10 degrees?

Yep, 18 degrees each side for 36 inclusive

Progression was

Diamond:
100
200
400
600
800
1000

Sandpaper taped to the 1000 grit diamond stone:
1000
1500
2000

Balsa Strops:
5
3.5
1
.5
.25
.125

Cow Leather Strop
.025
blank

Ya I use it dry, the only thing I add water to are the diamond sprays on balsa. While the pastes stay slightly moist and don’t really need maintenance, the sprays dry out and work better when slightly wet.

Just be careful while stropping that you lower your sharpening angle a degree or two and dont use too much pressure. You can get a blade to pass the HHT/whittle hair after 2500 sandpaper, but it’s easy to go backward with bad stropping.

I don’t have access to a microscope to give a real side-by-side comparison, but I can tell you that after the 1000 grit diamonds, the surface is still scratched and toothy, whereas after the 1000 grit 3M sandpaper, it starts to take on a mirror finish and lose its teeth. I don’t know WHY this is, just that it happens.

To be honest though, unless I’m feeling particularly OCD on a given day, I skip the 1000 and 1500 sandpapers, and go from 1k diamond to 2k sandpaper. It doesn’t get rid of every scratch, and it takes awhile longer, but it’s such a pain cutting out little rectangles of sandpaper and taping them to the same stone three times for each knife.

Here is a link to a great chart on grits of different materials. It includes the WEPS diamonds and the FEPA P abrasives.

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/856708-The-Grand-Unified-Grit-Chart/page3

Notice that the P1000 paper is 18 microns.
P2500 is 8.5 microns.
WEPS 1000 grit diamonds are listed at 7 microns.

I used to use sandpaper before I got stones to cover my progressions. I too noticed that the p2500 and eveb the p1000 paper would give me a much better polish and less tooth than the diamonds. I also noticed that the paper wore down much faster than I liked. I tend to think that Clay has to be right on this. The abrasive on the paper is breaking down to finer sizes. It is another example of how it is hard to choose a sharpening material simply based on the abrasive size. In fact I would go down to 0.3 micron 3M lapping paper taped to my 1000 diamonds. I never could get the level of polish nor edge refinement doing that as what I can do with the CHosera 10K which has abrasives sized at about 1.7 microns.

Yep, 18 degrees each side for 36 inclusive

1000

Sandpaper taped to the 1000 grit diamond stone:
1000

I’ve read more often that people use sandpaper. Any idea how the 1000 grit sandpaper compares to the 1000 grit diamond stones?

Where I live I can get sandpaper up to 2500 grit. However, thats the (FEPA) P-scale, which is different from the ANSI scale that Wicked Edge use for their stones. You can compare the scales here[/url].[/quote]