Sharpening a bevel-less knife

[ADP8]

I'm new to the whole knife thing and in terms of sharpening, every post/video i've read/watched says that when sharpening you should hold the knife at a 20 degree angle (or so) in order to sharpen the knife properly. Other posts note that this is to do with the bevel.

What I wanted to know is how do you sharpen a bevel-less knife? I bought an Opinel no.7 the other day and there is no visible bevel, therefore, no 20 degree sharpening. Do I sharpen it in the same way? Or is there some special way to do this?

Thanks loads!

Adam

 

[robin wood]

Opinels are sharpened like kitchen knives or pen knives and folk in the know sharpen moras the same way. You sharpen by creating a tiny secondary bevel. The good thing is that because the bevel is tiny it takes only a few strokes to do the sharpening. The bad thing is that you have to set the angle and hold it stable yourself without a big bevel to register on the stone.
So rest the big flat of the knife on the stone, lift the back say about 15 degrees take about 3 strokes along the whole length of the blade right to the tip. Turn it over and do the same the other side. Then go back and give it one more stoke each side. Ideally you would do this first on a medium then a fine stone but it doesn't matter too much if you did this just on a coarse stone you would have a good but very serrated edge which would cut tomatoes really well. If you like yo can finish at the same angle on a leather stop.
If you look at your opinel closely you will see this is the way it was sharpened when new there is a small maybe 0.5mm bevel at the edge.

 

[Sparrowhawk]

Opinels are sharpened like kitchen knives or pen knives and folk in the know sharpen moras the same way.

Are you saying that I should sharpen a scandi the same way? Surely it's easier to maintain the same angle by laying the bevel flat on the stone. It seems difficult to maintain a constant angle to create a micro bevel.

 

[robin wood]

Are you saying that I should sharpen a scandi the same way? Surely it's easier to maintain the same angle by laying the bevel flat on the stone. It seems difficult to maintain a constant angle to create a micro bevel.

Scandi's are not all the same, some like the woodlore or frosts 106 sloyd are designed to be zero ground and others like the mora are designed to have a secondary bevel. If you take one which was designed to have a secondary bevel and sharpen it by laying the primary flat on the stone it causes problems, see discussion and close up pictures in this thread http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=29512&highlight=mora+sharp.