My kit also arrived allready . I bought base kit + 800/1000 diamond stones + 1200/1600 ceramic stones + 5/3.5 leather strops. At first I tried to sharpen cheap kitchen knife to 20 degrees angle. I created burr with 100 grit stones on both sides, and then use stroping motion with each grit from 100 to 1600 and finally with leather strops. It become guite sharp, but nothing remarkable. I forgot that leather strops arrived blank, and diamond paste must be applied first. Next I sharpened better kitchen knife (Victorinox 56 HRC) to 16 degrees. I had applied diamond paste to strops already. And I made it very sharp! The edge was almost mirror, and it cut paper very nicely, and shave easily.
I think I must say thank you to people on this forum, so I had clear idea of good sharpening technique and learning was very fast. Other knives become similarly sharp.
After some pracitise I have several remarks and topics to future discussion.

1. learning was really fast (with this forum help) and results are very nice and consistent, regardles of the knife and steel.

2. each of 800/1000 diamond stones, 1200/1600 ceramic stones and 5/3.5 leather strops bring noticeable improvement to resultant edges and I am happy I have them.

3. it tooks me about 1/2 hour to reprofile and sharpen knive, it depends mainly of the hardness of the steel. At coarser grits, I feel that the friction between stones and steel become smoother after some time stropping, but I can't feel or hear any progres with finer stones and strops, so I can only guess when the amount of strokes on specific stones are sufficient. How do you guys handle this?

4. I use wooden cutting board from Ikea as base, and it is fine (thank you Mark). It is bigger than bases sold on this site (37 x 37 cm), but it is right size to my cupboard, and I store all my stones and strops on this board.

5. There are definitely some linkage play and blade of thin kitchen knives bends when sharpening, so there are some imperfections of keeping the exact angle, but I can't se any difference in looks and cutting performance of the resulting angles.

6. The top tightening screw overreachs when sharpening thin knives, it prevents from reaching acute angles if the blade is low also. I used a metal base under the head of this screw to solve this, but I think that one extra shorter screw for thin blades will be better solution. Unfornately, in Czech Republic we use different sizes of the thread than in USA, so I haven't any at home, but I will ask in some shops.

7. The screws holging the rods to devise unscrewed sometimes, they need to be checked time to time.

8. Leather strops are very prone to get damaged by the edge, I became to move paddles more upwards than in case of stones to solve this problem.

9. I can't get really mirror edge or consistently hair whittling sharpness. What do you think, is it problem with technique, or Chapton/Chosera stones are necessary to get such results?

To sum up, I am happy with my new sharpener, it isn't perfect, but it is far better than any other sharpening equipment I tried so far.

A couple of points to watch out for:
-remember the diamonds require a breaking in period and will do a better and better job the more you use them
- be really certain that the burr you have raised is along the whole length of the edge and that the scratches you make run right out to the edge...also be certain the burr is really there by using either a cotton ball dragged along the edge to see if the burr catches the fibers of the cotton all the way along. I found testing with my fingernail was not as reliable.
-caution...the only time you use pressure on the paddles is while scrubbing up and down making the burr! All other paddle work with the finer and finer grits should use little pressure...I describe it as caressing the edge;;;this light pressure holds true for using the strops too.

There is my two cents worth. I think it will help.

All the best
Leo

leomitch wrote:


Thank you for advices Leo! I reprofiled 8 knives , so I think that 100 grit stones are broken in already, but finer grits probably need more time. I use tip of my index finger (not nail) to check the burr, I will try cotton, but don't think that this is problem, because the resulting edge is about the same quality all the length of the blade. I strive to use light pressure, I will try to use even less.

All the best
Lukas

One more question Leo. I noticed that you have two great 3g steel fallkniven knives. I have also one( TK4), not so beautiful like yours, but steel is the same. Are you able to get better edges with this or similar high end steel than with cheaper one, or are the difference mainly in edge retention?

All the best
Lukas

Both my TK2 and PXL folder have frighteningly sharp edges...no problem. I get those with the standard kit plus the ceramic paddles. When I add some work with the Choseras they are even sharper and prettier too!

Cheers
Leo

Hi Lukas, good to hear that your WEPS has arrived and that you like it. You seem to have done it the same way I did: first prepare yourself well at this forum and then dive in. (It is really funny reading back the questions I had then. It is only two and a half months ago, but it seems a lot longer.)

Apparently (ahum) I also had some questions as to how to get the edge as sharp as possible, particularly as to how many strokes to use at each grit. And Leo responded he was into Zen and Tom wrote “it depends”. Man, these guys frustrated me .

Fortunately for you there is a very good post by Leo (which he wrote after he made me sweat so much ) here. Hopefully that helps.

Leo recommends 30-50 light strokes per stone per side after raising the initial burr, which should be enough. I learned that it takes some practice to feel this initial burr (and the cotton swab trick only worked for me on really obvious burrs).

After seeing some photographs by Tom, showing scratches appearing out of nowhere (here is a blog post on it), I got paranoid . This guy causes serious mental illnesses... So if I now really really want to be sure that I properly polished the edge with each stone, I do a few minutes of up-down scrubbing with some pressure, followed by 200 strokes per side.

In this way, if I sharpen with all the stock stones (100 grit - 1600 grit) and finish with some stropping, I always get a mirror edge. (Although there are mirrors and mirrors. The picture at the top of my blog was of a knife stropped after the 1600 grit stones.) Usually they also shave arm hair, but not always. Some knives, like my el cheapo kitchen knives, just don’t take an edge. I also did not get my Global kitchen knives to easily shave arm hair.

I’ve never gotten a knife so sharp I could shave my face with it. I think there is a reason an 8000 grit stone is considered the minimum in the straight razor world. (On Bladeforums though, I’ve read many accounts of people claiming to have gotten their edges razor sharp after 320 grit stones or so...)

Luckily there is a pair of 5K/10K Choseras waiting for me!

A few more tips:

• The top tightening screw may seem a bit too long, but wait until you want to sharpen a Fallkniven A1...
• The Ikea butcher’s block works very well. However, if you clean it under a running tap, it may curve. (I thought a thick block glued vertical to the grain should be able to handle some water, but mine didn’t.) I am now using a new block that I dyed with some marine varnish.
• I think it is quite normal for your first pair of strops to get nicked. (It's the business model of Wicked Edge .) The good news is that, unless they are nicked severely, they work just as well. But to prevent the strops from getting nicked, I now only make a straight up-down motion with the strops, so that I only strop a patch of the edge. I then repeat it on other patches.

Success with the next steps!

Hi Mark, it looks, that I do sharpening essentially right, I will try to be more patient. You haven't your pair of 5K/10K Choseras yet? I hope that you will write some fine post on your blog about these stones

LukasPop wrote:


I will. Just quietly working down my way in micron size .

Hello all, I got my WE about 1 year ago and my first try at one of my kitchen knives was a disaster. So I went to the dollar store and bought a knife, hit the edge with a file and started to practice and when that was sharp (after a few tries) then I went to work on my knives. There is a learning curve, be patient......Bill

A few observation after 8 months with WE. Recently I bought 3 new items - micro fine ceramics, balsa strops with 1 and 0.5 um diamond paste and ultra coarse diamonds. I think that micro ceramics and balsa strops improved my edges somehow. I lapped micro ceramics as recomended, it takes surprisingly much time - they are very hard, but it works great. Ultra coarse diamond are very fast, but my 100 diamonds are quite worn off (maybe they are finer now that 200), so there is a big gap between 80 and 100 diamonds.

My 100-1000 diamonds are well breaked in, but 100 works much slower than when being new. I use scrubbing motion only to raise a burr at first, becouse at finer grits it seems like waste of time to me. But now I use scrubbing motion with every grit. I control burr only with 100 (or the coarsest) and with finer grits I perform some scubbing motion with very low pressure before turning to sweeping. Now it seems to me more efficient in refining the edge than using only sweeping motion. And the changing of motion reduces fatigue. Anyway, low pressure is the key in refining the edge. In this way I am able to produce hair whittling edge if I continue to micro ceramics and strops.

Long and thin blades are more difficult. They require patience. I use a small cheap microscope dx.com/p/60x-100x-zoom-microscope-with-l...mination-light-25239 to check the progress along all the blade.

But using a full available progression is quite time consuming. I am not able produce fast touch ups with WE. So with my knives I use polished steel from Dick to keep my knives sharp. Some members of my family aren't able keep knives sharp and I have to sharpen them often. So I use short progression 100-600 diamonds and then 5 um leather strops. Its much quicker than full progression and resulting edges are still pretty sharp.

But this interests me. How do you solve touch ups? And when you buy new diamonds, how do you place them between existing worn off stones?