Thanks for the videos!
With more time on the machine, you get faster, plus doing knives for customers is different than doing them for yourself or your friends. You don’t need to agonize over every last scratch. You can often just find the existing angle, match it and start with the 600# stones. From there, it’s easy to work through the 600#, 800# and 1000# diamonds and then finish with 20 or so strokes with the strops. The knife you’ll give back to your customer will be screaming sharp (depending on the angle of course) and far better than anything they’ve ever seen before. If you work the same venue often, you’ll get the knives back after a while and it’s really easy to touch them up, just a matter of a minute or two. At shows, I usually do 5-10 knives per hour if they’re not too badly damaged or wanting a major reprofile. I spend more time on knives sent in to the shop, often 20 minutes or more making sure they’re perfect.
This is one area I was hoping would crop up a bit more in this thread (so I copied it over here)… time spent on a knife… especially when under a time constraint. I’ve been doing some sharpening lately similar to what is done with other methods… mark the edge with a sharpie, match or come close to the bevel on the knife, use one coarse stone (100 or 200) to set or cleanup a bevel, (and this will remove minor damages – chips, etc. that a lot of knives have) one fine (600 or 800) to clean it up, dozen or so strokes with a 5m (or any) leather, and done. You can hand a knife back to someone in 5 min. or less… it’ll be sharper than most anything they’ve ever seen, and will pass all the standard tests that most people want to try: cut paper, shave arm hair, etc. no problem. Similar but not quite like what Clay mentioned, if it has a decent edge… one fine stone, strop and done.
I think this is one “feature” of the WE that is often overlooked. There are many posts/videos/etc. on creating polished edges (often with a large time expenditure), but little on the fact that you can sharpen an edge, both sides simultaneously, quickly and precisely, with great results.
Of course the procedure used is based on the goal you’re setting… in this case it’s a “get it done quickly” goal… and still turn out a quality edge.
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