wickededge

Welcome StarkSharp! The best advice if you’re just starting out is to practice on a cheap knife or two. You’ll need some time to get your technique going and your stones will need some time to get broken in. If you’re working on a cheap knife, you can feel confident to experiment and not worry about making mistakes.

If the blade is straight, the angle will remain the same along the whole length. It can begin to change, usually going to a lower, more acute angle, as you get to the belly and tip. That can be managed by the correct positioning of the blade. Here are some good resources about that:

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We’re still working on this and had hoped to have it ready by now, but everything is pushed back for a while. Hopefully we’ll have something ready to go later this summer.

Yes, the Moleskin is adhesive on one side and fuzzy on the other. We also get some strips of felt (use them in the GO models do retain the stones in their storage channel) and they are sticky on one side, fuzzy on the other. Either of those work great and I’m guessing that the felt padding for furniture might work as well if it isn’t too thick. As…[Read more]

The model of sharpener doesn’t make a difference. It looks like you’re seeing some different settings based on two thing; the type of alignment guide used (standard or advanced) and the users’ preferences for setup. It’s possible to find more than one position that works for a knife, especially if you’re able to tilt the blade and use the Advanced…[Read more]

It seems like a tall tale, but we found in my outfitting business that, once we started sharpening on the Wicked Edge and had really well formed bevels, we could easily complete 1 elk with no touch-ups and could go as far as 4 elk if we were in a pinch and couldn’t do a touch-up in between. We’d sometimes find ourselves in that situation on…[Read more]

That’s a neat looking blade. Given the steel, it should have good wear resistance in those moments when you do have to go through the hide from the outside and will go through hair and dirt. 16 degrees per side will be very acute and you’ll need to take care when skinning if you’re planning on keeping the hide intact to mount or make a rug. With a…[Read more]

Hi Adam,

I’m glad you’re enjoying your sharpener. FFG blades can be challenging in the standard vise, but it is possible with just a little work. Please check out this article on how to do it: https://support.wickededgeusa.com/portal/kb/articles/can-the-wicked-edge-sharpen-fully-flat-ground-blades. My personal preference for shimming the blade is…[Read more]

Really good info from @MarcH

That looks great!

One bit of advice I can offer is to lighten your pressure considerably with your final strokes. Another thing we learned in playing around with the Bess machine is that the Micro-Fine ceramic stones took us below 100 very quickly.

We are working on this issue right now and have some good concepts in prototype. I’ll update the forum as soon as we finalize the design. I know it’s been a big PITA for everyone.

I haven’t used water stones in years and get as good as, or better results with the various combinations (depends on the goal as to which combination I use) of diamond stones, ceramic stones, lapping films and strops.

We’ve tried this and found that it didn’t work because the stones won’t reach the edge along the belly to the tip. The stones need to rotate a little to reach the tip.

I just completed imaging diamond stones from 800# – 3000# and measuring a sample of the individual diamonds on each stone which I then average:

800# – 19.13um

1000# – 13.68um

1500# – 9.67um

2200# – 7.14um

3000# – 5.04um

*It’s worth noting that there is some variation between sizes depending on how well we can determine the edges of…[Read more]

Yes, our plan is to include all the abrasives we off in the new system.

The charts below represent the efforts of some very smart, dedicated people to make some sense out of all the different grit systems on the market today. In addition to the clear confusion represented in these charts, there are concerns about the way different abrasives…[Read more]

First I’ll address the elephant in the room:

I am perplexed by the decision to release the new stones without also releasing the same information you’ve released with every other stone in the Wicked Edge lineup.

We removed our old grit chart well before the release of the new stones. We did it for a variety of reasons, the foremost of which is t…[Read more]

Hi all,

I’m away at a conference today. When I’m back in the office I’ll pay the specs with some pictures and explain the logic of switching to a new system. The current progression is rational and each of the diamond stones progress from one to the next as pretty much you’d as you’d expect them to.

We’re waiting to finish our study with Los Alamos National Labs before publishing any grit sizes since we’re probably moving to a new classification system.