JimR
@jrrmaker
active 3 years, 2 months agoForum Replies Created
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Simon it’s because of questions like yours that I have a love / hate relationship with the rabbit holes this forum sends me on. Like you – I have a WE130 (actually it’s a WE120 upgraded to the 130 vise) and when I looked into your observation I found the same thing. Actually though what I found was that while the LAA amplified the play, it wasn’t the cause of it. Without the LAA I still had play in the vise jaws of the 130 clamp, and tracing it further found play in the vise frame itself. What I found as I went deeper into the rabbit hole is that one of the two screws that secure the vise and angle bar to the blue frame was slightly loose (though the other one was tight). I tightened them both up good and tight and the play is now gone – not only in the 130 vise frame and jaws but also with the LAA clamped. So that’s something you might check – make sure both of those screws are tight!
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I have a set of many different size Wusthof Grand Prix knives and want to know the correct sharpening angles.
On the Wusthof FAQ page (https://www.wusthof.com/pages/faqs) they say the following:
“WÜSTHOF knives can be honed and sharpened using a hand-held sharpener, an electric sharpener, a sharpening or honing steel, or
a whetstone. We recommend using the same brand sharpener as your knife collection, to ensure that the material used is the correct hardness for the steel on your knives. Our sharpening angle for standard blades is 14˚ per side, and for Asian-style blades (Santokus, Nakiris) is 10˚ per side. We offer a variety of sharpening products with pre-set angles.”A good starting point is to sharpen at the same angle the factory sharpened to (using the Sharpie method to determine that angle). At one time WÜSTHOF sharpened to 20˚ per side – the 14˚ is their newer standard for European-style blades.
This page (https://www.williams-sonoma.com/netstorage/pdf/cutlery-comparison-charts-WUSTHOF-070215.pdf) suggests that ALL current knives (including your Grand Prix) sharpen to the same 14˚ (28˚ included angle) spec so you can’t go too wrong using that angle. As Marc points out, this is a balance between edge sharpness and edge durability.
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Harder steels such as you related, harder than HRc 59-60 can be more on the brittle side and may suffer damage in the form of edge chipping or fall off. Whereas the softer steels may fold or roll the edge with damage from use. I almost exclusively use whetstones made to be used with the Wicked Edge systems for these harder steels. Still, the rule’s not so black and white. Some of the harder steels I’ve found do sharpen quite well and easily with diamond sharpening stones. Whereas other similarly rated hard, but different steels will suffer severe edge damage with diamond stones. I have not experienced any edge damage or edge failure sharpening my harder steel knives with whetstones. The problem I found trying to sharpen these hard steels with the diamond stones is sometimes the edge failure doesn’t occur till the end of my sharpening progression when I’m using the finer grits.
You have succinctly described my problems sharpening an M390 knife. I suspect most of my problems arose from carbide tear out, perhaps the result of the machining method diamond stones use. Diamond stones are anchored in a hard matrix and they have to cut hard carbides also anchored in the hard matrix of the knife steel. As hard steels also may become more brittle (as a result of the carbide formation that makes them hard) this stresses the blade matrix until it exceeds its yield strength and hard carbides are torn out – leaving what seems to be chips in the very edge of the edge apex. My own observations suggest this is the problem I had. I solved it (quite spectacularly I might add) by going to Chosera stones in WE paddles which completely solved this problem – and took me to a satisfactory impressive mirror edge.
Whetstones (water stones) use – to at least some extent in my opinion – a different machining process. As I think of the slurry formed, some (much?) of the abrasive is no longer held in the matrix of the stone but becomes part of a free abrasive machining process (similar to a wire saw used in silicon chip manufacture) and is as much or more of a lapping process as it is a cutting process. The abrasive grains tumble across the surface of the edge bevel and instead of lateral forces that tear out the carbides they drive the carbides into the matrix – smoothing the surface out and refining it in a good way. It made a believer out of me and my set of Choseras are definitely now part of my toolkit – to use when I want this kind of edge with surprisingly little time and effort.
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I recently worked on two knives with a curved edge and was most pleased with the bevel I got when I clamped the knife (as Marc suggested) “roughly centered to the curved edge fore and aft so the imagined line is horizontal roughly parallel to the vise’s flat tips”.
One of those two knives had a factory edge bevel exactly as you described – I was removing Sharpie in the middle of the bevel and not reaching either the shoulder or the apex. Such a convex bevel was very likely done on the slack side of a belt grinder. If you pick a bevel angle that removes Sharpie in the center you’ll slightly re-profile the bevel but end up with one similar in width to the factory profile but re-profiled to match the “V” bevel of the Wicked Edge.
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This has been a most valuable insight offered by tcmeyer on two points – one is the problem caused by an unbroken in stone. Two knives I sort of really care about had some unique deep scratches that I ultimately traced to an unbroken in 1500/2200 diamond stone that I had added to my collection of stones without really breaking it in well enough. An easy fix once I realized which stone was causing the problem; lesson learned!
The second point is really interesting in light of Tom’s experience with ZDP-189 only my experience was with M390. I had sharpened it pretty well (or so I thought) all the way to strops when I noticed a reflection off the edge apex that shouldn’t have been there; a USB scope showed what looked like chips or irregularities that I couldn’t remove with films or leather strops. I finally discovered that anything I tried that involved edge trailing strokes caused these reflections and I couldn’t get rid of them – it only made things worse. I went back to 600 grit and cleaned up things and then went in a progression to 800 / 1000 / 1500 / 2200 and then 1.4/.6 ceramics but only using edge leading strokes. I could even get away with scrubbing as long as I followed with edge leading. The secret for me is very light (weight of the stone) edge leading strokes with stones that can actually be used in edge leading (which leaves out films and strops). The knife is super sharp but not necessarily pretty.
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Welcome Chefy from one relative newby (several weeks on Wicked Edge but 30+ years sharpening (and making knives). Get some stone stops (forum members here or what I did was buy a couple of shaft collars on Amazon) because you will sooner or later run a stone off the edge and down the side of the blade without them. It leaves some very ugly scratches that you can’t get rid of without refinishing the whole blade. But you still want to use all of the stone during break-in because you never know when a particular knife needs a longer stroke. What I did was buy a package of floor scraper blades (8″ long carbon steel) and remove the stone stops and intentionally run the stone off the edge – so that I got use out of not only the middle of the stone but the extreme ends of it too. And don’t forget the edges – they are not sharp but rounded (so you can handle a re-curved blade) but they will also have diamond clumps and need to be used. If you see a big scratch in your edge bevel – check the rounded edge of the stone too. Stubborn clumps can be removed by using a piece of glass (as though it was a knife blade) to remove a clump.
Practice all the different kinds of strokes – they all create different scratch patterns and all are useful at different times. Part of the “break-in” is to not only prepare the stones (by removing clumps of diamonds left from the manufacturing process) but also develop the muscle memory to use the best stroke at the right time.
Something to magnify your apex is very helpful but you can tell a lot about your edge with just a strong light – I use an LED flashlight to look at reflections off the apex (or sometimes take the knife outside in the bright sunlight). You should get no reflection from the real apex (a so-called “dark edge”) – if you see bright reflections at the apex you’ve got a rolled edge, or a burr, or a wire edge, a chip or a problem of some sort.
And lastly (for now) be careful. That knife you just sharpened to slice a paper thin slice of tomato will do a dandy job slicing a paper thin slice off your finger. So be careful. The one big lesson I’ve learned is that a knife sharpened on a Wicked Edge ends up being sharper than that knife ever was before.
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I think it’s an interesting concept and the diagram reminds me a little bit of the Henckels Eversharp steak knives edge. Of course that’s a much larger pattern of peaks and valleys, it’s obviously formed with a shaped sharpening media, and only one side is sharpened with this pattern. I sort of wonder what would really happen if you sharpened with two very different grits on opposite sides of the bevel as I don’t see the result looking quite like the diagram of the apex suggests.
I am attaching a download of the procedure. Use it even if the version is not the same as your model. Try to use this starting on page 15, for the red cube. DXL360S-v2-Dual-Axis-Digital-Protractors Do it the first time with it still is off, as a dry run.
This link was very helpful – more so that the printed instructions in my opinion. Two things to keep in mind:
1) My cube was not giving an accurate angle indication until AFTER I re-calibrated it – so while it SHOULD be calibrated correctly – don’t count on it. I was seeing the protractor suggest that the vise was wrong when in fact it was an out-of-calibration DXL360S.
2) As you go through the steps, the cube will beep as it stores information about that position and then immediately indicate an error about the position being wrong – which may make you think you just did something wrong. But that error isn’t about the position you just completed – the cube is telling you that you aren’t in the correct position for the NEXT step – not the step you just completed. So when the beeping stops and you get an error – just move on to the next position in the sequence – the error will go away and you can initiate calibration for the next position.
After re-calibrating the cube the error I thought I was seeing in the vise went away and everything is not within a couple of tenths of a degree which is about as good as you’re going to get.
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You all got me curious enough to check this out on my own WE device – originally a 120 but updated to a 130 with the addition of the kit and new vise. One thing I felt I could add was that I have a precision machinist’s square that I used to use to tram the vise in my milling machine (when I was lucky enough to have a basement for a milling machine) and I thought it would be interesting to run this test on my own. And I was sort of astounded to find that I was seeing a greater angle on the right side than on the left – about .3 degree greater. Then I checked my angle cube (a brand new to me DXL360S) and felt it didn’t seem to be calibrated well – some of the positions involved in calibration were off by about .3 degrees. So I re-calibrated the cube and got rid of the variation and ran the test with the square again. I did find that the weight of the cube magnetically fixed to the square could be enough to flex and affect the measurement – the best way to clamp it was in the vertical middle of one leg and with the cube and vertical square leg was in front of the vise – you can sort of see this in the pics I took.
The top pic is with the cube on the left side of the vise and the bottom pic is with the cube on the right side. The cube is in zero mode and was zeroed on the base and on the blue frame (no difference between the two BTW). As the pics show – the left angle is .24 degrees from zero and the right angle is .21 degrees from zero (and the deviation from zero is in the opposite direction as you might expect because I think the weight of the cube does cause the square to lean to the left or to the right depending on which side it’s on. My take away is that what looked like a similar deviation on the right turned out to be calibration of the angle cube compounded with slight lean because of flex due to the weight of the cube.
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The W.E. micro-angle adjusters have recently, (in the past few months), been upgraded to include the hex thumb wheel on the outside. This serves as a jam nut to lock the micro-angle adjusters positioning. It can be either finger tightened or tightened with an appropriate sized wrench.
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Marc thanks for pointing out about the hex on the new production. I got a 120 before I discovered this forum and was perplexed what it was for (in part because my 120 (subsequently upgraded to a 130) came assembled as shown in your picture – with the hex towards the spherical joint – and it didn’t make sense to me. That was before I did some sharpening trials to break in my technique and my stones – and pretty quickly learned that the knurled lock doesn’t stay locked and the micro adjusters move. I reversed my lock so that the hex is on the side away from the spherical joint which allows you easy access to the hex to tighten with a wrench. I have a full set of inch and metric wrenches and found an 8mm metric is the best fit – and the wrench I dedicated to the Wicked Edge is shown in my pic. It’s a ratcheting 6 point box end / open end combination but with the knurled lock facing “hex out” you could use any regular 8mm wrench or even a socket wrench.
The pic also shows the latest sharpening project using the Tormek Small Knife jig – this job happened to end up with a 19 degree bevel. The jig worked well enough – I don’t believe I could have sharpened this knife without it (originally this knife was made by me and sharpened in a Lansky). ETA – that funny looking black knob you see in the hole for the long blade support is a 1/8″ hex driver (that fits the micro adjusters) press fit in a knob (intended for a Fender guitar) that makes it easier to adjust the micro adjusters to get exactly the angle you want.
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