Upgrade Vise Prototype TEST REPORT
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Arrived home from work today to find Josh’s package with the Gen III vise waiting for me! After getting the kids to bed, I was able to mount it up, sharpen a knife, and try mounting a few others. Planning to do more tomorrow with more convex ground blades (more below), but very pleased and will sum it up to say that I will be buying a Gen III system (sans stones) for the convenience of the vise and the quick angle changes.
Click on any picture below to see other view options.
So, here is my Gen II before the change:
And here it is after:
I decided to mount the Gen III vise without the riser since others had done it with the riser, IIRC. Putting the two side by side (Gen II with riser block):
My wife has been asking me to sharpen up a few knives for her for a week or two (which I’d normally jump on, but work has been nuts), but this gave me an excuse to make time for it. Here is a cheap paring knife she wanted done:
Since the vise is taller, the knife rests further up on the stone at rest. I’m thinking longer arms would be better with any system using this vise. I sharpened this one at 18 degrees and could tell I didn’t have much room to go lower, but I had used the upper mounting holes with the depth key. If just mounted the knife further up and ignored the depth key, then lower would of course be possible. Just thought I’d see what a beginning user might try and what the results would be. The knife sharpened up beautifully of course.
Next I tried mounting a few other knives. Most others seemed to be showing pocket knives, so I mainly gave the fixed blades some love, though the first was an Opinel folder:
Mora HD
Carter Bowie
Carter Original Neck Knife:
Spyderco Bushcraft:
Ran into some issues with the highly convex ground blades. My Fallkniven F1 barely fit in the vise and I was able to (with force) rock it back and forth and it stayed canted where I left it. I didn’t take any pictures of that because I think the test might have been marginal due to the thickness of the blade and the vise limits. I tried the Fallkniven WM1 next:
This one still could be rocked a little and remained canted, and you can see (hopefully) that there are gaps around the jaws where it is gripping:
I want to do more testing on highly convex ground knives tomorrow. I have a whole slew of Bark River knives to try.
Finally, with some discussion of asymmetrical grinds, I wanted to try the ultimate asymmetric grind, a single bevel kiradashi:
To my utter amazement, the jaws still managed to center the blade, at least as far as my eyes could tell! I tried to photograph it, but the photos weren’t everything I’d hoped they would be:
More to try tomorrow and then I’ll be passing it on. Thanks for this opportunity, Clay! I’ll be calling tomorrow with a Gen III pre-order. :woohoo:
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