Has Anyone Tried this direction?

Blade trailing down up and away, keep stones on knife, then blade leading up down and towards you. Without removing stones off of knife. Has anyone tried it this way?

Not exactly, if I’m reading you right. Down and away, then up, then down and towards you? That upstroke would leave a nasty section of your bevel. In fact, any vertical stroke would leave a distinct mark on the bevel, as it cuts a full-length swath in a strictly stone-width section, where all other stone-work is diagonal. This can commonly happen where you hold your stone against the ricasso for a substantial length of stroke and requires some special attention paid to blending it in with adjacent sections.

I only use straight up-down movements (or similar to the ones you describe) when I’m establishing a bevel. After that I use a stroke that’s more gentle to the edge. As Tom writes, your strokes could do nasty things to the edge (which in fact straight up-down strokes can do as well).

I think he’s saying start down and towards the user, move up and away towards tip (edge trailing stroke). Then, without moving stone of the blade, you are still in the position of up-and-away, bring the stone back down and towards the user. This is in lieu of removing the stone, repositioning at down and towards user, and then doing another “normal” edge trailing stroke.

Barman has it, thanks for translating for me :slight_smile: TC… how long ya been at this hobby?

Bought my WEPS in summer of 2011, but have been trying to make stuff sharp for about 55 years. I retired in '06 after 37 years designing and building custom machines mainly for the disposable paper industry - baby diapers, adult diapers, incontinence products and a lot of really off-the-wall products; from battery plate wrappers to Kraft caramel wrappers. I’m a self-taught, licensed professional mechanical/electrical engineer and a wannabe teacher. Which is why I hang out here.

TC so did you design and build dispensers? I’m sure I speak for many here, we are honored and would like to thank you for helping many of us.

Not dispensers. The machines we built were up in the million dollar + range. The biggest one we did just before I retired went for about $12 million and had a little more than 100 servo drives. The footprint was about 50’ wide by about 120’ long. Now they’re building them on two levels, with close to 200 servos. Can’t tell you much more, as we had confidentiality agreements with all of our customers.