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swedeee
dancing james
Had the Horl for an about ten days but been rather busy. The new knife from Ynishir/Upcycledblacksmithing is beautiful but was not razor sharp. It is 80crv2 steel but was ground initially to 17 degrees.
So I had to regrind it to 15 degrees as the Horl only has 15 or 20 degree options. I started out with the standard coarse disc but it was slow, thankfully I had also purchased the additional coarse disc which quickly redefined the edge. I then moved through the normal diamond disc, the ceramic honing disc and the 3000 and 6000 discs. Disappointingly the knife was no sharper than it had been to start with. But I had probably only given it a minute or so with the coarser discs and then a couple of minutes with the honing and progressively finer discs. Clearly this was not enough time/passes across the blade.
Yesterday I went back through the honing and fine discs but spent 5-10 minutes on each one, listening until the sound of the whetstone was consistent along the length of the blade. I could see a furry ridge of magnetised dust along the edge of the knife, wiped it off, gave one pass along each side of the blade with the coarse disc and then honed on a leather strop and now i have a half shaved left forearm as I was so childishly fascinated by how sharp the blade is.
It was the realisation that using a conventional whetstone is a slow process, Horl is just a similar grinding medium and its time in contact with the blade that counts. It definitely saves the time learning muscle memory of blade angle and consistency but probably takes just as long to actually sharpen. The stones don't need soaking in advance and the set-up time is minimal, and with the wooden stands it is a nice addition to the kitchen window ledge which houses brass/cast iron scales and the wooden handled pasta cutters. It is much slower than the bench grinder mdf disc option but I wouldn't want to risk that with harder blades.
tldr Horl does a fantastic consistent job, it saves the time of learning to sharpen freehand, but the actual sharpening process probably takes the same time as normal whetstone
@Tenderloin
@Constable_Savage it is foolproof, just not impatient twat proof