First, how to learn to sharpen. I like these two web resources from:
Chad Ward at egullet
and
Steve Bottorff
I like Chad's a little better than Steve's, though Chad's is a LOT longer.
For stones, I personally don't think there's a good combination stone out there, as it seems like either the "coarse" isn't coarse enough, or the "fine" isn't fine enough. I hear good things about the DMT coarse/fine stone, but I haven't personally used it.
I've really come to appreciate the medium Crystolon (Silicon Carbide) stone from Norton. My stone is a combo with medium Crystolon on one side and fine india (Aluminum Oxide) on the other side. I find the fine india to be essentially useless for me, so I just ignore it.
A medium Crystolon would be a good place to start for the coarse side of things. I've become a huge fan of the Spyderco medium ceramic (gray) over the past few years. You can get a rather fine edge on a blade with one, and it happens pretty quickly. I've been using their "profile" sharpener. It's hand held, but it's 8" long, so you can use it as a bench stone too, as long as you elevate it, and put something under it so it doesn't slide around.
More info
here. You can find it for more like $28 to $30 plus shipping at various online stores. If I had it to do over again, I might opt for the
spyderco medium bench stone instead as it's the same material, but it's 2" x 8", so it's got more flat surface area to work with and *might* be better to use.
Technique is the most important thing though. All the stones in the world won't help you if you don't have the basics down.
Oh and your question about strops: A strop is traditionally a piece of leather that you run the blade over to micro align and micro polish it. Like barbers do with straight razors. You can use almost any piece of leather as a strop. Cardboard works too. A "loaded strop" is one that's been rubbed with some kind of (very mildly) abrasive compound. Chromium Oxide is the most common. I've got some CrO on piece of cardboard that I cut from the flap of a box. The CrO (green buffing compound) was $2 at Northern Tool. The cardboard was essentially free. It works quite well actually. I'm planning on building a strop with a piece of leather, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Good luck on your quest.
Brian.
