BUT, if you leave it on and shave some wood, for example, and the edge that seemed sharp now comes off, the blade is actually dull. Hmmmm. I don;t get this part. .
Stretch, please forgive my poor use of text ,I seem to have left out stuff that when I read my post to myself my mind fills in whats left off.
From what I have been reading, it works like this:
You first sharpen only one side of the knife.
You keep sanding until you have that whole first side sanded to the point where the cutting edge is so thin and sharp that it cant stick straight out anymore....thus it bends over to the other side of the knife (this is called the wire burr)
You do the same thing for the 2nd side of the knife, also raiseing a burr to show that this 2nd side is now sharpened as far out to the cutting edge as the steel itself can support.
Now you actually have the knife very sharp at this point, but that darn burr that we were attempting so hard to "get' now has to "get gone'.
The wire burr is a thing thats not connected too well to the rest of the knife edge, so it will flop back and forth under the lightest force on the knife...
The burr is just sticking out there past the edge of the knife and is in the way.
The wire burr "might" be sharp,,,(it could be very sharp,, perhaps, maybe-maybe not, I dont know), but it's so weak and is so likely to flip to one side or the other that you cant use it for cutting.
Just behind the wire burr we got the stronger steel of the trued up knife edge looking to be uncovered, (once we get rid of the darn wire burr thats in the way.)
You get rid of the wire burr with the more traditional manner of sharpening of, stroke-flip-stroke-flip-stroke, etc.,
You use less and less force as you stroke the knife into the stone and you slowly change the angle up so that the last few strokes are whisper light.
When you do it right, you can actually see the wire fall off and you can just clean it off your stone.
At this point, (once burr is removed) the knife is as sharp as that stone can get it,,,,But you can go on and use things like sandpaper or leather strop to get rid of the scratches that are left from the stone.
Now, even the use of just a leather strop will create yet another wire burr, but as seen in the photos in my link, you find that as you work the edge the burr gets smaller and smaller untill it's really not much of a problem.
ON THE OTHER HAND....
If you leave the wire burr on, (thinking that it's so sharp), what happens is that the moment you try to use that wire burr to cut something you will find that it flopped over to one side or the other, and this now means that there is a flat-dull edge where the wire is blocking cutting.
When this happens the wire burr becomes a "bumper" in front of the sharpen knife...Yes your knife is still sharp underneath this "bumper" but until you get rid of that wire burr 'bumper" you are going to think; "Hey why is my knife already so dull?"
This is one of the main reasons guys tell me that they hate their old hunting knives, because to them it seems that no matter how sharp they get the blade it goes dull right away.
But in fact, their knife just has that wire edge still attached to the cutting edge, and thats turning into a bumper that makes the guys think their knife is getting dull after one cut...
Maybe it was a bad HT batch or something...