I recently received this very useful edge maintenance tool from A. Dale McLean. You can get more information on the Raz-R-Steel and other products at the Razor edge website.
"We were in a packaging plant where a butcher was boning
hams, and we had him steel his edge upon completion of each piece. We had
seen some operations where a knife would only last about fifteen minutes and
was too dull to cut butter. But when we worked with that man and taught him
our steeling methods, the life of that edge jumped from fifteen minutes to
over four hours."
For a complete description of how to steel a knife (among other things) see The Sharpening FAQ by Joe Talmadge. The basic principle is very simple. When most knives become blunt it is because the edge has been misaligned. Instead of being in a nice thin straight line, it is now wavy, flopped to the side, impacted or otherwise rolled. Now you could simply sharpen the blade on a hone and remove all this metal, however that takes a fair amount of time and it is a bit wasteful. If you use a steel you can push all the material back into alignment again and the cutting performance of the knife will be raised dramatically.
The technique described by Razor-Edge is very simple and illustrated on their webpage. All you do is fold out the two rods to the preset angles, 35 degrees, equal to or just slightly larger than the edge bevel on the knife being steeled is what is necessary, and gently wipe the blade down across them. In just a few strokes you will notice a very big difference in how the edge feels and cuts. Don't use excessive force as you can actually make things a lot worse and ripple the blade. Aside from this you just need to make sure that you don't over steel as this will make the edge too fragile by thinning it out too much. This just takes practice to see how many strokes you need and what kind of performance you can expect.
I have been using this steel with good results lately. The claims that they made about the increased edge retention are fact. You can really extend periods inbetween sharpening for much longer than without a steel as the major cause of most knife blunting is by deformation and not wear. It is not just for small blades, for example I have been working with it on a CS Trailmaster. If the blade has been excessively rolled like it was with the Trailmaster then you might want to give the edge a few swipes with a ceramic or diamond rod to remove a little metal as this will make the edge that much durable.
Besides restoring blunted edges, the steel can be used as described in the above quote to periodically maintain a sharpened edge. In this way you prevent the edge from even rolling excessively and the knife will stay sharp much longer. It has one final use and that is that if you use it on a freshly sharpened blade it can make it a little sharper by raising the polish sightly and forceing the edge into a tighter line.
There are a couple of advantages to this small steel that a lot of others do not have. Since it folds up it is very easy to carry - it even comes with a pocket clip and the rods are tucked away so they are much less likely to get damaged. If a steel has a nick or chip in it, this will very likely do more damage than good if you try to use it on a blade. If this happens then you can try to polish it out with some wet/dry sandpaper or just make sure that you avoid that damaged part of the steel.
About the only negative part of this handy little tool is that the rods are a little short for large knives. However if the rods were made larger it would quickly become impractical to carry comfortably. Razor-Edge does sell a much larger non-folding model that would be better suited for bigger knives.
The only real downside is that you will induce some variation in the stroke angle, how much so depends on how careful you are. The more variance in your passes, the more you have to steel the blade in order to restore it and the more likehood that you will oversteel it and weaken the edge. However this problem has been solved by the new system from Razor's Edge : the Mousetrap Steel which uses preset rods. I have no experiece with this system though.
You can comment on this review by dropping me an email : cliffstamp[REMOVE]@cutleryscience.com or by posting in the following thread on Bladeforums :