Just a thought, the retention mechanism for these appear to be the four tabs, but was thinking of a possibly simpler solution... what about a channel with either one or both ends open? Instead of having four tabs, the entire edge would be a long tab. Install/remove by sliding it on from the end. No fancy CAD drawing, Microsoft Paint sketch attached.

I'm going to vote opposite of the popular consensus... you already have a good assortment of stones, so I'd go for the upgrade arms. As a point of reference, I'm not really into the polishing it to a mirror finished edge (so I haven't even used the 3.5u polish).

Thinking back, I bought my WE system in the following order:

1) pro kit: 100/200, 400/600, 800/1000, 1200/1600, and 3.5/5 leather strop packs (10/2011)
2) PP2 upgrade arms & angle cube (11/2012)
3) 50/80, micro-fines (02/2013)
4) low angle adapter (05/2013)

My logic would be you only use one set of stones/strops at a time, but every single one of them could benefit from the extra precision of the ball joint arms.

Ultimately, it's really comes down to what end you're trying to achieve; as others have said, you can't go wrong either way.

I think you have three choices: clamp it on the "x", clamp it near the "x", or clamp on the other side of the "x". =) Have you tried clamping it to see how it would grab?

IIRC that blade is 1/4" thick in that area, so on the floating clamp side, you might want to adjust the arm setting outward a degree or two more, unless you have a angle cube.

Mounting the low angle adapter is very straight forward; the one thing I'll point out is when mounted correctly, the floating clamp should not kick out at all, and the fixed and floating clamps should be parallel.














As you'll see here, plenty of clearance at these angles, although when I was done, I noticed some material removal from the adapter jaw at the very corner (oops).










With the low angle adapter, the final angle was: 9.35 + 12.85 = 22.2 degrees inclusive (11.1 degrees per side), compared to 32.5 degrees inclusive (16.25 degrees per side). So the adapter allows for a 10 degree inclusive (5 degree per side) reduction (for this particular knife).





Great job Clay, the constant innovation of the Wicked Edge will keep this product at the "cutting" edge for many years to come.

To test, I used my everyday cheapy paring knife; 3" blade, 3/4" tall, FFG (full flat ground) 1/16" at the thickest. But before I jump to the new low angle adapter, I'll clamped it in the new ball joint arms with riser setup. Being FFG, you'll notice the LH (floating) clamp was really kicked out so that you get a good grip on the blade. On a side note, I don't really like the idea of putting other materials (e.g. chamosis cloth or blue painter's tape) in there. I used my angle cube to determine that when the blade is flat to the RH (fixed) clamp, the other side is 3 degrees off; so to simulate a straight up/down clamping, 3 degrees needs to be added to the LH side. In the picture, the RH is set to 14 degrees, and the LH is set to 18 degrees (I had it at 17, but it was hitting).

Angle without the adapter is: 19 + 13.5 = 32.5 degrees inclusive (16.25 degrees per side).

I sent Clay a quick note about how well finished the adapter looked, and how the design looked elegantly simple; and 3 days later I had one in my mailbox to test. The first thing I did was take it apart and inspect it; overall the fit and finish are top shelf (as everyone has thus far stated).

The only "improvement" I made was to deburr the lock screw so that it wouldn't cut into the beautiful anodizing. I've only tested one knife so far, but as you can see it doesn't scratch the anodizing.

don't forget morale patches! would look like this:

I have both the regular and upgrade arms; have sharpened lots of knives with the regular setup and once in a while it would loosen up, upgrade arms don't seem to have that problem (but I've only sharpened maybe 20 knives with them).

One thing to check is if the adjustment screw tip has a sharp point or is more rounded. One would think the sharper point might be better but consider this: a rounded point might allow more contact between the screw and base rod. Here is something you should check, remove the screw from the clamp and see how it fits into the base rod locking holes. I checked both my upgrade and regular arms and they both fit well, specifically the contact area is at the wider part of the tapered tip. If only the tip is touching, you'd probably want to file a really small amount off the very point so that it makes more contact.

The upgrade arms are also threaded all the way through, so you can use another set of screws on the opposite side, however since that side would be clamping against the flat part of the base bar, you'd probably want to use screws with a flat (vice pointed tip) end.

Yes, between 10 and 30 seconds to load a page. My workaround is to open all the thread I want to read in a new tab for each, the do something else; when I come back a few minutes later, they're all loaded.

This this article:

40cooks.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/advance...in-knife-sharpening/

Are you changing the temper, even with a Japanese water stone? Very likely yes. To what degree would be determined by how much heat is applied, the Japanese water stone applies the least; a belt sander throwing white hot sparks, probably lots. The Wicked Edge system is likely closer to the water stones. But the more important question is, what are you going to do about it? A simple solution would be to immerse your WEPS in a huge tub, and sharpen everything completely covered in water.

The next question would be how are you going to measure how much you've changed the temper? There's probably a microscopic hardness tester that measures down to the atom level, but sounds like a great topic for a doctoral thesis!

I tend to believe that sparks coming off from a blade on belt grinder WILL meet the time requirement to change the temper, especially at the microscopic level. No hard scientific data, just a hunch. IMHO, life's too short for "molecule polishing". =)

great stuff Mark, I haven't opened any of the links yet but I already know from your post that it will be awesome; got my reading for this evening, thanks!

Option 5: Just use the system you have now until you can reach its maximum capability, then expand. For about 6 months, I had the basic set up to only 600 grit. The added on the 800/1000. Then a few months later finally started into the ceramics and strops. For a usable edge, you really don't need more than 600; everything above that, especially all the mirror edges is just for show! j/k, not really!

MatthieuMethot wrote:


Can you post a pic of all your stones lined up next to each other; from your post, sounds like it should be a noticeable difference between the 50/80 and all the others?

Bob, I tried with the flat stones, and it was a bloody mess... j/k; the flat stones didn't get in the curved belly, pic below (noticed the area not sharpened). Pretty sure the Mayo Hawkbill is a tighter radius than the Commander, so the flat stones will only do a marginal job at best.

Not a hawkbill, but this Emerson Commander was reprofiled using the curved ceramics:

Not my video, but you can really hear the difference as he goes from rough to finer grits. Also a good representation for how much time you'd spend at each grit for someone learning the WE system.

I've been doing something similar for a while now (note the date on the pic), but I've experimented with not just fore-aft, but up-down too. If I had to try and summarize my approach, I think I'm trying to best match the over all curvature of the blade to the center of the arm pivot points. More pics of how I've clamped knives in the album in my signature. None of them are clamped per the WE instructions.

That makes more sense now; I think the way you'd implement that on a WE is that your FINAL grit would be different, e.g. sharpen to only 600 on one side, then continue to 1000 (or higher) on the other side. If you look at how a lot of serrated edges are cut/ground, they basically take a V-grind knife and cut the serrations into one side only; this is probably similar to his dual grit finish on a very macroscopic level? And if you take that serration process to a very microscopic level, it's another way to create a micro serrated edge.

To maximize the serrated capability, you'd want to sharpen the "rough" side at as close to a perpendicular angle as possible. But I wonder what the effect would be of making the scratch pattern 45 degrees to the perpendicular... either leading or trailing, I would think it would make either a push or pull cut more effective.

JoseFuste wrote:


From the instruction booklet, page 20:

"Wicked Edge offers a Limited Lifetime Warranty to the purchaser of the knife sharpener, for defects in materials and workmanship."

I searched around the WE site as well as the Internet, and also found this:

"The Wicked Edge comes with a lifetime warranty that covers defects in all parts and workmanship."

www.bestsharpeningstones.com/catalog/wicked-edge-sharpener.htm