I've seen both ways, but didn't know if 1 way could be better than the other? Like the circular motion gets heel to toe then toe to heel when using a stone.
This GearJunkie article is mostly agreeable by me, but what I wanted to show you about it isn't the text - rather, it's that very last animated picture, the one in the "Step 3: Remove the Burr" section.
That's what I mean when I wrote that I went "both ways," on the stone.
I personally don't think it's that important - "hilt"/ricasso-to-tip or the reverse, or circular - as
@papa noted, I think that whatever you do, as long as you're able to maintain angle and can exercise to not damage the tip, those are far more important.
YouTube has become uselesstube for this education.
I know what you mean - the signal-to-noise ratio isn't what it used to be....but that said, there's now also lots more really good content than there used to be as well.
Even with my actual job as a benchtop research scientist, I routinely find YouTube videos and Reddit to actually contain valuable information/instructionals.
The more my hands bother me from arthritis the more I am seriously considering a Work Sharp belt sharpener.
Nowadays, I most routinely use the Work Sharp. I've got the Ken Onion Edition. It really does make very fast work out of virtually *everything* I normally use: as with many first-generation Asians, I favor a cleaver in the kitchen, and keep separate meat versus vegetable ones to maintain working sharpness. I usually end up using the veg one until it's nearly dead, going to my Western chef's knives for more delicate slicing, but typically, I'll sharpen the cleaver to be able to cleanly slice tomatoes, and the WS really makes very short work of that.
As with any tool, it's got its own set of compromises, but particularly for heavy users, its ease of operation and its speed are hard to beat. In just a couple of hours, I can work through both of my cleavers, a smaller slicer, and my Henckels block set.
My other favorite is the Spyderco Tri-Angle Sharpening System. After I got that, I rarely spent time on my stones anymore. Now the only stone I routinely use is the one I have at work for my microdissection instruments.
