you usually work up grits. In general for edges that should end shaving sharp (e.g. kitchen, whirling) below 1k is rough work, profiling work, 1k or so is basic small chip repair etc, 3k is standard sharpen, and higher is polishing wank. You get what you pay for in general: cheap stones need soaking, the wear out fast (needing truing). Shapton makes some great splash and go stones.
However, there is one cheap 2 sided diamond stone that is actually quality. The sharpal one. Be aware diamond cuts extremely fast (good and bad), it doesn’t need truing or soaking. I recommend if you’re getting one stone get that. Learn proper bur minimisation technique and that’ll cover chip repair and get your knives sharp enough to cut seethrough sheets of tomato.
If you feel fancy add 1 micron stropping compound and a sheet of balsa wood to strop on.
Is it possible to sharpen with a higher grit. Like 4k/6k if my knife is quite dull and has some chips? A colleague lend me his stone, but it seems very fine, so either my technique is bad, or it’s too fine to sharpen my knife.
There is no magic to it. You can sharpen a knife with a brick if you’re careful.
The result and rate are determined by a few things:
- Harder, more jagged grits will cut the steel of the knife away faster
- The final edge can’t be (much) smoother than the grit used on it last.
It’s just like sanding wood or filing your nails. Usually we start course because it would take ages to wear in the approximate shape using finer materials, then we go progressively finer to smooth out the scratches left by the step prior.
Finer media is typically more expensive too, as fine stuff contaminating course stuff isn’t a huge issue but the opposite isn’t true. So we want to not blow our budget wearing away all nice stones.
Personally I would not try removing chips with anything finer than 1k, and depending on the size and the hardness of the steel might drop to 300 or so. you can, but it will take hours instead of minutes.
