(03-15-2017, 04:40 PM)Ankerson Wrote: In general it comes down to what grit the edges are sharpened and or micron level.
The finer the stone used to sharpen with the smoother or more polished the edge will be.
Bobbo - I'll try to explain a bit more, as best I can, what he is talking about.
One way to consider it is that sharpening a blade is a lot like sanding a piece of wood with sandpaper. If you have a very coarse (low grit number) sandpaper it will leave a very rough, scratched surface. You can actually feel the roughness with your fingers. But if you keep sanding with finer and finer (higher grit number) sandpaper, as you sand away the deeper scratches, the surface becomes very smooth ready for painting.
The exact same thing happens when sharpening a blade with some abrasive.
Here is a microscope image I took of the bevel of a blade that I sharpened with, if memory serves correctly, a brand new, 400 grit belt on my belt grinder. A brand new belt can be pretty rough until you have used it a bit. You can see the scratches created by the rough, basically sandpaper in belt form, belt.
If you look carefully and/or zoom in on the image, you can see how the scratches go all the way to the edge. These scratches cause the edge to have, for lack of a better term, little "teeth", like a saw blade. Hence the term, "toothy edge".
These images are "thumbnails". Click on them to view a larger image.
Now, compare that to this blade I sharpened with a very fine abrasive. It is much more smooth and polished and therefore not "toothy". Hence "polished" edge.
You can see how a toothy edge is sort of like a serrated knife blade only on a very small scale. A toothy edge is generally better for slicing things like tomato skin than a smooth, polished edge is because the tiny "teeth" grab the skin rather than just riding on the surface. For kitchen knives, a toothy edge is generally more useful than a very smooth, polished edge.
Hope that helps! Ask away if you have any more questions!
