dang thats sharp... possible with any knife?

[603Country]

I use the diamond plates for my woodworking tools, like hand plane blades. A medium grit and then a very fine grit, followed by a leather stop with jeweler's rouge on it. For the knives, I skip the jeweler's rouge.

If a fellow is going to use stones or the diamond plates for a knife blade, it's important to equally work both sides of the blade. Also important is to find, through experience, a consistent angle of blade to stone. I believe that one of the biggest problems people have when being unsuccessful with stones is that the don't have a consistent angle of blade to stone. That problem is removed from the equation if one buys a sharpening 'system'.

And, as earlier mentioned, the blade steel really matters. For the last 4 or 5 years, I've carried a folding Gerber (I live in the country and always carry a pocketknife). It would take a great edge, but I'd lose the edge pretty fast doing ranch stuff. Just recently I bought a folding Benchmade 4 inch blade pocketknife. Wow, that's good steel. The Gerber would have been dull by now, but the Benchmade is still dangerously sharp. I sharpened it anyway yesterday, using some small diamond plates, and leather. Took me a bit to find the edge angle, but once I did, I got a super edge.

How all this works is that with the coursest stone you get a wire edge. Go to the next finer stone and the wire edge is still there but finer. The eventual remaining wire edge, almost non existent, will be removed by the strop. Then you will have two mirror edges on the blade and no wire edge.

 

[geetarman]

I believe that one of the biggest problems people have when being unsuccessful with stones is that the don't have a consistent angle of blade to stone. That problem is removed from the equation if one buys a sharpening 'system'.

That, in a nut shell, is the key. I find that for my use, a 25-29 degree angle works best for me.

Wicked Edge suggests using a felt tip marker to mark the edge and then a couple of swipes of the stones to check how much and where the blacking is removed. The problem for me using handheld stones is that it is difficult to a consistent amount of material removed from both sides of the blade. The same occurs using a strop if you are not very careful. You will polish more on one side than the other. If your blade is sharp, you can cut a hair toward the root of the hair. If it is really sharp, you can break that same hair cutting from the root to the end of the hair. If the blade is super good, you can cut from the root to the end of the hair from both sides of the blade. Being able to do that is really impressive and is very hard to do without fixturing the blade to get the same angle on the edge. Once the blades are really finished with the same angle on both sides, a handheld stone ( I really like the Paul Gesswein Ruby stones ) can keep them in pretty good shape for quite a while. The artificial ruby stones in fine grit can be lapped flat enough to create interference fringes under monochromatic light and are then flat enough to stone the burrs off gage blocks without scratching the surface of the gage block and destroying the gage block ability to "wring" to another. They are very expensive and they will shatter when dropped on a hard surface or treated indelicately. I have some that I still use that I bought in 1967. You just have to be very careful with them.