(no subject)

[unicornduke]

butchering talk below



So the deer is done. It took me an hour to skin and quarter it, which was a big improvement in time over last time and I hardly needed my instruction list.

I have realized a minor issue, and that is that I'm relatively short. This buck was much bigger than the last one and we got it hung six inches higher than previous and they both nearly touched the ground. So I had to stand on a milk crate in order to reach the hind legs.

I also have to literally hug the hindquarters because I can't balance them in one hand and cut them lose and then remove the lower legs. It's pretty absurd to be honest. Dad was running to pick up straw so no help around.

There was no time improvement in cutting the meat from the bone and cutting it into pieces. It took me around 3 hours again. This whole deer is for ground meat and so I tried to hurry through the processing because it doesn't matter what the cuts look like as long as most of the fat and sinew are off. I also tried to hurry through it because I was doing it in the unheated garage and it's kinda chilly. I wasn't in the wind at least. My back is sore because I was looking down the whole time.

Grinding went really fast.

Comments

[graydon]

The most important thing about butchering is that all of your bits stay attached.

I'd say this is something where practice really matters and that I doubt you've got the good knives yet. (I've never met a butcher or a chef who wasn't particular about knives.) "An afternoon" seems to be about average for processing a deer, so ~four hours to process a deer by yourself the second time is doing laudably well!

[unicornduke]

I stabbed my finger a little bit on the first deer and I've been careful since then. I've stabbed myself enough that I'm decent at keeping it from being a bad stab. I didn't really hurry at all because I couldn't go faster lol

I don't have the good knives yet and I'm currently using one that has replaceable blades since I don't know how to sharpen a knife yet. I've got plans to learn soon.

Overall, I'm super happy with how it went! Especially since I've been doing it by myself although dad did assist with the field dressing this time. I've always been a quick learner with physical skills and this seems to be right in line with that.

[graydon]

Replaceable blades.

[Some severe bogglement, shuddering, swearing, and just general the-cat-disapproves gesticulation goes here]

You are a Hero of the Revolution for getting through that!

V. v. important if you stab yourself to stop, disinfect it, dress it, and then make sure it's not leaking; butchers have to wear nitrile gloves over any cuts. Human blood in the food is often harmless, but the failure cases are awful. Going the other direction can be pretty bad, too.

(I am pretty sure you know this but there are Reflexes on the subject.)

I'm the sort of lamentable obsessive who dislikes most knife sharpening devices and has opinions about whetstones. (and stropping.) So I shall just hush now. :)

[unicornduke]

It was the result of the dicks sporting goods being closed for renovations and having to buy the knife from the home depot. Pretty much the only reasonably useful blade in the store for some reason. No time to run to a different town to get it because it is out of the way.

It works Okay.

Yep! I'm good on wound care. The last one I was working off some fat from the back and just slipped. I changed up how I work from that for safety. Wrapped it, new gloves, etc.

If you want to get into it, I'd love to hear more on knife sharpening! It's new to me, although I've done a little sharpening on hand tools and such. Not that same as a knife though.

[graydon]

Same set of ideas, really.

Any cutting tool gets into the iron triangle -- toughness, hardness, corrosion resistance, pick two! -- and knives are no different. (Though your modern high-end speciality steels are doing their best to get all three in there; LC200N is amazing, but it's also gasp-choke expensive and there isn't much made in it.) (Your modern cutlery steels massively emphasise corrosion resistance; if you ask, they'll say things about tomatoes, but this is in large part because people put them in the dishwasher. These knives do not hold edges as well as other steel choices would, but it's a kitchen knife; you can always sharpen it just before use and you're unlikely to be doing anything that strenuous with it. The folks who make semi-custom hunting knives -- e.g., Bark River -- tend to go nuts, often with tool steels (I want toughness and hardness and if you don't want it to rust, you'll wax it or grease it or something) like M2 and 3V. Grohmann use Krupp 4100-something cutlery steels, but get their heat treat right so the edge retention is (by modern standards) decent; it'd seem miraculous in 1950. Really extreme modern steels like Maxamet or M4 or even just "this is for knives" CPM S35VN are amazing examples of materials science, an order of magnitude or two better than plain carbon steels, and would get you in trouble for witchcraft in 1950.)

The thing about sharpening is that there's always two things; fineness and keenness.

Keenness is the angle that forms the edge; this can be nearly square (83 degrees on carbide inserts on woodworking tools) down to really acute (whatever the angle is on those rotary deli slicers) but it's always trading ease of cutting (as the angle gets more acute) for edge strength (as angle gets wider/less acute.) You probably don't want to change the keenness of a knife blade. There's interesting "but I don't want this to be a triangle" approaches, too; basically trading more effort for a best-of-both-worlds convex edge shape. ("appleseed" or "scandi" (short for "Scandinavian") grinds.)

Fineness is how smooth (and how straight, down at we're-using-magnification scales) the edge is. If you form a keen edge with a belt sander using a 60 grit belt, the edge will be keen but it won't be fine so it will tend to catch when cutting. (It'll have what are effectively small serrations.) How much fineness is a task thing and a preference thing in a lot of respects; the small serrations do act to concentrate force and in many applications (cutting rope or anything else loosely fibrous) this can help. It's also quicker; if you go up to 600 grit wet-dry paper and stop, well, it's fast, it didn't cost you much for materials, and the edge is entirely usable. It's not likely going to be an ideal edge and this is going to wear the blade away pretty fast. It will also not be as durable an edge in use -- it will get dull quicker -- than a fine edge achieved through honing with fine abrasives.

The other thing is sweep; the edge of a knife may not be straight, and the motion you use the knife with may not be straight. As a caricature, a knife you use only straight down for chopping has no sweep and you have no sweep -- no slicing motion -- in the use. A butcher's cimetre has a pronounced curve in the blade and gets used to slice, so the blade shape and the use combines for lots and lots of sweep. (Arms are only so long and the longer you can make the stroke the greater the effective keenness because the angle of cut is bending "down" -- is lowered -- compared to the physical grind angle of the blade.) Sweep moves the point of cutting along the blade as the cut takes place and you can want the edge geometry to reflect this.

Then there's material strength; how much metal have we got? How thick is the blade (= how much side-to-side bending won't it do?) and how deep is the blade (edge-to-spine distance; how hard can we push on this?) Even really cheap knives these days would be considered good steel in 1980 so this is less of a worry than it used to be.

For skinning or trimming, you want lots of keenness and lots of fineness and a capacity for sweep; you're going to be taking small cuts at awkward angles near the fingers of your other hand and you don't want to have to use force. (Force = danger; that's when the knife slips. You'll get people saying sharp knives are safer because of that, you can do what you need to do with less force.) That kind of knife tends to be a flat grind (the primary bevel runs all the way to the spine of the knife), trading some strength for greater keenness.

For splitting the sternum or jointing, you're going to chop. (Or maybe baton (hit the back of the knife with a length of wood) or saw or use an axe...) That needs much less keenness because you're going to need strength from the blade rather than precision and it makes fineness less important because you're not going to be slicing much. That kind of knife has a thicker blade and a different grind; parts of the blade are likely flat above the primary bevel. ("sabre grind", various other names; scandi grinds are like this.)

So, one pile of terminology and objectives later:

The sorcerous practices of Japanese chefs aside, sharpen by dragging the knife away from the edge. (the other way from the way you'd expect the knife to cut.) You want to look for the secondary bevel -- usually there's a grind angle on the blade, and then right at the edge there's another, wider angle; that's the secondary bevel -- and hold the knife at the angle which maintains the secondary bevel. (There are all kinds of jigs and tools for doing this. Spyderco sells a good one.) Because the sharpening surface is going to be narrower than the length of the blade, you draw the knife blade back toward you in a way that follows the sweep of the expected use of the knife.

If the knife comes with a convex edge grind ("convex edge", "scandi edge", "appleseed", there's a lot of names for this) you want to change the angle as you're drawing the spine of the knife back towards you, going from relatively flat (the primary bevel angle of the knife) to steeper (rising up to whatever the effective meeting angle of the convex edge is.) This is way easier to do with a soft abrasive; relatively loose sanding belts, leather strops, and so on.

Modern synthetic abrasives are pretty good; I try (with kitchen knives) to not actually need to use a stone, but to stick to stropping before each use because this minimizes metal loss to sharpening and the leather of the strop squishes a bit which creates a natural convex ogive shape right at the edge. (I am never in much of a hurry and tend to buy relatively expensive knives and want to maintain them.) If there's been bone nicking in the edge, something coarser than a strop is kinda required. There's a bewildering array of stuff out there. Diamond isn't necessarily what you want for harder knife steels, and you generally don't want to use it dry.

https://www.discountcutlery.net/Knife-Sharpening-Stones_c_3143.html has a fair cross section of that bewildering variety; the Spyderco Duckfoot is simple and versatile and lamentably spendy. Your basic lubricate-and-clean-with-water (or scrub-with-soap) synthetic ceramic stones are a good bet.

(First question; bench or hand-held sharpening device? Second question -- do I want to hone while I'm working, or stop and sharpen every now and again? If the former, a pocket hone of some kind is required.)

I hope some of that was actually useful!

[dragonlady7]

Not too shabby!
I am super jealous of your meat grinder.

I'm trying to remember how my bil cut the hindquarters when he butchered deer. I think he just cut the front of the deer off just above the pelvis (with loppers), and then cut the legs free still hanging. IDK, but he managed to get blood all over himself at one point, so there were definitely some un-graceful moments.

He has a whole collection of nice knives and a saw, but he wound up using one of the slaughterhouse knives for most of it. Those knives aren't anything special but they are sharp as hell because we re-grind them pretty often and then use a steel on them basically constantly.

[dragonlady7]

oh, i see above you were asking about knife sharpening.
This is what was in the slaughterhouse and what we use for parting chickens: Victorinox 6" Wide Stiff Boner yes it's really called that, I knew because one of the packages was still there and we tell constant jokes about it.
Just this year, one of the long-time slaughterhouse volunteers (she works for chicken feet) bought us new, shorter knives for eviscerating, because the 6" one is too long. I cut the shit out of one of my fingers on the second of our turkey processing days; I was out on the finish pluck table removing necks and I had to dissect the skin to get the neck free, and somehow after doing 174 of them I just plumb forgot how to not cut the shit out of myself.

Annie and I did a load of research about knife-sharpening a couple of years back. She's generally familiar; they have some grinding stones and they regularly sharpen all the harvest knives, the shovels, the spades, and so on. She's even got a little stone to sharpen her pruners with, and does.
But generally, we only bother hitting the knives with the stone on a very infrequent basis. They mostly only need that level of sharpening if they've not been maintained, and if they've hit a lot of bones.
We have a steel that lives in the barn, and one of the longtime slaughterhouse workers (he's a friend of the previous owners) uses the steel on the knives before every slaughter session, and that's generally enough.
I just poked around YouTube and this is exactly what Pete does with the steel; he does it to each knife for a good twenty to forty seconds.
Zack usually repeats the process immediately before starting work to cut up the chickens; he usually cuts 20-30 chickens in one session, while we're packaging the others, and he will prepare two to three knives and keep them by his workstation. Cutting up whole birds is the #1 thing that dulls our knives, because he has to cut through bones, and bone dings the edge of the blade. He's got techniques that minimize the amount the blades contact bone, but it's inevitable that he's going to hit bone sometimes.
But, the steel is largely what you need.

We have some of those plastic doohickeys you just pull the knife through, and one of these fuckin' things, and they're better than absolutely nothing, but we generally only use them when nobody knowledgeable is free, we don't have enough knives to just not use the nicked/dull one, and it's that or struggle with the dull knife. There's one in the house and sometimes in desperation I use it when all the knives in the kitchen suck, which is often. (For some reason Annie only has either shitty little paring knives that never get sharpened, or these huge butcher's knives I can barely hold onto. I keep meaning to buy her a nice, like, six inch chef's knife, because there's no reason to have two fourteen-inch chef's knives in one kitchen.)

Oh, the Spruce has a nice tutorial on how to use a steel if you don't know how, that seems very manageable. As long as you're doing it somewhere you've got a countertop, that method could be fine!
They've got a reasonable tutorial on using a whetstone, too, which lines up with the other research we did. I'm still no great shakes with a whetstone, though.

[graydon]

The Grohmann 6" utility knife is more like a 6" paring knife than a 6" chef's knife but good for pretty much all small-or-vegetable kitchen tasks. The Lee Valley "peasant chef's" knife (the name of the style in France) is the closest thing I can think of to a 6" chef's knife. Really general purpose; high carbon tool steel, so it will rust, but takes a lovely edge.

Sharpening steels are halfway between a swage -- squishing the edge back into shape -- and a file -- stripping metal off. This will work fine for your standard cutlery stainless knives but with some modern fancy hunting knives they don't work well because the knife is made out of some ridiculous tool steel that's both harder and tougher than the sharpening steel. (Some Bark River knives in 3V got bad reviews because of this; reviewer didn't like the knife because it won't sharpen using traditional means.)

I have a bias against sharpening steels because they take off far more material than strictly necessary when used on modern knives. They are however very fast and totally ubiquitous among butchers and chefs.

I'm still a strop-and-hone sort of guy, because I am never in that much of a hurry with knives.

[unicornduke]

Thank you so much for this information! It's really neat to see all the intricacies. I'll admit, I haven't really looked into it too hard because I find lots of prepper sites and things like that and I don't like it much.

I've got to sit and think about this, which I've got time now since I don't plan to get a deer until next year. My dad keeps joking about rabbits and squirrels next but I don't think that will happen. I mostly just don't want to deal with either immediately processing the deer or trying to find some way to cool it so no summer hunting haha

I know for sure, a hand held sharpening because I end up in different places. I'm waiting to buy anything else as well since I had to replace my windshield two weeks ago and thus, trying to save money right now.

But thank you for the details!

[unicornduke]

I brought it back to NY with my in case I want to make sausage at some point. So if there is grinding to be done at the farm, you could borrow it no problem. I ran some real sinewy stuff through it and it did decent, if noisy. I did the whole deer worth in maybe 20 mins or so. It took much longer to package it up than grind.

Yeah, I ended up cutting the hindquarters off around the joint and just losing a little meat there. So I had it hung from the back legs, cut one leg free, let it hang, cut the other leg free and promptly dropped the head/spine/ribcage assembly on the ground. Very dignified all around.

[unicornduke]

Neat!

[graydon]

Urk! windshield. Hopefully random road gravel and nothing traumatic.

I find sharpening relaxing and meditative; I shall hope you find it so, too.

And, really, if you're thinking about next fall, no rush whatsoever.

There are some relatively sane knife enthusiasts out there, even on Youtube, but one thing that's important to remember is there really isn't one right way to do it. There's one correct result -- you took the least steel off to get the edge you wanted and it didn't take longer than you had -- but lots and lots of ways to get there.

Otherwise, it's your common-or-garden start-slow turn-the-bits-to-reflexes manual skill. Like anything else involving sharp things, never get in a hurry and it'll be fine.

[unicornduke]

A rock kicked up from a tractor trailer while I was going 70mph. It was spreading quick so I got it fixed ASAP.

I think sharpening will fall into a necessary skill. It's good to know!

[graydon]

Nasty oversized gravel. Boo.

Fixed right away is the right thing to do with cracked glass! Hope the wallet-pain is soon repaired, too. :)