I find the info in chatrooms to be fairly sketchy even when the poster is doing their best.
Things are left out,
Unintended words wind up in the text due to this silly self correcting "feature" . . .
David Boyes book Step By Step Knife Making has a chapter on sharpening that is also very good. That is where I learned about looking for the light reflecting asking the edge.
better a misspelled word that makes sense than this "helpful" silliness.
I have that book by the way. Had it since I was a teen living at my parent's house forty years ago. I didn't get accurate and seriously sharp, satisfyingly sharp, durable edges until I read and followed the magazine article I posted. I had had a water stone and stropping equipment a decade and more before that and things still didn't really come together, just slipshod, on again off a gain results . . . was able to cut stuff pretty well but never understood why my Swiss Army knifes went dull so fast . . . if I ever got one of them to cut much of anything . . . I thought, wrongly, that the steel just wan't any good. Now one of my favorite, super sharp slicers is a SAK Bantam. All I had to do was change the edge geometry. Drastically . . . and what it will do and how long it will do it is eminently satisfying.
Also I could not figure out why it took so long to effect a change in an edge . . . then
Whammo !
Shazam !
The Fine Woodworking article on sharpening methods. That and one other article directed more at edge geometry and woodworking hand plane tuning, serious tuning, think angle grinder . . .
and there wasn't anything I couldn't sharpen. Heck I sharpened a pair of Fisker's scissors yesterday at work that were so dull they wouldn't cut a register receipt in half. With one little diamond paddle I was able to bring them back to easy snip, snip . . . sharpening by hand in several minutes.
Did the ladies that ask for them to be sharpened say thank you ? No they just took it for granted and walked away.
Getting back to what I was saying about chatroom info . . .
Books and magazine articles tend to be much better because the text is agonized over, proof read by more than one person, corrected, slept on, rewritten, added to, subtracted from and finally put out good or bad but often better than the first draft . . . if you see what I mean.
People are, more often than not, offended when I chastise them for not reading these texts first and then coming into a chat room for clarification of fine details. They seem to want me to read the texts for them then type them here so they can
read them here. Or other forums.
I post a link to a book and say read it and come back if there is something you don't get and they hate it.
PS: ditto for YouTube . . . text that is agonized over slowly and thoughtfully is better than Videos and some of the YouTubes I watch . . . I watch them all the time . . . I am sure there is stuff I don't know yet . . . most all the stuff I watch just makes me shake my head or laugh. For instance stropping HARD USE blades I AM NOT TALKING RAZORS . . . fifty strokes ! ! ! ! on each side ! ! ! ! after as many strokes on a couple of stones ! ! ! ! I can sharpen an edge sixty strokes TOTAL on three or four stones and get hair whittling. Why would I want to triple the number of strokes ? ? ? Just because somebody who is famous and doesn't know any better does it that way ? ? ? After all they are not known for their edges they are known for what they have been able to do in spite of their sharpening habits.
Yes, yes . . . a Japanese dude with a big kitchen knife, taught by a "Master" does it so and so way . . . gets good results but ruins the stones / wears them unnecessarily in the process . . . and . . . could get better results in less time with less abuse to the stones and less self defeating circular effort if they would look up somebody who has had the luxury of seeking out the best / latest methods rather than get by stuff from a thousand years ago.
