David N
@dgnorton
active 2 weeks, 2 days agoForum Replies Created
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Lee, you expressed concern about your workshop being 1.5 degrees different from one side to the other. I’m not sure if you’re talking about the room you work in or some other type of sharpening system (Worksharp?). If you’re actually concerned about your workshop, that’s not going to make any difference. All that matters is the angle adjustments on the Wicked Edge relative to the clamp, which will be the same regardless of whether you’re on a precision leveled surface or the the side of a mountain slope.
If you’re asking about how precise the angle adjustments are from side to side on the WE, I don’t know an exact number but I’m going to say it mostly comes down to play (slop) in the stones riding on the rods. Using the digital angle finder that came with the Low Angle Adapter kit from WE, I get 0.2 degrees of play. How much difference does that make in getting knives sharp? Not much as far as I can tell. Everything else on the WE feels rock solid. I got my WE Pro Gen 4 yesterday. I practiced on 3 knives I didn’t care about and then did one of our middle of the road kitchen knives (a 9″ chef’s knife). It came out sharp enough to shave.
Regarding the precision adjustment feature, get it if any of these things are true…
- you will be sharpening a lot of knives or have any sort of commercial use case
- you have the money
- you have expensive knives
I also agonized over whether to spend the money on the precision adjustment. Now that I’ve got it, I’m glad I spent the extra money. I reprofiled the edge on one of our cheap kitchen knives because it was a degree or two off from the other side and it took much longer than just sharpening. What might have been an 8 – 10 minute sharpening session if I left the bevels as-is turned into nearly an hour. Huge waste of time for something that won’t make any noticeable difference. Also about 10x or more wear on the 100 grit stone than it would have been if I’d just left it. Anyway, all that to say, get the precision adjustment if you can. It makes it significantly easier. On the second kitchen knife I sharpened, I used the coarse adjustment to get get as close as possible to the existing angle and then used the fine adjust to match it exactly. Sharpening that knife was a breeze.
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I know I’m responding to an old thread but I just joined the forum, it was top of the list, and relevant to me. Just thought I’d drop my experience here in case it’s useful to the OP or anyone else. I bought a WE Pro Gen 4 directly from WE with the LAA. It arrived yesterday. I’ve spent a couple hours with it and sharpened 4 knives (counting the practice knife), so I’m still a newbie. I primarily bought the WE for sharpening kitchen, hunting, and larger EDC knives but I also have some Swiss Army Knives (“SAK”) that I’ve carried daily for years. I tried one of those SAKs in the LAA and it took quite a bit of fiddling to get in clamped so the stones weren’t hitting the LAA. Here’s what worked for me and what I did was probably overkill..
- Clamp just a few millimeters of the spine of the blade in the jaws. Basically the bare minimum to hold the knife secure.
- Use the digital angle finder that came with the LAA, I zeroed it to the base of the WE then set it on the edge of the clamped blade (parallel to the edge) and allowed it to lean slightly against one of the upright rods (yes, it was sketchy but it worked), loosened one screw in the clamp so I could tilt the blade to be parallel to the base front to back (0 degrees +/- 0.1), re-tightened the clamping screw
- Put a piece of masking tape on each side of the clamp so I could ensure the diamond stones weren’t rubbing without damaging the clamp (probably not a big deal if the clamps get a few scratches but, hey, this thing is still brand new!)
- From there, I followed the normal procedure except that I started with 800 grit instead of 100 (small knife, soft-ish steel, already sort of sharp) and went up to 2200 grit
The results weren’t great for the SAK. The bevel looks more uniform than ever, which is great, but the actual sharpness of it is no better than I get using the bottom of a coffee mug or edge of a car window. Won’t shave hair off of my arm at all. However, I sharpened one of our middle-of-the-road kitchen knives to 2200 grit (no strop) and I could, in a pinch, use it to shave my face now so, the WE works great. I suspect more practice with small knives will yield better results for them but they are definitely not WE’s strong suit.
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