wickededge
@wickededge
active 1 month agoForum Replies Created
-
Kurt,
Clay here, founder of Wicked Edge. You’re making a lot of unfounded assumptions, so please allow me to set you straight.
- First, you’re assuming that we’re making buckets of profit. In this first assumption, you’re dead wrong.
- I’m guessing you don’t have a lot of familiarity of what it takes to run a business these days. There is a lot more that goes into producing a product besides the costs of materials. If you would like to learn more, there is a wealth of information online about overhead, marketing, payroll, benefits, taxes, packaging, assembly, R&D and the plethora of other expenses that businesses incur. These costs are only the start of all the expenses needed to design, manufacture, market and fulfil products to customers. Along the way, every vendor and municipality gets their cut. Then we have to add in some margin for any resellers or online platforms where we sell. And don’t forget transaction fees at every step.
- Second, you seem to assume that the engineering and manufacturing of our products is inferior to a stamped and mass produced Winchester. Again, dead wrong (not that there is anything wrong with their products, I love my Model 94 30-30 and my Model 12 shotguns.)
- Take a look at the part count of some Winchester products.
- Now take that number, especially the precision machined number, and compare it with the Gen 4
- The Gen 4 has 163 parts, a large number of which are precision machined – nothing is stamped or extruded.
- Add in 12 premium diamond stones that typically go for around $25 each online for a total of $300 in diamond stones alone.
- You should get the picture pretty soon.
- As far as engineering, the sharpeners have each undergone thousands of hours of design and engineering from our team of 6 along with dozens of iterations and months of rigorous testing.
- You assume that we don’t value our customers’ intelligence. One more time, you’re dead wrong.
- Please check out the forum and all the years’ worth of conversations we have in which we dive deep with our customers and share our experience while learning from theirs and working to update our products based on their needs. Same thing on all of the other platforms where we engage with our customers.
Bottom line – I get it if you personally don’t see the value; after all, to each their own. But please don’t disparage a company you know nothing about. It’s insulting to me and my team after all that we put into designing, manufacturing and supporting products that we believe in. You impugn our integrity and you insult our existing customers and it’s entirely uncalled for. If you do want to engage in a meaningful dialog, without the insults and posturing, we’re here to talk. If your intent is to continue attacking everyone here and to not engage in genuine discourse, I’ll ask you to move along and torture some other company that is trying to produce and support a quality USA made and lifetime warrantied product.
-Clay
@Jason – MarcH is exactly right. That video (I’m surprised you found it) was made for our brand ambassadors last summer to help them get results quickly. It’s sort of a short cut to get around the work that is often required to make the bevel just right at the angle your marker indicates; by increasing the angle by 1 degree per side from what the marker showed, you can be very confident in reaching the apex quickly.
-Clay
@Precept thank you for your excellent explanation of the problem along with the clear photos and videos. It’s very helpful to get such high quality information to help troubleshoot.
Thanks to everyone on this thread for the their input, it makes it much easier to track down the issue.
When we redesigned the jaws and added the center split and the tension adjust, we redesigned the pads so that they now slope continuously as seen in Precept’s photos. We performed a lot of prototyping iterations to try and get a “one size fits most” design since it’s pretty much impossible to get a “one size fits all” solution. I can agree that thin blades are what create the challenge here. We’re currently working on a new design for the jaws to solve the issue and one concept we’re playing with are some high durometer pads to go into some recesses pockets to create fill any excess space left with thin, parallel sided blades. We’re also prototyping new pads with different dimensions.
For those in this thread with the more noticeable pads from the earlier design – can you confirm that you are able to get a better grip on thin blades with parallel sides and with the Low Angle Adapter?
@Precept – as we work on this solution, the best workaround is to add some thickness to your blades, either by adding some painters tape, or a thin rectangle of leather or chamois wrapped around the spine of your thin blades. It will also work with the Low Angle Adapter.
Once we are ready to release the new design, we’ll notify everyone on the forum when it’s ready.
-Clay
5 users thanked author for this post.
The AAG is poorly designed. There is a lot of lower space on it that most people will never use unless they are sharpening a boomerang. It needs to go much higher. I have no idea what they were thinking of when they designed it. Hopefully they will fix that.
Thank you for the comment. We are working on redesigning it based on feedback we’ve received. That said, the reason for all the locations in the lower half is because of the occasional need to tilt the tip of the knife down to find the “sweet spot”. The amount of space we gave was obviously excessive and we’ll try to move some of that real estate up higher. We’ll also make it longer.
-Clay
4 users thanked author for this post.
Hi Kenny,
Try mounting the blade so that the back of the vise is lined up with the start of the belly of the blade, or thereabouts. You’ll have to tinker a little to find the “sweet spot”. If you need more info on finding the sweet spot, do a search here on the forum and you’ll find some excellent posts from forum members. You’ll probably find that the factory angle is pretty wide, maybe even 25 degrees per side (DPS) or more. I’d start with sharpening at the current grind and see how it goes before trying to re-profile it to a lower angle.
-Clay
2 users thanked author for this post.
I use my Micro-Fine ceramics if I want extreme sharpness. In our testing, some of the lowest (best) values we’ve gotten for sharpness on the BESS machine and our own machine have been after finishing with the white Micro-Fine stone. If I spend enough time with strops and emulsions and then kangaroo strops and diamond/cbn sprays, I can get a better score but it’s a lot more work.
-Clay
3 users thanked author for this post.
knives, especially carbon steel knives, will spontaneously lose sharpness due to oxidization
Gillette an other razor companies have demonstrated this well. I’ve had a similar experience w/ a Sabatier knife that I bought as a gift for a chef friend. I got it hair popping sharp but then couldn’t connect with him for a few months. It just sat on a shelf with a cover over the edge. When I next checked the edge, it was no longer popping hairs until I stropped it again.
-Clay
3 users thanked author for this post.
I do not understand how W.E. could have released the Gen3 with such a glaring problem. All they had to do was try there own prototype once or twice to see it was a design that was not ready for release. Considering the apparent quality of the rest of the product, releasing a knife sharpener that relies on exact angles but which cannot maintain those angles due to the micro-adjusters constantly loosening is baffling to me. And now after spending $900 on the Gen3 I have to order aftermarket parts made in someone’s garage to get my Gen3 to be able to work properly. Ridiculous!
This is a legit criticism and shows that I haven’t been listening enough. I’m working to change that. After hearing some more from some users, we did some prototyping, thought we’d come up with a viable fix, got (kindly) corrected by a couple of our beta testing users and are now reworking the fix. I’ll post again when we finalize the solution.
-Clay
7 users thanked author for this post.
There is a lot of good info here, especially about edge shapes and finishes. I’ll add that we’ve done a fair amount of testing for edge retention at different angles. In general, we’ve found that if you’re cutting materials that are not excessively abrasive, and you’re keeping the edge angle at or above the minimum angle the steel can support, an edge with a lower angle will stay sharp longer than an edge with a higher angle. The hypothesis is that force is the major factor (ignoring for now cutting very abrasive materials) that dulls a knife by deforming the edge. The edge is either chipped, rolled or flattened by the application of force from the edge to the material being cut. An edge with a higher angle requires more force to rupture the surface of a material, so edge deformation happens more quickly and accelerates as the knife dulls, requiring increasingly even more force to complete the cut. An edge with a lower angle requires much less force to rupture the surface of a material, so edge deformation happens more slowly and the rate of deterioration is lower. There are exceptions for extremely abrasive materials, very soft steels or knives that are sharpened too acutely for the structure of the steel e.g. a very hard steel that is sharpened too acutely can be prone to chipping with minimal force or a very soft steel will roll or deform if the angle is too low.
-Clay
7 users thanked author for this post.
All three areas do require a password and they don’t talk to each other, so it is ridiculous and we’re working to change it but haven’t had a lot of success so far. We’ve tried a few developers and they haven’t been able to make it work. We’ll keep trying. The issue is that the website is hosted on Shopify. The forum is on WordPress and our support system is on ZOHO.
It is possible to use the same username and password for all three areas so you don’t have to keep track of multiples.
-Clay
Hi Russ, welcome aboard!
Welcome 000Robert!
-Clay
2 users thanked author for this post.
- First, you’re assuming that we’re making buckets of profit. In this first assumption, you’re dead wrong.
