Ceramic Rod Vs Steel

Find out how the different materials affect your knives and what to look for in a honing rod.

Ceramic rod vs steel. Ceramic steels which should maybe be called ceramics not steels are capable of rubbing off a teeny tiny amount of metal from your knives as you hone them which you can immediately see as gray streaks on the white ceramic rod. Many of these rods are made out of alumina ceramic. This eliminated the need to replace guides due to wear. Http amzn to 2haxekr retail partners links support the channel.

If you are using high carbon very hard steel then a ceramic hone will have limited effect so you may need to use a leather strop fine wet stone or even steel to hone that edge. It just didn t happen. Then in the 1960 s ceramic rings were inserted inside the rings. Honing rods are made of steel and can come coated in ceramic or diamond in addition to steel.

Contrary to popular opinion very hard blades are not necessarily better and can be a real pain to maintain. Is ceramic smooth steel or grooved steel the best material to keep your knives in great shape. Historically guides were predominately steel and sometimes were coated with chrome. Buy one and be cool like me.

The steel and ceramic honing rods may have longitudinal ridges whereas the diamond coated steels are smooth but will be embedded with abrasive diamond particles. The rods can be round square or triangular as long as the knife has a smooth surface to slide along. You clean a knife each time you use it and you should also clean your sharpening steel every time you hone your knife. Honing steel option 2.

Sharpening rods are two rods set in a base at a specific angle 30 degrees for the ones i use. Ceramic diamond rods. Http amzn to 2lmg2sj the bigger one green elephant. Photo by flickr member matt feifarek under creative commons.