The last post inspired a new question - what about old knives?
Here's the Q:
"I think that leads to another question: When your knife gets this old, is it possible, and if so, advisable, to have the knife reground so that there is more thin material? "
And the A:
Use your knife enough, and resharpen it enough, and the sharp edge heads North toward the spine. As you remove material from the edge, you're left with thicker and thicker material to create the edge. There's a turning point, on my knives at least, when I just can't get an adequate edge anymore. Frustration X 100 (see image). The blade is now into the thicker terrain and there is not enough angle available to hold a fine edge for long.
What I do is resharpen the edge at a very shallow angle, creating, in effect, a new leading edge, which has some, but not all the characteristics of the original edge. It's important to do this by hand, not on a machine, as the speed and heat of a machine based sharpening will un-temper the steel. It's sort of like making the knife into a bevelled knife, and I notice that Landwell is sending all their knives pre-sharpened in this way.
To get a very consistent result, I use this handy-dandy aligner blade guide, which you can get from my company, of course :0
Setting up a new edge works for a while, but eventually, and soon, the knife must be relegated to the scrap heap, or in my case, to open boxes and cut tape.
I'm sure other reed makers have more to share on this. Just one mans opinion.
2 comments:
ok, let me be the one to ask a dumb question (after all I am a bassoon player). When a knife gets really old, why not just buy a new one? In your experience, are oboe players dramatically more neurotic about reeds and knives than bassoon players?
Those are two questions, Steve.
And the second one is hard to answer with a straight face, being an oboist first and bassoonist a distant second. So I won't. Not yet.
First answer is: buy a new knife. If you can afford it, and don't have confidence in your knife anymore. The techniques I mentioned are to help the struggling player who has limited funds, or a concert in two hours and no source for a new knife. I try to make my knives last as long as reasonably possible mostly because I'm cheap that way, but also because it just makes sense to make good use of it before adding it to the garbage.
As for answer number two: just exactly how neurotic are bassoon players anyway? I'm looking for a baseline number for comparisons sake - if you can give an exact response, figuring in the rotation of the earth, fluctuations in humidity, and wind speed I will ask my teacher to tell me the only possible answer :}
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