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I finally switched from a coarse steel to a fine diamond rod on my boning knife and the difference after 2 weeks knocked me over
For 6 months I ran every knife across the same old coarse steel at the end of each shift, and my boning knife kept chewing up pork shoulders instead of gliding through the seams. Two weeks ago I swapped to a fine diamond rod, maybe 8 passes per side at a shallow angle, and the same knife now separates silverskin clean off a tenderloin without me sawing at it. The cuts look cleaner too because I am not crushing the muscle anymore. My forearms stop burning by 2pm now, which I did not even link to the steel until the change hit. Any of you run diamond on the whole block or just keep it for the boning and filet knives?
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pat_carter4d ago
The "same old coarse steel at the end of each shift" is doing a lot of work in this story, and I'd bet the real fix was the switch from coarse to fine, not from steel to diamond. A worn out or overly coarse steel tears metal off the edge instead of lining it back up, so of course a finer abrasive feels like magic after that. Put a fine cut steel in your hand and you might get most of the same result for a third of the price. Diamond rods are great, but they cut fast and if you keep leaning on them every shift you'll be grinding away good steel and shortening the life of that boning knife. And the tired forearms thing was probably you learning to let the knife do the work after you stopped fighting a ragged edge, not the rod itself.
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