Microtech's "Closer"
- This topic has 16 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 03/27/2016 at 3:03 pm by
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I haven’t sharpened that particular knife, so I looked it up. First, WOW… if it’s like the ones I looked at, very nice!
From the pictures it doesn’t appear to be sharpened unusual, so my first question is, how are you determining the angles? If you’re clamping it in the WE, be aware that, as the stone travels around the belly toward the tip, the farther away the tip is from the clamp, the smaller the actual angle is…
… from this page: https://www.wickededgeusa.com/does-the-angle-change-along-the-length-of-longer-blades-on-the-wicked-edge/
As tcmeyer posted, it may be a matter of positioning the knife properly, to cover the entire knife.
Like I said, I’m just going on pictures. It might help if you can post a picture or two of your setup… to see how it looks and if anything stands out. Maybe also how exactly you’re determining these angles?
Hi dima,
Thanks for posting. Just to be clear on terminology and what’s happening with your angles, what you’re seeing with the stone track through the marker is that the stone is removing the marker from shoulder to edge along most of the blade but as the stone hits about midway through the belly, it’s only removing the marker from the shoulder, possibly indicating that the angle of the stone to the blade is dropping as it approaches the tip (there is another possibility that I’ll discuss below the image.) I did a little markup on your photo (nice photo by the way) so that you can see it more clearly:
The stone track is easier to see in the section blowups behind the regular image.
I can’t tell for sure from the image you provided, nor from the ones I can find online, but it appears that there is not much distal taper to the spine i.e. the spine does not taper toward the tip. If that’s the case, then the bevel through the belly and especially towards the tip is being cut from thicker stock, in which case the angle could remain similar throughout the blade but you’d be ending up with a wider bevel at the tip anyway. If you’re using an Angle Cube, you might be able to test it by checking the angle above the clamp and again at the tip, but you have to be sure that the Angle Cube is plumb when it’s out on the tip portion. You can use a square or you can attach some string to the cube to check for plumb. If you’re reading similar angles at both locations, the issue is the thickness of the stock at the tip. If you’re readings are very different e.g. more than a degree, then you still haven’t found the sweet spot and you might want to experiment with rotating the tip of the blade downward.
-Clay
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Ahh, that explanation certainly helped! I ended up rotating tip of the blade way down. I also made sure that angle measurements are identical at the hill and at the tip of the blade with an angle cube. Thanks a bunch, Clay!
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Glad you got it figured out… pictures always help.
If you can, post how you finally got it set up… and also the results. (A good excuse to see more pictures of that knife). 🙂
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cbwx34 – gladly!
However, I don’t have the “results” yet, as I just figured out how to sharpen this knife. Don’t have necessary tools yet – just ordered a set of ceramics and strops yesterday. Once it arrives, I’ll try to take a photo of the finished edge.
Setup looks like this (this is an approximation):
As for the photos of the knife itself, check out these:
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Forgot to mention – Clay so kindly agreed to make a demo video on how to sharpen this knife. Coming soon, I hope!
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cbwx34 – gladly!
However, I don’t have the “results” yet, as I just figured out how to sharpen this knife. Don’t have necessary tools yet – just ordered a set of ceramics and strops yesterday. Once it arrives, I’ll try to take a photo of the finished edge. Setup looks like this (this is an approximation)Hia
My guess you might get a hard time when it comes time for touch up
You also might want the Advanced alignment guide many of us waiting for
Yikes! I don’t like to see an edge mounted vertically so near to the vise. I would think that the effective angle at the tip would be quite high – maybe up to 40 dps or more. I’ll be very curious as to how it turns out.
Probably not… If you rotate the image so that the knife is horizontal (since the pivot can’t tell the difference)…
… it doesn’t seem as bad as it looks in the original photo.
You have to consider the pivot point of the arm relative to the point of contact (the tip). The stone is rotated almost 90 deg. from normal. If this point were on the left edge of the vise, the angle would be right around 90 deg, no matter how high the contact point is. The sweep of the tip should be about as far forward of the pivot point as the heel of the edge is above the pivot point.
Incidentally, the Gen 3 vise has two contact points – one at each of the upper corners of the vise. From the photo, it looks like the blade is held at only one point, which might let the blade rotate about that point.
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