Click to view our Accessibility Statement or contact us with accessibility-related questions
Drop Refurbished
Like-new products you can trustDrop Rewards
Get $5 for every 500 points you earn! Learn more
Drop Keyboard Club
Become a member and expand your keycap collectionCollaborate With Us
For Brands & DesignersFollow Drop
Short answer is on Japanese water stones you can basically do anything which is what I primarily use. Magic steels will take you forever to do though. You might want to get diamond stones or a mix. I initially bought Japanese water stones to do planing cutters. If you are referring to this system not really sure. Fairly sure western knives would be okay in general. Traditional Japanese knives can be a bit odd and expensive. If you go this route get knives that have seen better days to start out on. I would point out that looking at the cost of the stones might not be the best factor when deciding. Each company has different quality stones. Nice part about this system is it takes other companies stones. So if you don't like these you can get another companies.
Long answer, I'm not sure i am the best to address your comment as there are many here I think have more knowledge of steels and sharping. I am old enough to have caught the tail end of men coming to sharpen family tools door to door when i was like 6. I started with Arkansas stones but never liked the oil. Moved to Japanese water stones when I took an interest in woodworking. BTW vendors will tell you how wonderful natural stones are. Of course they are more expensive and I have never found them to be superior to manmade. I also have the Syperco sharpener they had for sale here.
I think the Syderco sharpener is fine but once you buy all the accessories to make the system work you end up paying more than it is worth IMHO. You want the diamonds to reprofile and the extrafine stones to give a mirror polish. You easily spend about $140. If I had to do it again I would get a pivot type sharpener. Lansky has fixed degrees. A pivot sharpener such as this you can basically do any degree. You have to really do some research as some clones are better than "originals" in some respects. Each has their weaknesses and strengths relative to each other.
Murderdogg as a point that those systems are easier to use than using stones by hand. You could always do the "scarey sharp"method with sand paper and a mousepad (I do something similar sharpening axes). But it puts a convex edge on blades and will fuck up your flat edges. As difficult as it is try to work through all the bs and politics on the big blade forums. I am in the same boat as you to some extent as I think I will get a pivot system to at least reprofile as I now have enough magic stainlesses to make it worth while. Best advice I ever got was to use whatever system you decide on crap blades. If you don't have them go to goodwill and get half a dozen. Good luck.