I have the standard WE and I like the way you can set and refine a very consistent bevel quickly and without the noise, dust, and heat generated by power tools. I generally take an edge through the four grits of diamonds and then move to my 4,000 grit Toromek water wheel. If it's a chisel ground edge I lap the back to a mirror on glass with 8, 4, and 2 micron diamond lapping fluid.
I guess what I'm saying is that I like the WE a lot for (very) precise alterations/regrinds -- especially on smaller knives. I already have a lot of sharpening toys. The Sharpmaker is still the single best 'toy' out there. But, the SM can only, truly, shine if a blade is set up with good factory-precise bevels; over time and with a large number of trips to the sharpmaker most people will make a blade increasingly uneven. Correcting this uneven geometry can be a pain in the ass to do on the SM -- even with the diamond rods; even though (obviously) proper technique, and time, could obviously do pretty much anything. For most people's purposes I think that the WE and a Sharpmaker (and, I suppose, any sort of potentially ersatz strop) go together like peanut butter and jelly, campfires and ghost-stories, etc. -- the sharpmaker excels at putting a screaming-sharp micro-bevel on a well-ground knife, and -- at least in my use -- the WE can quickly create EXTREMELY even bevels which are a prerequisite to further-refined, frighteningly sharp, edges.
Bear in mind -- I just got my wicked edge and have really only used it on half a dozen blades. I also, only, have the basic setup -- the green-handled diamonds are labeled 600...feel free to correct me...but, whatever it is, it is not a high enough grit for my tastes, and I would usually want to grind on an edge a little more before I start stropping. The earlier poster with the strider, clearly, got a great edge by rigging a piece of wet or dry sandpaper to the factory file. I am going to have to try that; or, make a new file that I could more easily attach WD paper or micro-finishing film to.
All in all -- I am happy I dropped the money on it, and I probably will buy more stones and strops.
I also think it could be really fun to make your own stones and strops for it, if you're into that sort of thing. I've got a piece of T-1 high-speed steel in key-stock form. I'm toying with the idea of lapping the four faces of it to four different finishes, and then getting the thing drilled out to fit the rods -- and then I'd send it off to a buddy to be put through a ferritic nitrocarburizer. The thing would be heat treated to above 66HRC and is more wear resistant than M4 -- but if you put it through FNC you harden the surface, and about .1mm of the substrate, to between 70 and 80. It's the same deal as the Ti coated drill bits basically, but deeper hardening. I'm curious to see how a super-butcher's-steel rod works on the thing...
