how to clamp down medford infraction in the vice

Can you disassemble the knife and then clamp on the flat section where the pivot is located?

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Jeff, Brewbear

Wow, that is an unreasonable policy in my opinion.

I think you should still be able to clamp this knife on the flat area in front of the stop pin. There might be a portion of the jaws that aren’t able to grip anything (in the thumb hole area) but that shouldn’t prevent you from being able to sharpen. If all else fails you can always clamp the knife in the Tormek small knife adapter and then mount that on the WE.

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Jeff, Brewbear

Franky4246, welcome to the W.E. forum.  I have no experience with that specific knife so I wouldn’t profess to know how to clamp and sharpen it.  I can share with you with a few years worth of W.E. knife sharpening under my belt that:

1. You don’t need to have the knife positioned within the jaws and resting down on the depth key pins.  The pins are simply a positioning guide that holds the alignment and advanced alignment guides positioned for recording the knife’s clamped position.  The knife can sit down on one or both pins, or neither.  As long as the knife is held securely between the vise jaws it doesn’t matter how the knife is positioned.  All we need to do is position and clamp a knife so it is tight and secure, and the position allows us to sharpen the knife edge.  Sometimes this requires that the knife be clamped at unexpected positions and rotated at unexpected angles.  Like I said, as long as the knife is secure and the stones can contact the knife edge at your desired sharpening angle is all that matters.
2. Also, I usually employ a small rectangular patch of dry real leather chamois cloth between the jaws and the knife steel.  The chamois I find compresses tightly to allow for me to clamp knives tightly and securely for sharpening.

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Brewbear

Marc’s suggestion of using a small piece of leather chamois has served me well also on blades with weird geometry or a distal taper which can compound the issue where you want to clamp, however, in the picture of that knife the hollow grind appears to only go about 50% up the height of the blade around the mid point on the length of the blade.  Looks like there would be lots of essentially flat area above that to get an adequate surface to clamp on.