I want a decent working edge, sharp but durable. I would think I need to reshape quite a few to make them usable again. What do the fine folks here do to bring those old knives back? Specific angles that work best?
How much do you want to spend?
For 20 bucks, you can get a perfectly good sharpening system like this one. It will put a good edge on any knife, easy to use, no power tool required. It takes about 3 minutes to do even a really dull knife. I’ve used a similar one for years, can’t read the brand on mine but they’re all the same anyway.
Seems like anything else is swatting a fly with an elephant gun. I mean yeah you could spend a few hundred on a professional sharpening system and then you’d be able to sharpen the same knives you could for $20 using the system above.
Way too much fussing is done regarding angles. If using stones, match the angle the blade already has. If using a sharpener, the angle is set and the knife simply gets reprofiled in the process of sharpening from coarse to fine. For a bunch of old utility knives, I wouldn’t think about it any more than that, a sharp knife with the “wrong” angle is still a sharp knife and a lot more use than a dull one.
If you need to sharpen tools beyond knives, now might be the time to invest in a good basic set of water stones and learn how to use them. Again, for some reason people want to massively overcomplicate sharpening by hand with stones. It takes about an hour and a couple of videos to learn to sharpen by hand using water stones. Once you have learned the basics, there’s nothing you can’t sharpen.
