LOL nah not a war at all, and in the end if SE just isn't for you there's nothing at all wrong with that either. The best thing you can do is get a Sharpmaker if you don't already have one and start touching up the edge on the brown medium rods. The Caribbean should sharpen up much easier than a lot of other SE grinds so you should start seeing better results if you just use the Sharpmaker by the book, not really much more than that.
On some level a serrated edge may hold an edge longer than plain edge, because of the way the points tend to protect the curves (like with a steak knife banging against a ceramic plate) but personally I touch up my SE all the time, at the very least after every heavy use. Even with the way I reprofile them I do start to dislike how they cut once they start to dull, even if they do continue making cuts. This also really depends on what I'm cutting, but once I start seeing snagging that's when the fun is over for me. Still I have used LC200N quite a bit and in some of my cutting tests I've cut some pretty nasty stuff before the edge got to the point that I'd call it dull, so I wonder if you'll see better results after a couple sharpenings.
Hi David,
I reckon you might be on to something there with the sharp maker. I usually use either a KME with diamond plates followed by a series of strops or tapes on glass blanks. While it is really great for PE it is about as useful as nipples on a piano for doing serrations.
I do love the effortlessness of how my PE’s just glide through materials as if they’re not there, but there’s definitely a time and place for a serrated knife. Interestingly I let some kids at a session I ran this morning try both my Magnacut mule and my Caribbean SE. It was about 50/50 as to which they preferred for whittling green wood, so I think a large part of my feelings is probably an existing bias through familiarity towards PE.
Anyhow thanks for your replies. I’m enjoying discussing and learning about SE almost as much as I am using it. What a great community it is on here.
Have a great morning/afternoon/evening (depending on where in the world this finds you)!
Al