Have you considered learning how to sharpen a knife or reprofile an edge yourself?
I bet it would save you loads of strife.
I do it routinely on all my knives, but the Seki-made Tantos were just so thick it resulted in really tall bevels, and the angled point required even much taller bevels, to the extent of looking absurd.
To me 0.040" edges or thicker are not knife edges worth re-working, at least not on all but the most humongous of choppers (10" and over).
On a knife below 9", 0.040" and over behind the edge is pry bar territory, meaning that it probably should
stay a pry bar...
Recently I sent a 7" Peacekeeper I dagger (Aus-8 Japanese made, not Taiwan) to be re-profiled by a professional, and to achieve anything below 20 degrees per side the edge bevels were so tall it looked borderline absurd. What killed it was that one the bevels was even taller, so one of the four bevels was over 1/8" tall and looked awful.
Even with that huge amount of metal removed, and with a high polish, the sharpness was adequate but not exactly mind blowing... The knife was well done by the professional, but I considered it ruined cosmetically from being just too thick edged.
As a point of comparison, I recently I found on Ebay a old Gerber Guardian II 6.5" long dagger, similar in size but much narrower compared to the much broader blade 7" Peacekeeper II: Despite the blade being WAY narrower on the Gerber than on the CS (15/16" wide overall to about 1.4" for the CS, a huge difference), it came with an astoundingly sharp Zero-edge bevel that needed only a very slight two minutes touch-up to slice apart phonebook paper with astonishing ease: This from an extremely narrow blade that is a full 1/4" thick, while the Cold Steel Peacekeeper I, with a much more favourable broad blade, and a thinner 3/16" stock on top of that, required a huge re-working, and never quite equalled the sharpness of the Gerber out of the box.
A lot of the thin bladed 1/8" Cold Steel stuff is fairly sharp, including folders, but as soon as you get into 3/16" stuff the edges get really thick: This is not unique to Cold Steel, and seems a characteristic of a lot of the thicker blades made in Seki-City: Even hollow ground Al Mar daggers require a lot of metal removed, and so do many of the Seki-made SOGs. The resulting edge bevels, when you try re-profiling them, are very tall, which means that restoring the edge, once worn, will require abrading a huge surface of metal, to the point of impracticality. This is why Randalls are much easier to use on a regular basis: The edges are typically less than half as thick, so only tiny bevels are needed.
Gaston
