Keeping Your Sharpening Stone in Top Shape: How to Clean a Sharpening Stone
How to Clean a Sharpening Stone – Knives are among the most important tools in a kitchen. Therefore, keeping your knives in top shape is important. For that, you will need a sharpening stone.
Just like knives, sharpening stones need to be kept in top shape, too. That is why knowing how to clean a sharpening stone is indispensable.
Here’s the good news: cleaning a sharpening stone is easy. You can do it yourself and it will only take minutes to finish. Want to know how to? Just follow our guide below.
First and foremost, preparation. To clean a sharpening stone, you will need honing oil, a towel, paper towel, an old toothbrush, clean rags, steel wool, clean running water, and warm and soapy water.
If you don’t have an old toothbrush, a Scotch-Brite will suffice.
If you no longer see any debris from the sharpening stone, you can rinse it under clean running water.
Why running water? Because it will wash off any particles and soap from the sharpening stone. If you use standing water, the stone may retain or pick up some particles.
The last thing to do is to dry the stone. Use a clean rag or paper towel to pat the stone dry.
Alternatively, you can leave it out in the open air so any remaining water can evaporate. Either way, when you dry the stone, make sure that it is dried completely.
If your sharpening stone doesn’t need aggressive scrubbing, using warm soapy water may be enough to clean it.
You can use warm soapy water in two ways: using it to replace honing oil or place the stone inside warm soapy water, let it sit for a while, then scrub, rinse, and thoroughly dry.
If aggressive rubbing is needed and you don’t have honing oil, you can use WD-40 in its place. Similar to honing oil, WD-40 also helps to remove dust, grime, and heavy debris from the stone.
