If it takes you more than one slice to get through something, so you do one backwards slice and one forwards slice, does that mean that any benefit from the teeth pointing the right way on one of the slices is cancelled out by the teeth pointing the wrong way on the other slice?

Cheers Curtis. That does help, yes.

I guess ultimately sandpaper is so cheap (about £4 GBP delivered on eBay for all four of the grits mentioned in large sheets) I should probably just try it and see. I just figured there was no harm asking here first.

Thanks

Earlier today I watched this video from YouTuber M0DiFiEDZ:


It's a 48-minute-long video so rather than expect you to watch it all through the main thing to note is that after the 1,000 grit diamond stones he uses sandpaper (taped to the stones) beginning with 1,000 grit and then going through 1,500 - 2,000 - 2,500.

After he finishes with sandpaper he strops but even before the stropping negins you can clearly see that the edge has started to get a nice mirror polish on it from the sandpaper.

So after watching that I thought I might give it a go and looked on eBay for sandpaper, found some items but before buying decided to come on here and just check if there was any specific advice or brands of sandpaper recommended. So I did a search for "sandpaper", read through the results and found this post from Mark76:
www.wickededgeusa.com/index.php?option=c...9&Itemid=63#8897

It seems that sandpaper grits are rated using a different scale (FEPA-P) to the scale used for the Wicked Edge grits (ANSI).

So the 2,500 grit sandpaper that M0DiFiEDZ finishes with should actually have been coarser than the 1,000 grit WE diamond stone, and the three sandpaper grits he used before that (2k, 1.5k, 1k) should have been a lot coarser than the WE 1k stone.

Yet you can clearly see in the video that they do improve the mirroring, they don't reverse the scratches, so what gives? How can coarser grits actually refine the scratches further?

In my searching I did see another post where someone (Curtis, maybe) says that sandpaper wears quickly and can often be a finer grit than rated but even so, you'd expect at least the first two sandpaper grits in the video to do more damage than good, even if the 2,500 paper had worn to the point where it was no longer coarser than the 1k diamond.

On the one hand I just want to buy some sandpaper and give it a go because it's cheap and seems to work, based on the video, but on the other hand I don't like blundering into things I don't understand first so would appreciate some clarification, if any exists.

Thanks, but it seems like your loupe uses a slightly smarter battery door design than mine.

If you look at the pic of mine, the LED part can slitp into two halves, a top and a bottom.

The top is just plastic that comes off, the bottom (which stays attached to the loupe) houses the LED, the switch and the battery.

The switch assembly sits on top of the battery and is connected to the LED bulb by a strip of metal. It's this strip of metal that it seems like I would need to bend to replace the battery but I don't want to try that obviously.

Like you say though, they're so cheap I could just buy another when the battery dies I guess, just seems a shame.

I bought one of these 10x LED ones off eBay:


It works fine but being curious I had a look to see how to change the battery and I must admit I'm a little stumped. The switch assembly seems to sit directly on top of the battery and I couldn't see any way to get the battery out without bending the assembly which seemed like a bad idea so I just closed it back up and forgot about it.

Does anyone else have the same loupe? Have you changed the battery? If so do you fancy doing a YouTube tutorial I did have a quick look to see if there was already one up on YT but couldn't spot anything.

Thanks again Curtis.

Apologies, but once again I'm going to use the "two identical knives..." analogy here just to make sure I understand. So if we have our two knives and they both have double bevels at 15/18 degrees, however on one knife the 18 degree section is larger than on the other knife, then the one with the larger 18 degree section will be stronger?

If so then how come you can't follow that through to its logical conclusion and say that if you enlarge the 18 degree section to the max it's even stronger? Which would basically bring us back to saying a single bevel at 18 degrees is stronger than a 15/18 double bevel, wouldn't it?

Thanks Curtis, nice and simple. I do have one follow-up question with regard to this point you made:

cbwx34 wrote:


I thought that having extra bevels was usually stronger than one bevel? Or is that wrong?

EG let's say you have two identical knives and both have their cutting edges set at 18 degrees per side. The only difference is that one has a simple single bevel at 18 degrees per side, and the other has a double bevel with the first at 15 degrees per side and then the cutting edge itself at 18 degrees per side, I thought the knife with the double bevel would be the one with the stronger / more durable edge? I may be completely mistaken however.

If you're creating more than one bevel, how do you know which grit to drop back down to when you widen the angle for the next bevel?

So for example, let's say you're doing the first bevel at 15 degrees per side (30 inc) and then you're going to do the cutting edge at 18 degrees per side (36 inc).

You set the arms to 15 degrees and then go up through the stones finishing at the 1000 grit diamonds (side question - do you bother to strop this bevel or only strop the cutting edge at the end?). Now it's time to do the 18 degree edge so you set the arms. At this point do you go all the way back to 100 grit? Do you only need to use the 800 / 1000 grits? Do you go back a little but not all the way to 100, say to 600 maybe?

How do you know?

cbwx34 wrote:


They do taper, yes. Looking at the both I can see one of them is slightly flatter on the end than the other one, but I already tried swapping my arms around so I don't think that's much of an issue, and it's only a tiny bit flatter, not by much.

CrisScott wrote:


So the upgraded arms have hex recesses in the heads? Interesting. In this photo (below) on the product page they don't have any:


Is that photo out of date? Are upgraded arms now coming with screws that accept a hex key for extra tightening?

How did you keep the angle exactly the same between coming off the Wicked Edge and using the Spyderco rods? Are there still plans to launch something that will allow you to mount Sharpmaker rods onto the WE?

I have the standard Sharpmaker kit (no extra rods) and would quite like to try using them if a way of mounting becomes available. Does anyone know what the grits of the regular Spyderco rods are?

Ok, I'll see if I can track down purple loctite and in the meantime carry on with pliers but be careful about it.

Does the same problem exist on the upgraded arms too?

Hey all. So I've done about five knives now on my new WE system and I love it, but I have noticed that the thumb screws that hold the arms at the chosen angle have a tendency to loosen themselves on my unit.

I'm not sure if it's my technique, or whether I'm doing something wrong perhaps. I have noticed it happens a lot more on the left side than the right side (about three times more often on the left), but I've swapped the arms over and that still holds true so it's not the arm itself, I don't think.

I tighten the thumb screws as hard as I can after I've chosen my angle with the cube, and they hold for the first 5-10 minutes then start to loosen, and after that point even though I tighten back up again they seem to loosen every minute or so.

I've taken to using a pair of pliers to get them tighter than I can manage by hand but that's not an ideal solution and I'm worried I might damage something doing that as it's obviously not designed for forces greater than can be achieved by hand.

Can anyone offer me some advice please? It's very frustrating, especially if I forget to check and notice the arm has slipped, then have to go back down a grit or two. I was already contemplating buying the upgraded arms but I want to make sure it's not something I'm doing wrong first.

Smashing stuff, cheers for the quick replies chaps.

Hey, I have two n00b questions about clamping.

1) What order do you loosen / tighten the bolts? Top first? Bottom first? How far open should the arms be before inserting the knife?

2) I've been trying to use masking tape on the blade (the white stuff we have here in the UK) to protect it but it seems to lower the friction. When I have tape on the blade I can usually wiggle it up and down, which is obviously bad as you need the blade position to be totally constant. I also tried some pieces of thin rubber (cut from one of those round discs that give you extra grip when opening glass jars) but they seemed to be even worse for friction and allow even more wiggling.

So far I've only sharpened knives I don't care about so have gone without any tape on the blade, and without anything on them they seem to clamp properly and don't move / wiggle. And I must admit there have been no marks afterwards, apart from ones that clean off.

But still, I've seen YouTube videos of guys in the US using blue masking tape and assumed it would be the same as the white masking tape here in the UK. I guess not. Can anyone recommend what I can use for clamping protection?

mark76 wrote:


The aluminium drinks can?

cbwx34 wrote:


Weird, thanks for sharing. Yeah there's definitely something at play here, would love to know what it is. Like I said, I'm not complaining as the stones do the job they were designed for perfectly, I'm just curious. I don't like not knowing things.

Hey all, so my brand new WE stuff arrived last week (huge thanks to Bob at Oldawan for the excellent customer service) and I've been having a lot of fun sharpening knives, everything works great.

I've got the 50/80 grit stones and I was watching them cut through metal thinking "I'd better be careful not to slip my finger down one by accident while applying pressure" when later on, while washing the stone I did just that by mistake.

It didn't hurt much. So I did it again deliberately. Still nothing. I thought it might be because it was wet, so when it was dry I did it again. Same result.

So (and this is where I should say nobody should try this at home, I'm stupid and did this because I'm a curious idiot) I picked up the stone and scrubbed a bit of the skin on my hand with it. Still no real result. And remember this is the 50 grit stone, that shaves metal off a blade very fast.

So then I started applying what I would call medium pressure, about the same as I had been using on the knives. I scrubbed up and down on my skin at least twenty times, maybe more. thinking back to how the stone cuts through metal it ought to have left a red/raw patch on my skin, but it didn't. Skin felt perfectly fine.

At this point I wondered if it's because skin is soft and flows around the stone instead of resisting, so I tried to file one of my fingernails on the stone. It did file a bit, but no faster than a normal metal nail file.

So then I picked up an empty aluminium drink can and had a go on that. After about twenty medium-pressure strokes it was only just starting to scratch the paint off.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with the stone, it does exactly what I want it to when it comes to knife sharpening. I just don't understand how a diamond surface that cuts through metal so well can have such a seemingly reduced effect on other surfaces. What gives? Can anyone explain what's going on here?

Sorry for the slightly leftfield, non-sharpening-related question, but I'm naturally curious and hope someone can shed some light on it.

Yes, sorry, I mean putting a tip/point back on a knife where it's rounded or broken.

Cheers. I didn't have a loupe so have just bought a cheap 10x LED one off eBay, god bless that site.

Yep, I do have a few knives I want to reprofile so won't be using the 50s on everything but definitely for some things.

Has anyone got the time to do an idiots guide to re-pointing with the Wicked Edge? I ask because I'm quite new and despite reading a little in another thread about re-pointing I confess I didn't really follow it fully. I tend to learn best when I can see things done but I couldn't find any videos about re-pointing with the Wicked Edge so I wondered if anyone had the time to explain it patiently and with simple language here in the forum?

And I should warn you now I'll likely ask some stupid newbie questions so please be prepared to deal with a dunce