Give Your Fingerguard a French Manicure
Posted on | September 11, 2010 | 2 Comments
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Here’s another post ripped from Fred’s. jmbullman, a member there, asked how to deal with the bolster on his Nogent when sharpening.
There are a lot of different kinds of bolsters, but only a few of them either are or have finger guards which extend all the way down the back of the blade. So, if you want to get really picky about it – and you know I do – it’s the finger guards and not the bolsters, per se.
French finger guards are traditionally made with a little bevel on the bottom. To grind down the finger guard:
• Set the knife on your coarsest (not softest stone) stone, with the bottom of the finger guard on the stone.
• Tilt the knife back (handle down, point up) until the bevel is flat with the stone.
• Holding the angle, grind away until the finger guard catches up with the blade, and go a little farther until you’ve created at least a little bit of “chin.”
You won’t have to grind too much away, as you don’t really need to have the first millimeter of heel incredibly sharp. That’s something of a point of honor among knife guys first stepping into Japanese knives, but it won’t advance your cooking an iota. You do want to keep it thin enough to not get in the way of forming and maintaining straight bevels.
When you profile, use the finger guard as guide to section the back part of the knife with straight strokes, making sure the heel is thin. Then keep sectioning towards the point. Repeat this a couple of times on each side of the knife, check to make sure there aren’t any high or low spots. If there are, fix them by sectioning the high spots. Finally move on to length of the blade honing or stropping strokes. Then, it’s on to your sharpening stones.
It’s a good question, by the way. For one reason or another, a great many sharpeners never quite figure out how to handle the finger guards. The process of taking down the finger guards isn’t at all difficult, and just realizing that the problem may have a solution gets you about 90% of the way there.
I was going to publish “before and after” pictures of my finger guards, but last night when I sharpened my entire block, there unfortunately weren’t any good “befores.” Every knife was already taken down plenty far.
Oh well.
But it brings up a happy point… Congratulations! You don’t have to do this very often.
I’m not sure that it’s really worth posting this “after” picture one more time, since it’s already in another post.
Bottom of the Finger Guard is Bevelled, Chin is Revealed
On the other hand, why not? Why should you have to search around for it. Who’s paying for this bandwidth anyway?
Meanwhile, back at the narrative: In this picture I took to illustrate a soft pinch grip, you can not only see the bottom of the French finger guard on my stained, K-Sabatier chef’s, but that the chin is bevelled at the same angle as the guard, and that the bottom of the guard has been ground down on a coarse stone.
BDL
The Give Your Fingerguard a French Manicure by Cook Food Good, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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WHO IS BDL, Boar D. Laze, or whatever the hell his name is?
A Brief Biography:
Ex-Navy Seal; Ex-Victoria’s Secret model; Turned down a three-way with Sophia Loren and the young Marlene Dietrich (as in the Blue Angel) because had other plans; Knows who killed everyone in The Big Sleep, and why; Chaired the work-group which invented Time, Space, Gravity, Fire and Holiday Sweaters; Prefers Dickel to Jack.
What is Cook Food Good?
What’s this site about? It’s about a lot of thingsForcing myself to work out issues relating to writing a cookbook: COOK FOOD GOOD: American Cooking and Technique for Beginners and Intermediates.
Getting feedback on my work from you.
Discussions on basic and not-so-basic techniques. The recipes here are very technique driven. Similarly, the idea behind the book is to be far more about the how than the what – with the goal of teaching you to create your own recipes and tweak other people’s, confidently and successfully.
How to cook better, as it relates to you (and me too). That is, taking a beginner or advanced beginner to good, restaurant quality. Mostly this will be (more or less) French technique and (more or less) American food. But only mostly, more or less.
Recipes for this, that and the other.
Knives and all about sharpening them (which have somehow become a subject on which I frequently get asked for advice): How to choose and how to use.
The first Cook Food Good Blog was hosted by the website, Chef Talk. However, CT, removed its blog section. If you’re interested in bad writing, poor punctuation and ancient history, you’ll find the old CT posts archived here. One thing about posting on CT, was that it acted as a sort of language and attitude super-ego. Don’t count on it here. This is naked id.
October 22nd, 2010 @ 6:10 am
Yes sir Bdl I did do the cus and grind on my sab and it worked great. The blade itself (about a 1/4 inch of it) was actually hanging about as low as the finger guard so that had to be reworked too. I hit it with my course/soft india followed by my 1200 bester and finished with my surgical black arkansas it worked beautifully. I have discovered that anything above the polish on the black ark (a.k.a. my king 6k) will lose it polish rather quickly even just sitting in the block.
October 22nd, 2010 @ 5:13 pm
Jim,
Exactly, exactly, precisely, not to mention me too. You da man.
BDL