Ceramic Rod Vs Steel

Ceramic diamond rods.

Ceramic rod vs steel.

Find out how the different materials affect your knives and what to look for in a honing rod. 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. This means that they have a slight sharpening effect. Sharpening rods are two rods set in a base at a specific angle 30 degrees for the ones i use.

Once you ve chosen your sharpening steel you ll need to take care of it. Historically guides were predominately steel and sometimes were coated with chrome. Ceramic rods on the other hand are less aggressive than diamond and can sharpen as well or better than a steel. Contrary to popular opinion very hard blades are not necessarily better and can be a real pain to maintain.

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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. 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. 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.

Many of these rods are made out of alumina ceramic. This eliminated the need to replace guides due to wear. The rods can be round square or triangular as long as the knife has a smooth surface to slide along. Photo by flickr member matt feifarek under creative commons.