wickededge wrote:


Clay,
If you have time one day, I would love to see a photo of that setup. I am just having a bit of trouble visualizing it. I have tried to mark the blade with a sharpie, two lines, one on either side of where the scope should go. It is still pretty hard to get back to the identical positions as you have.

Phil

PhilipPasteur wrote:


Hey Phil,

I'll get a picture of it tomorrow at the office.

wickededge wrote:

The stock progression is definitely next. For the microscope positioning, I leave the scope in the stand. Then I tape photo paper to the bottom of the stand to add some extra light via reflection. I trace the knife's outline on the paper so I can get it back in the same position every time.

________________________________

I'm also having difficulty getting the scope back to the exact same position on the blade.
Clay, help.

holymolar wrote:


I'm sorry I forgot to shoot that picture today! The setup goes like this:

I tape some photo paper to the base of the microscope stand. Then I lay the knife down on its side, in a way that it rests naturally, bumping some portion of the knife up against the edge of the stand so that there is a natural stop in the heal-to-tip dimension. If adjust the knife side to side until I find the bevel in the scope and micro-adjust until it's just where I want it. At that point I take a fine line pen and trace the outline of the knife as accurately as possible. I then tighten down all the adjustments on the scope stand so it doesn't move. With that set up, I can take the knife out, sharpen it, put it back in the same spot. I just bump the knife back up to the edge of the stand, align the edges with the pen marks and it's good to go.

I hope that helps explain it a little better.

I get it now..
I thought that the stand you were talking about was the WE clamp.
It is the base of the scope stand that you posted a picture of earlier.
I can see what you are talking about now. Not having that same stand, right now anyway, means that I can't duplicate that method. I have been trying to use the scope on the knife blade still mounted in the WE clamp.

I am not as good at this as you (obviously), or at least haven't yet figured it out, but I am not confident that I can get the blade back in the clamp precisely time after time. Especially with knives with a curved or sloped spine (Spyderco) it seems that there is room for error because of rocking on the depth gauge and my imprecision at getting the knife back in clamp in the same exact place between the pivot and tip, using the length gauge. This, of course will introduce errors in the way the stones hit the blade..
or so I believe.

Thanks for the explanation!

Phil

Thanks Clay,
I, too, was trying to use the scope while the knife was still in the WE vise - which just isn't practical. Taking the knife out of the WE vise and placing it on the base of the scope stand is the only way that I can think of to do this.

Here are before and after photos using my smaller scope stand to mark the position of the knife blade on paper, etc. I tried it several times and it worked.

When returning the knife to the scope stand after sharpening, if I wasn't exactly on the same spot on the blade, I was < 1 mm off. So it was easy enough to slightly move the blade to find the spot - as long as I had a landmark on the blade (such as a deep cut or something) to look for.


Drawing the blade outline with a lead pencil onto a post-it note stuck to the base of the scope stand


After removing the blade and showing the lead pencil outline of the blade