Daniel Nash
@dannyboy2k
active 5 years, 5 months agoForum Replies Created
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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:
Your post brought back to mind another post I read recently where the poster had draped fishing line over the edge of the blade with weights on each end of the line. He would look at how the weights fell relative to the vise and wiggle the handle back and forth until the weights were even on each side. I just searched but wasn’t able to find the post again right off the bat.
I keep hoping there is some way to get the floating vise on the professional model for our models. No more clamping issues then. I also keep wondering if I could fashion something like the KME sharpener’s clamp (I think similar/same as professional model floating clamp) and replace my WE clamp with it.
~Dan
I’m happy to try and demonstrate what I did last night. (Click on the photos for larger versions).
- Firstly, I inserted the knife into the vise where it seemed like a good place to clamp (more towards the handle), putting it at roughly a 20-30 degree downward angle, and snugged up the top screw.
- Then I placed a piece of painter’s tape on a stone.
- I placed the stone at a point on the blade where it was approximately perpendicular to the edge and marked a line with a pencil.
- I then moved the stone (while still pressed firmly down against the arm at the base) to the tip and wiggled the knife up and down gently until the tip was hitting the line.
- I moved the stone back and forth between those two points and continued gently wiggling the knife until the line was hitting dead on in both places. I then snugged up the bottom bolt to finish clamping.
- In this case, there was still plenty of blade directly over the clamp that I took my reading as normal for the angle with the stone right in line up and down with the clamp, but in the case you are too close to the handle, I would use Josh’s suggestion of holding the stone at the rearmost point on the blade edge which will probably be butting up against the choil/handle, put the angle cube in line with the clamp as in the picture a few posts back, and take my reading there.
I’m still working on this one as it needed quite a bit of reprofiling, so the edge doesn’t look great, but it looks so even!
Hope that helps!
~Dan
Well, I suppose you could do this to check the angle:
Or is there an easier way that I’m missing? Seems like the above way would be difficult to replicate repeatedly.
~Dan
- Firstly, I inserted the knife into the vise where it seemed like a good place to clamp (more towards the handle), putting it at roughly a 20-30 degree downward angle, and snugged up the top screw.
