Changing Blade Bevel Angle?

[Shaggy DA]

Hi there guys and thanks for looking at my question. I've got knives for kitchen, shop, work use that are (to me) at too steep of an angle. Some of the angles are very inconsistent (probably from my poor free hand sharpening) and like I said, at what I consider (again, to me) too steep of an angle. The knives range from cheap china stainless (cheap kitchen knives, guess I should invest in better quality but that's expensive on a working man's budget. ), 440C, 8Cr13MoV, 5160, and whatever that Bear Grylls Parang machete is made of.

With that said, I'm wondering if any of you have any experience with the WorkSharp (original) or the Worksharp Ken Onion edition and changing the bevel angle? I've been looking at it for a while now and haven't really heard anything bad about it but I'm wondering if it would do any good at changing or correcting blade bevels? I've looked through this forum and found a whole lot about using it sharpen knives and how good it is but I haven't seen anything about correcting or changing the angle of the bevels. Also, do you know how well this sharpener (or others) perform when sharpening blades with recurves blades? Any information would be greatly appreciated but if you know of something that would work better (without ruining temper on some of my better knives (1095, 5160, 0-1, D2) I would appreciate that as well. Again any information would be greatly appreciated and thank you for your time by looking at this.

 

[Indignation]

I have the work sharp ken onion, it's awesome for cutting in a new bevel angle, cuts the time from using a jig or freehand to a fraction. I like the ken onion's ability to slow down the grind speed and not take off too much metal. Go slow and watch the temperature and you shouldn't have any issue with damaging temper IME. (This is a controversial subject, Cliff Stamp has some great in-depth info on high speed grinding effecting edge temper)
My method for nicer knives is cutting 90% of the bevel in on the worksharp and finishing up the edge with a jig (edge pro or wicked edge), I've gotten razor sharp edges and still save some time. For cheaper blades I just use the WS all the way to save time.
Hope that helps!

 

[Shaggy DA]

I have the work sharp ken onion, it's awesome for cutting in a new bevel angle, cuts the time from using a jig or freehand to a fraction. I like the ken onion's ability to slow down the grind speed and not take off too much metal. Go slow and watch the temperature and you shouldn't have any issue with damaging temper IME. (This is a controversial subject, Cliff Stamp has some great in-depth info on high speed grinding effecting edge temper)
My method for nicer knives is cutting 90% of the bevel in on the worksharp and finishing up the edge with a jig (edge pro or wicked edge), I've gotten razor sharp edges and still save some time. For cheaper blades I just use the WS all the way to save time.
Hope that helps!

That's definitely all the information I could ever need. Thank you. I was already leaning towards getting one (mostly because of how often I have to sharpen the cheap kitchen knives). Though I doubt I'll be able to afford either the Edge Pro or Wicked Edge jig systems. I'll just have to buy some cheap Remington or Winchester knives and practice thoroughly. Again, thank you for the wonderful insight.

 

[bgentry]

This is a late reply but....

Last week I sharpened some knives for a customer including a filet knife with chips 1/4" to 5/16" deep. Essentially all the way through the edge bevel. Near the heel, there really wasn't any edge bevel left either; just a sliver like 1/64" wide. So I started by cutting the edge off of the blade by running it on the WSKO at around a 75 degree angle, alternating sides, until all of the chips were gone. Of course that left me with essentially no edge bevel at all!

Starting back at something like 7 or 8 degrees, I cut in new relief bevels. This took quite a bit of grinding, but didn't seem like any problem for the machine. Finally, when the relief bevels were closer to meeting at the apex, I increased the angle to around 15-ish degrees and cut in new edge bevels. All of that grinding was done with a 60 grit ceramic. After I had an edge formed I progressed through x200, x100, x22 (which was very fast) and ended up with a nice sharp blade again.

Honestly I almost feel like I totally re-ground the blade. I'm sure it's something pro sharpeners do with 1x42 or 2x72 belt sanders all day long. But I got it done with the little 3/4 x 12. So yeah, the WSKO can reprofile blades. For sure.

Brian.