1500 knives later…

Looks like there was some speck of corrosion that was plated over. Just like rust spreads under the paint of your old Chevy.

I see three sets of 800/1000’s in your first photo. I think I do under 100 knives per year. So far, I’ve had one 400 and one 800 wear out on me.

That’s a lot of effort to remove all those platens from that godawful tape. Did you use heat?

Well I used heat on a few of them to see if it helped and it did, but most of them just took a little work and they popped right off! The tape wasn’t bad…. It would just roll up in a ball with your thumb.

I don’t know what happened to my extra 400/600 paddles. I know I’ve used more than one set over the years!

Congratulations, Josh.

Tom, 65 degrees C in the dishwasher. And you can remove your stones B)

Very helpful tip! Sounds like you have done the same thing

Now that you have all the empty paddles what can you do with them? Is there a source for replacement diamond plates or replacement ceramic or wet stones that are cut to paddle size?

Well there are a ton of things you COULD do w/ them, hehe. not sure what I will do w/ these yet.

You could get any number of waterstones you may be interested in, say a line of the shapton pro series, but get them in the large block. Then cut them up on a tile saw, mount them to aluminum bases, and then to the WEPS paddles and sell the rest. This is just one application though! You could also play around w/ different strop bases: balsa, leather, nano cloth, etc.

Congratulations.

What percent do you think were re-profile vs. touch ups to knives already sharpened once on WE?

Most of the heavy reprofile work I do on a belt sander, then I simply microbevel w/ my WEPS at 19-20 dps w/ the 800/1k’s. But whenever I mirror an edge or match the existing angle I use the full progression. If I had to guess I would say that the 600-1k’s all have about the same wear on them, and then the lower grits (esp. the 100’s) have a ton of wear from hours reprofiling. Shoot, I reprofiled an Al Mar fixed blade to 10 dps by hand and that took me about 2.5 hrs per side – just reprofiling w/ the 100’s! So as you can imagine that takes life off of them. I don’t normally touch up ones already sharpened on the WEPS except for my own. Most of my customers have some sort of maintenance devise like the sharpmaker or stropping.

Shoot…. I’ve done about 30 knives and the diamonds of my 100 grit stone are peeling back on the edge.

Very strange… I’ve went through at least 2-3 sets of 100/200 grits and never had that issue, I may have on a 400-600 at one point, can’t remember. I know a different issue I had w/ my stones seemed like some cross contamination during the diamond plating process and you could feel larger diamonds in the surface of my 1k’s – Wicked Edge replaced immediately w/ no issues whatsoever. Sounds like you need to make a phone call :side: