Comments on DMT Aligner Kit

I use just the clamp with my bench stones for profiling jobs. I think it's a great system to use as a set of training wheels to learn to sharpen freehand. Personally, I think setting up systems for regular sharpening jobs is a waste of time.
 
Highly recommended

Simple and accurate with great results
Good for a newbie to sharpening
Use the stone holder for touch ups and then free hand.

I use mine to initially rebevel my Queen D2 folders.
It takes 10 -15 minutes from blunt to very sharp per blade

I added an Extra Course stone to the kit
 
Thanks, it's for rebeveling that I'm planning to get a guide system for. Consensus seems to be this one is a good one.
 
love it, added extra extra fine, need extra course for reprofiling, sharpened some friends knives today
 
I got mine when I bought the Queen Congress. It's got four D2 blades and freehand just wasn't cutting it. There's a set online with x-coarse, coarse, medium, and fine. It's very easy to get a usable burr with the coarse and x-coarse on D2.

Here's my other trick that I try to share. After raising the burr and moving through all four grits, I take the fine stone and wrap it with sand paper so that the paper side is out. Then, I use that to strop my fresh edge with. It uses the same angle and really does a great final touch. Try it.

Oh, and the only issue that I've ever had with a DMT is on little pen blades. I really struggled to even touch the edge with my stone because the clamp got in the way. But I found that if I placed something like a thin strip of cardboard in the clamp first, the blade was pushed out far enough for me to get the edge without reducing safety.

It was so easy to get great edges (first time I whittled a hair!) that I redid all my convex edges with the DMT, except for my Bark River Mini-Canadian. I just can't bring myself to un-convex a Barkie.
 
Excellent system. I got the one with four stones instead of three stones and a rod. So I have a black extra-coarse, which comes in handy for getting those factory edges on high-end steel slimmed down.

The principal drawback is that it doesn't work well with narrow blades since the clamp gets in the way as Chewy1 said.
 
Swedge said:
The principal drawback is that it doesn't work well with narrow blades since the clamp gets in the way as Chewy1 said.
Click to expand...

If a blade is small enough then the stones are big enough to freehand with - that's how I do it. I am also freehanding my Endura ATM because I am using an angle that the guided system cannot get down to.

I got the 3 hone system with a bonus EEF included, since then I have bought the curved hone for sharpening recurved blades and the XCourse hone. I also bought an XXCourse hone - it isn't listed as a DMT Aligner stone - but it is exactly the same size and fits the holder just fine!
On this page:
http://www.dmtsharp.com/products/ski.htm look at the WS4XX - this works good for drastic reprofiling. (like taking a sabre grind Endura and turning it into a scandi grind) It is noticeably courser than the XCourse stone and takes off steel quicker.
 
I have the EEF, but I am still breaking it in. It comes fairly rough at first. But I am looking forward to using the EEF once it has smoothed out.

I was thinking about getting the WS4XX, which I assume is extra-extra-coarse. It seemed like it would fit just fine, but DMT never suggests it's suitable for the aligner. Glad to hear that it is, for there are some reprofiling jobs that really need to start with it.

Of course, one can free-hand with the smaller stones, but the whole point of an aligner system for people like me is that I don't want to free-hand and don't want to put in the time to develop the skill. While it is a plus, as you said, to be able to use the 4" stones for free hand, I suspect that most people who want to free hand will have some larger stones on hand already.

For the smaller blades, I use my SharpMaker. For my bread knive with a 10" blade that has absolutely no belly, I also use the SharpMaker. I suppose I could use the the DMT aligner system, but I would have to fix the clamp in at least two locations to cover the entire blade, and the arcing motion of the stone means that the bevel of the edge not would be even along the length of the blade.

When a knife is too small (such as pen blade) or too long (such a bread knife), the DMT aligner system doesn't work for me. But for most knives, it is my first choice.
 
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