Acknowledging the fact that the WE has to be built in a way to keep the price down.
In a recent mail I received from Tuffy he asked “do u have to set like 1 degree different on left side to match bevel on right side?” the answer is yes .
My primary thought is the way the vice works since one side moves to allow clamping which probable means that although there seems to be an oversized hole in the base of the vice it is often hard to keep the knife absolutely centred between the stone arms also there is no reference mark on the centre line to act as an aid to checking that the blade centre is centred.
A vice where both sides move equal distant when clamping would do away with this minor glitch but I suspect add some considerable expense to the WE although to be fair most of the expense is in the stones it would be desirable as an optional upgrade to have a vice that is self centring it would require a radical redesign of the vice to enable this and perhaps the whole We would have to change I imagine the super we shown off at the knife shows recently achieves just that.
The second observation is the time factor to fine tune the position of the arms with the present set up which involve using two sets of three allen keys to reset an angle .
Again my thought on this revert to that of a Sextant and the mechanism to set the angle on the arc which is very rapid since speed is the essence when taking sites since both the sun , moon & planets move quite rapidly 1Ëšrepresents 6 minutes in time .
The mirror arm on a Sextant is moved roughly by pinching together two levers and then fine tuning with a micrometer again it would be a beautiful upgrade but would I believe be very costly but if one is to sharpen commercially I would think that the self centring vice & the levers & micrometers set to each stone arm would pay for itself over time .
Once again Clay’s newest beast probable takes care of both observations in his own way.
I think that these upgrade would be desirable but I am not certain that in general people would appreciate the price since I am sure that a fair amount of cost on a sextant is the manufacturing of the arc and the micrometer adjustment.
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