Whetstone Grit Chart: What Each Band Does and Where the Progression Stops Paying
A #1000 stone plus a #3000 covers everything a home kitchen needs, and the returns past #6000 are gone within two hours of cutting. Edge force measured after each stage falls steeply from #400 to #2000, then flattens — and a #12000 edge and a #1000 edge converge at roughly the same working sharpness after six board hours. Buy a good #1000 and a flattening plate before you buy anything finer.
By the Knives Wow Editorial Team
Two stones. A #1000 and a #3000. That's a complete kitchen sharpening kit, and if you add anything to it, add a flattening plate, not a finer stone.
The grit progression is not a ladder where higher is better. It's a sequence of jobs, and each stone exists to remove the scratches left by the previous one. Once the scratch pattern is finer than the damage a wooden board does to an edge in the first ten minutes of use, you're polishing something that will not stay polished. That's the point where the progression stops paying, and on a kitchen knife it arrives around #3000 to #6000.
Edge force figures on this page are grams of force needed to sever a calibrated test media, the standard way sharpness gets measured as a number rather than a feeling. Lower is sharper. A factory edge straight out of the box typically lands between 350 and 500 grams. A well-finished stone edge lands under 150.
What a grit number is actually counting
It's counting particle size, in a system that varies by country, and the systems do not line up. JIS is the Japanese standard and it's what almost every water stone sold for kitchen knives uses. FEPA-P is the European system used on sandpaper. ANSI is the American one. A JIS #1000 and an ANSI 1000 are not the same stone.
Rough conversions worth knowing: JIS #1000 is around FEPA-P 800 and ANSI 400-600. JIS #6000 is around FEPA-P 2500. The mismatch gets worse as the numbers climb, which is why a diamond plate marked 600 grit can be coarser than a water stone marked 400.
If a stone's packaging doesn't say which system it's using, assume JIS if it's a Japanese water stone and assume the number is decorative if it's an unbranded stone from a marketplace listing. Grit numbers on cheap stones are frequently aspirational.
The working rule for what a grit does to steel: the scratch it leaves on the bevel is roughly a third of the nominal particle size. A #400 stone with 30-micron particles leaves scratches around 9 microns deep. That figure is what determines how long the next stone has to work.
The grit progression
Grit (JIS) Job Particle size (um) Scratch depth on bevel (um) Edge force after this stage (g) Strokes per side from previous grit Steel classes that benefit Home kitchen verdict #120 Chip repair, broken tips 105 30 Not a cutting edge 15-25 Any, damage only Optional - repair only #220 Reprofiling, thinning behind the edge 60 18 700+ 20-30 Any Optional #400 Heavy reprofile, angle changes 30 9 480 25-40 Any Optional #800 Sharpening, raising a burr 14 4.5 300 30-50 All Useful #1000 Sharpening - the one stone that matters 11.5 3.5 220 40-60 All Required #2000 Refining, removing the #1000 scratch 6.7 2.0 165 20-30 58 HRC and up Useful #3000 Refining to a working kitchen finish 4.0 1.2 135 20-30 58 HRC and up Useful - stop here #5000 Polishing 2.5 0.8 110 15-20 60 HRC and up Optional #6000 Polishing to a bright bevel 2.0 0.6 100 15-20 60 HRC and up Optional #8000 Mirror polishing 1.7 0.5 90 10-15 62 HRC and up Pointless in a kitchen #12000 Show finish, single-bevel ura work 0.9 0.3 80 10 62 HRC single bevel Pointless in a kitchen Leather strop, 1 um compound Deburr and align 1.0 n/a 70 8-10 passes All Useful - weekly, 30 seconds Work down the verdict column. Buy the Required row first, then the Useful rows, and only consider the Optional rows once you have flattened your #1000 at least a dozen times and still enjoy the process. Stroke counts assume the previous grit's job was actually finished. The commonest beginner error by a mile is moving up before the burr has formed along the entire edge — you then spend the next three stones trying to sharpen an edge that was never sharp, and end up blaming the stones.
Test for the burr with a fingertip drawn away from the edge, not along it, from spine to edge on the opposite face. If you can feel a wire catching along the whole length from heel to tip, that side is done. If it stops 30 mm short of the tip, you have 30 mm of unsharpened knife and no amount of #6000 will fix it.
Where the returns disappear
Here's the argument in numbers. Take one knife, finish it at each of these grits in turn, then measure the edge fresh, after two hours of board work, and after six.
Finishing grit Edge force fresh (g) After 2 board hours (g) After 6 board hours (g) Force gained per board hour (g) Advantage still present at 6 hours #1000 220 250 300 13 Baseline #2000 165 215 285 20 Marginal #3000 135 200 280 24 Marginal #5000 110 190 275 27 None measurable #6000 100 185 275 29 None measurable #8000 90 185 275 31 None measurable #12000 80 185 278 33 None measurable #3000 plus stropped 115 165 240 21 Yes - the only one that holds The columns to compare are the first and the third. Every finish converges within about 25 grams of the others after six hours of cutting, so the fine-grit advantage is real for roughly the first afternoon and then gone. Two conclusions fall out of that. First, a high polish on a kitchen knife is a temporary condition, because a wooden board and food acids degrade the apex faster than any grit difference can protect it. Second, the stropped row is the exception — a quick strop realigns the edge rather than removing steel, and doing it weekly keeps a #3000 edge closer to its fresh figure than another three stones ever will.
That's why the stopping point is #3000 for most kitchens, and why a strop is a better third purchase than a #6000 stone. Whether the finer stones are worth owning at all comes down to whether you enjoy sharpening as an activity. Plenty of people do, and that's a legitimate reason to buy a #8000. It just isn't a performance reason.
The kit that covers a kitchen
- One #1000 water stone, at least 200 x 70 mm. Bigger is genuinely easier — a short stone forces short strokes and short strokes wander.
- One #3000 water stone in the same size and brand family, so the two feel similar under the hand.
- A flattening plate, either a diamond lapping plate or a dedicated flattening stone. Non-negotiable. A dished stone puts a convex bevel on your knife and you will not be able to work out why the edge won't come up.
- A cheap #400 only if you own a hard blade you expect to chip, or you intend to thin a knife behind the edge. Skip it otherwise.
- A leather strop with 1 micron compound, or a piece of scrap leather glued to a board. Thirty seconds a week.
- A pencil or permanent marker. Colouring the bevel before you start is the fastest way to see whether you're hitting the edge or the shoulder.
Splash-and-go stones want thirty seconds of water on the surface. Soakers want ten to fifteen minutes submerged until the bubbles stop. Do not soak a splash-and-go stone overnight — some binders swell and crack. Do not let a soaker freeze while wet, ever, because the water expands inside the stone and it comes apart.
Flatten before every session, not when it feels bad. It takes forty seconds with a pencil grid drawn across the face and a lapping plate, and the moment you skip it you start sharpening a curve.
Which blades can actually hold a fine finish
Soft stainless around 55-58 HRC will not hold a #6000 edge in any meaningful way. The apex at that polish is only a few microns of very fine steel, and soft steel deforms rather than fracturing, so within an hour of cutting the edge has folded over and you're back to a #1000-equivalent working sharpness. Finishing a Victorinox or a standard Wusthof at #1000 or #2000 and stropping it is not a compromise, it's the right call.
Steel in the 60-63 range does hold a finer finish, for a while. That's the honest case for the finer stones: on a hard blade, the extra refinement survives long enough to be noticeable through a couple of prep sessions rather than a couple of onions.
Single-bevel blades are the genuine exception, and they're why #8000 and #12000 stones exist at all. A single bevel has a large flat land and a flat back that has to be maintained as a mirror to work correctly — the back is the reference surface, and scratches on it are functional defects, not cosmetic ones. If you own one, the fine stones are not optional. If you don't, they are.
What goes wrong the first time
- Moving up a grit before the burr runs the full length of the edge. Everything downstream fails and it is almost always this.
- Sharpening the shoulder instead of the edge. Colour the bevel with marker: if the marker survives at the very edge, your angle is too low and you're grinding the flat.
- Too much pressure. A stone cuts on abrasive contact, not on force. Heavy pressure digs a gouge in the stone and rounds the apex.
- Never flattening. A #1000 stone dishes visibly within about ten sessions and invisibly within three.
- Chasing a mirror on a working knife. A hazy #3000 bevel that cuts is worth more than a mirror bevel that isn't sharp because the apex got rounded on the last twenty passes.
- Using the same stone for a carbon blade and a stainless one without a rinse. Carbon particles left in the surface stain a stainless blade and, more annoyingly, mark the stone so you can't see the swarf.