To confirm Nathan's statement that both methods can work I'd like to offer some evidence to the discussion. Years ago a good friend of mine who writes articles for various sporting magazines asked me to help him in a test. This was when those friction forged blades were just coming out, the ones that were changing the knife world forever (didn't much happen). He'd been invited to a large hog hunt put on by the maker where he took a good hog and was presented with a set of three of these knives as were all the other writers there. He wanted to try and quantify how much better these knives were then what was on the market. So the test he devised was for me to cut rope, I was the muscle and he did the tabulating. 5/8" sisal rope was cut and cut and cut. It was cut so much that we wrapped leather around the knife handles. Then we ended up using the leather wrapped handles and padded gloves. At the end of the two days we had two 55 gallon drums with 1/2" cut off pieces of sisal rope. We tested 12 knives total all from his personal collection, including one of my Rodeos (at that time from 440C at 58Rc, nowadays from AEB-L @62-63Rc), which was his personal edc. My friend, in a former life, was a well known and very well paid actor and he had a very significant and very drool worthy collection of custom knives as well as some factory knives to choose from. As a very avid hunter none of these were art knives but had been carried and used for the most part. We tested knives in FFG, hollow ground and convex ground. Each knife cut rope until it wouldn't cut rope. The backing was onto a fresh piece of fir 2x4 for each test. I then hand sharpened each knife (I was into water stones long before they were cool) and cut again until the knife would not cut. Each knife was cut with 4 times and how many cuts it made each time before it stopped cutting was recorded, with the average taken from the 3 highest for the final results. Part way through this very hand abusive couple of days I was running out of hand, I mean down right achy and the sharpening seemed to be causing more aching than the cutting. So in order to save my hands I would hand sharpen a blade 2 times and belt sharpen it the third time. It was always mixed up which of the three sharpening times was done on the belt. My method was and is done wet on a 220 silicone carbide belt and the burr wiped off on a buffer with green scratch remover basically just polishing the apex of the apex. Never more than two passes on the buffer. The results, for this discussion, were interesting in that no perceived difference presented itself. Sometime the belt sharpening out cut the hand sharpening, sometimes it didn't but in the 4 reps of cutting there was never enough difference, to make a difference, or to tell a difference if ya didn't know, which was which. In fact the results were so similar that we'd switched just to the belt sharpening by about halfway through the second day cause I was about done. Interestingly, for the point of the test, the regular knives of D2 made by the same outfit that made the friction forged blades out performed consistently, the friction forged blades which is probably why we don't hear some much about them anymore these days. He called and told them, but they didn't want to hear it and said that was impossible but the results were in. Anyhoo.
Can belt sharpening screw up an edge ABSOLUTELY, can it be done well, yep. I realize this isn't as scientific as the info presented by Larrin but I can personally testify to the blood sweat and tears involved. Not bad for a couple ol cowboys. Worst part I don't think he ever even wrote an article about it. He did buy the beer.
