Am I Imagining Things?

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Sep 28, 2014
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Whenever I have to lower an edge angle by hand, it seems like I can get most of the bevel ground pretty quickly, and then the last 1/64" of the old bevel takes five years to grind out. Am I imagining it, or is that really a thing? I feel like I'm gonna be like that knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, sitting in my little room for all eternity, sharpening away at a knife that will never apex. Plus, it's usually the tip that goes last, and there's always this one little gleaming section sitting there mocking me.

Okay, maybe I'm being a little over-dramatic. 🎭
 
It stands to reason. When you lower the bevel angle, the first contact point is just the corner where the bevel turns. Knocking down that corner doesn't take much material off. As you keep going, more and more surface comes into contact with the stone. I'm thinking more surface area means more material that needs to be taken off to get to the next layer which means more work which means more time.
 
It stands to reason. When you lower the bevel angle, the first contact point is just the corner where the bevel turns. Knocking down that corner doesn't take much material off. As you keep going, more and more surface comes into contact with the stone. I'm thinking more surface area means more material that needs to be taken off to get to the next layer which means more work which means more time.

What he said. The farther you work into the bevels, the more material there is to remove.
 
It stands to reason. When you lower the bevel angle, the first contact point is just the corner where the bevel turns. Knocking down that corner doesn't take much material off. As you keep going, more and more surface comes into contact with the stone. I'm thinking more surface area means more material that needs to be taken off to get to the next layer which means more work which means more time.

^^That's it, in a nutshell.

If you imagine you were using your hone to grind down one edge of a pyramid, it becomes more apparent as to why the going gets much slower as you progress. The contact surface area under the hone gets exponentially larger (literally) with each thin layer ground off, so the speed at which you'll progress through the depth of it gets exponentially slower. That's also when it becomes apparent if your hones are clogging as you work, as that'll just make everything even slower.


David
 
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