Ah. I'm not sure about the uneven bevels, but I hate chisel grinds. Give me a flat grind or a convex edge any day of the week over either.
As far as the edge goes, once a week is considered a long time between edge maintenance by a lot of knife people, especially for a blade that receives regular use. Sharpening daily is almost a necessity for a higher end steel, where it is capable of being hardened well and has a composition that's conducive to abrasion resistance. Because it's a good steel, it should have minimal damage after use, and take only a few strokes to return the edge, while at the end of the week, you'll have to remove a lot of metal that doesn't want to move.
Having been bored and curious in the last half hour, I've done a bit of research, and here's a breakdown of the steel used in a few popular Japanese and German knives. With the exception of Global (it's Japanese, right?), they have very distinctly different opinions on the "right" steel.
Wusthof and Henckels: They use X50CrMoV15, hardened around 54-56 RC. This is actually a low carbon steel (high carbon steel is about 1% carbon and up), though advertised as a high carbon steel. It's got a ton of chromium in it, which allows for excellent corrosion resistance and better edge retention but can leave steel brittle. Due to its low carbon content and high chromium content, it can't be hardened very well, thus leaving it soft and easy to sharpen, but unable to take and hold the same edge a better steel.
Chroma: They use 301 stainless. I'd like to actually take a moment and cry for anyone who paid the outrageous price for these "high carbon" blades (.15% actually
). 301 is junk steel that kids in shop practice on. Some of the low end chinese freebie kitchen knives that they give away use this. It hardens between 52 and 54 RC, is considered unusable for cutting applications by most people.
Shun and Tojiro use VG10, which may be perfect for a chef's knife. It's a true high carbon steel with an alloy makeup that allows it to take an excellent edge, hold it well, and not be too painful to sharpen. It tend to have an RC from 59-61.
Shun also uses SG2, which has super high carbon (1.25-45), vanadium, and molybdenum (both at almost unheard of levels) and hardens reliably around 64 (part of what makes the super steels super is that they have the "toughness" to get incredibly hard without becoming impossibly brittle- though this is often accompanies by abrasion resistance that makes them almost impossible to sharpen without specialty stones).
Takeda uses Aogami Super, which is also a super high carbon (1.4-1.5%) and, along with several good alloying elements, has a very high tungsten content. It's apparently used by Takeda consistently at 62RC.
*Whole point of this post is that the german knives tend to use low carbon steels, which could probably be sharpened on a dinner table, while japanese knives tend to use steels that are hard to the point of sucking to sharpen (with the exception of VG10, which is a great compromise).
