Richard

Sounds like you’re getting the hang of it, congrats!

I don’t go higher than 1600 because mostly I’m doing kitchen knives but I scrub for a burr on every single stone and then stroke until all the vertical scratches are gone. Here lately, I’ve been stopping at 1000 and even there, I can slice phonebook paper every time. You have to apex the edge all the way through the routine and not stop at 600.

Hey Bryce, sounds like you’re kind of new to sharpening. I would strongly suggest you break in your stones by going through at least ten junk knives before getting into your wife’s assortment. And don’t stop there, spend a lot of time honing your own skills before getting into the expensive ones because any damage is pretty much irreversible…[Read more]

Welcome to the forum WN! You’ll learn a lot here so check-in often.

Welcome to the forum Anomad! Lots of knife wisdom here. Takes awhile to develop your own technique so just keep at it and try new methods.

All I can say is it takes time and a lot of practice to develop your own personal skillset. I do things that I’ve discovered assist me in obtaining a final objective that aren’t even mentioned on this forum but it works me so be patient and be careful.

I bought one and have used it several times, especially on smaller pocket knives and an occasional paring knife. The blade heighth on these particular examples don’t lend enough clearance for the stone to clear the vice even with using the Low Angle Adapter (LAA). It does the trick, there are some good YouTube videos on how to properly use it as…[Read more]

Guten tag Pirate and welcome to the forum. Yes, phone book paper is an excellent media to measure your edge with. In the videos that Clay demonstrates his techniques on, he uses printer paper which is fine and maybe that’s where you want to start. A 1000 grit edge should scream through printer paper, then progress to the phone book paper since…[Read more]

Another point I wanted to make is that people don’t understand our craft and I’ll give you an example of what happened today. I get up this morning and some guy who I didn’t know had e-mailed me last night saying that he needed three kitchen knives he wanted sharpened so right away I’m in the dark regarding what kind of knife it is and how much…[Read more]

I think you talk about this in you ‘Finding the Sweet Spot’ thread, right? It works, that’s for sure.

You know I said that because it happened to me, right? Taught me to use a lot of masking tape. Lesson learned.

I personally just created a Google Business page and began getting hits immediately, they bugged the heck out of me for months wanting me to enhance it and spend money but I just kept ignoring them and the calls finally ceased. But my advice is to not bite off more than you can chew probably for the first year. Get really good at, for example,…[Read more]

It’s really true that instead of feeling for a burr, you can use the USB microscope (or really just your naked eyes) to see the light being reflected off of what want’s to be an apex. I have high intensity LED lights shining on both sides of the blade and it’s really remarkable how great that method works.

I tend to agree. I usually start at 800 grit and go from there. If I’m not seeing consistent scratch patterns the entire length of the blade, I drop it to maybe 600 to dig in a little deeper and go from there.

I do appreciate this post because I’ve been experiencing pretty much the same thing over the few years I’ve had my Gen3. Every single time I clamp a knife into it, I get angle variations off to the right and I’ve always wondered if there’s a way to correct the variation without shimming the knife back to the left. Tomorrow, I’ll do a few…[Read more]

With the help of all the guys on this forum, it took me a good six months to develop my own style.

Kinda goes hand in hand with the pinned “How to Find the Sweet Spot” post.

Hey Jason and welcome to the forum!  It took me a good six months before I developed a skillset that I could call my own with the help of the guys on this forum.  There are some good YouTube videos as well as some bad ones so yeah, take those knives in the bucket and put them to the test, it’s fun!

Richard

Welcome Russ and Robert!