As per TT's infinite wisdom: voila, a thread about knife sharpening.

What do you all use? How often? Hits and misses along the way?

Personally, my household keeps the knife game simple: 1 Shun Usuba, 1 Shun Duba, a New West Knifeworks Santoku and an Opinel paring knife. Minor redundancy but it's knife if you've got two people working.

For sharpening, we exclusively use Japanese waterstones. We have two, one of which is double-sided. The first is an ara-to (estimated around 750 grit), while the second is a double-sided naka-to (!4000 grit) and shiage-to (~10000 grit). Every 3 months all of the knives get the full treatment. It takes about 15 minutes per knife, so I tend to throw on a good podcast or at least make sure someone is around for entertaining company, as it's quite repetitive work..

In the past I've owned synthetic stones and an electric sharpener, and neither got the job done as well as waterstones. They're simple to use, hard to f* up and last ages. We've had ours for 3 years now (so, about 12 rounds of 4-5 knives...) and they're not even 10% worn.

For in between the proper sharpening sessions, we keep a honing steel around that's used probably once a week per knife.