Some new blades I got.

Nice efforts and results.  Welcome to the W.E. forum and W.E.P.S. Community, Alex.

What you have learned with your sharpening experiences is why many of us have chosen to customize, modify and accessorize our setups to personalize them to allow us to better clamp and sharpen our knife collections.  With practice and experience you will learn how to best position and clamp the various designs and style knives you own and sharpen.

Using a W.E. Advanced Alignment Guide, AAG, or possibly a custom type alignmenting guide, you can clamp knives without the need for them to rest directly on the W.E. depth key’s pins.  This allows you to position and clamp knives higher up in the vise jaws allowing you to achieve lower angle settings and better find or match the “sweet spot”.  All that really matters is if the knife is clamped stationary and securely.  I sometimes only use the depth pin key to position/reposition which ever alignment guide I am using for positioning and logging the position of that knife.  This more “free style” knife positioning along with other customization and modification has allowed me to sharpen a much wider range of knives without the need to use the Low Angle Adapter, LAA, or to simply settle on whatever sharpening angles can be reached, for that clamped knife.

I will add this, my interests and sharpening experiences are mostly with kitchen knives, food service or fish/fishing service knives.  Many of these knives, even the very expensive hand crafted knives do not have evenly sized bevels or often even bevel angles.  Whether down along the entire length’s of the knives or even from side to side.  The precise attention to symmetry and evenness of bevel appearance is IMO more likely associated with higher-end collector knives.  Those are knives possibly more for appearance then for utility.  I believe, some bevels may even intentionally vary along a knife’s length to enhance cutting and slicing.

There are so many new and different steels, knife makers, knife kinds and styles that after years using my W.E. setups despite my sharpening experience and knife familiarity that is still the case.  It  has become even more-so like this and will continue to be like that as long as new limited run boutique steel alloys are created and forged into high end knives for a niche efficinado collector’s market. These new steels are metallurgical lab tested to determine specifications, then named, labeled and touted as “harder and more durable than…” with no real world user’s or knife sharpener’s experiences.  Whether theses steels are ground into old time classics, popular favorite models, or into a new one-off or limited run custom ground knives… This is just how it’ll be.  This is not a complaint.  It’s just my observation of the current nature of the hobby.