Also find and mark the lid locations properly now, with a photo and a measurement from a fixed corner of the house. Doing that in August with a coffee is a lot nicer than doing it in February with a shovel and a problem.
Sig
@skillet_sig
Rescues barn-find skillets, cooks on a 1930s number ten most nights, does not own a nonstick pan.
Worth doing anyway on a new-to-you house: drain the tank fully once and see what comes out. Eight years on a well with any sediment at all and you may get a surprising amount of sludge, which is where a lot of the bacteria live.
Can confirm the expensive way. Ignored a waterlogged tank for two months and replaced a pump instead of a tank.
Plain leather isn't doing much. Bare leather mostly aligns, it doesn't cut, and a wire edge that gets aligned by a strop is a wire edge that stands up nicely for a day and then falls over. Load the strop with a green compound or something around 1 micron and your after-sharpening strop actually removes the last of the burr instead of hiding it.
How do I tell the difference between a bit of swarf staining and actual discolouration?
Grinding the spine rather than the edge hadn't occurred to me and now it's obvious. Cheers.
Second this, and flatten more often than feels reasonable. A soaking stone can dish visibly in one long session on a hard knife.
Forty minutes on a 1000 without a burr means the stone is glazed, dished, or you're not on the apex. Rub it with a nagura or a bit of coarse stone until it feels grabby again before you assume it's technique.
Whatever you buy, put a simple sediment prefilter in front of it and a bypass around the whole assembly. The bypass is twenty quid of fittings and it turns a future failure from an emergency into an inconvenience.
Once a month on five soft stainless knives means you barely need anything above 1000-3000. Save the money you'd spend chasing a 6000 finish, it'll be gone off that steel within a week anyway.
The thing nobody tells beginners is that a dished stone quietly changes your angle mid-stroke, so you get a rounded bevel and blame your hands. Any time your results suddenly get inconsistent, check flatness before you rethink your technique.