The steel is to straighten the edge of the knife, two passes changing side to side is all it takes. Problem being is you can not see whether the knife needs it or not, unless you have a microscope.
What Markem618 said.
I once saw a demo where the guy use a piece of folded tin foil to represent the blade. The edge was all wavy, acting as a exaggeration of the very thin edge of the knife blade. He pinched his fingers together and ran them along the tin foil, straightening the edge out.
That's what a steel does. It doesn't sharpen, just straightens.
True, but it doesn't hurt anything to use the steel, so I don't see that as a "problem". Like you said, a couple of quick passes and you're done.
If you always assume that the blade is wavy, you'll always feel that you've done some useful work. ;-)
I thought the steel was to knock the burr off the edge.
Or didn't do enough. ;-)
It depends on the knife. For carbon steel they perform a burnishing function that can maintain edge sharpness. For stainless steels not so much.
I have a diamond steel which does maintain an edge on stainless. There are ceramic steels which do the same but are a bit fragile.
The issue is hardness? I thought stainless was fairly soft, so doesn't hold an edge very well.
Sharp enough that we have not tossed them and bought another set, IIRC we paid $10-$15. Mostly what dulls are the points against hard plate. The rounded Protected edge stays sharp for a very long time.
Where did the burr come from between uses?
See my response to J. Clarke about different types of steels. (honing vs. sharpening)
It depends on what type of steel you are using. There are sharpening steels and honing steels.
Honing steels are made from steel that and have no sharpening function. Their job is to take the "curve" or "wave" out of the very edge of an already sharp blade. They remove very little (if any) material from the blade, so they don't actually sharpen it.
Sharpening steels are ceramic or have a diamond coating and therefore actually sharpen the blade.
I understood that it came from (microscopic) rolling the edge over during use.
A burr is formed while sharpening and raising the burr is an important part of the sharpening process. The curve or wave that you get while using the knife is something completely different.
I've used a Spyderco set of ceramic sticks for several decades with good results for several decades and inherited both my late father's and late father-in-law's sets which I had given each of them as Christmas presents long ago. One of those sets stays with my hunting knives and the other lives at a small cabin in Colorado. Our Faberware set of kitchen cutlery gets touched up every three or four months and the sticks keep a pretty fair edge on a couple of 50 year old wooden handled Chicago Cutlery knives; the hunting knives at the beginning of deer season and before every deer for those years when there are more than one.
FWIW
I just buy a new paring knife annually. The ceramic ones at harbor freight are on clearance now for under $5 each. :-)
You might be confusing the burr when sharpening a scraper to one that is created during the sharpening of a knife.
When sharpening a scraper you actually want to create a burr.
Typically you also get a burr when sharpening a knife and that is normally removed by simply cutting directly and lightly in to a piece of wood.
It's the same when sharpening a knife. Both of the following quotes are from:
"Once you have formed a burr on each side using your coarsest stone then you can progress to using finer and finer stones to polish and reform the burr until you end up with super tiny burr that often can?t even be felt. This final burr (which is often a wire edge) can be polished off with a high grit stone or a leather strop."
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