I finally learned to freehand sharpen when I had a decent stone and just made myself go through it. I watched some videos - the point is to hold the plane of your knife at a constant angle ...
I did the same thing last year. I'm in my 60s and after messing with fiddly, finicky PITA guided systems for decades, I finally decided I was gonna learn freehand if it was the last thing I do.
I started with a couple of 8" x 3" double-sided Norton oilstones (India which is AlOx and Crystolon which is SiC -- you can find these for about $35 each) and spent maybe an hour or so every day for a few weeks freehand sharpening all the knives in the house. I also watched a lot of YT videos, particularly from users "Burrfection" and "OUTDOORS55" which helped a lot.
For me, it didn't "take years" to get the hang of it. It took maybe a month to develop the "muscle memory" to get all our knives close to "push through paper" sharp.
I later added a couple of good DMT diamond stones to the arsenal: A 10" double sided Dia-Sharp (~325 and 600 grits which will cover 90% of what you need) and an 8" 1200 grit.
These diamond plates are good for super steels. The main drawback of diamond plates, for me, is that you really shouldn't "bear down" on them with a lot of pressure if you want to remove a lot of metal faster. So I do that on the Norton oilstones. I also made a strop from MDF and green jeweller's rouge, which is also good for touch-ups and for removing the burr.
My takeaways from all of this:
1. Start with a coarse enough stone to get results in a reasonable amount of time. The stones I had that I struggled with for years were too fine grit, so I "gave up" in frustration before I ever got a burr, assuming (incorrectly) that the problem was my technique rather than not having a coarse-enough stone. You need to raise a burr, and you can do so a lot faster on a coarser stone. If it takes 1000 strokes on a fine stone versus 30 strokes on a coarse stone to raise a burr, that means you need to hold a consistent angle for 33 times as long on a fine stone -- and you'll have 33 times as many opportunities to screw it up by holding an inconsistent bevel angle on just
one out of those eleventy-bajillion strokes. I once worried about coarse stones wearing out my knives faster, but now I worry about all the time I wasted using stones that weren't
coarse enough. You can always buy another knife...time, not so much. (I also realized that
even a coarse stone removes metal a lot slower than you often want or would expect, particularly when you're trying to remove enough metal to get past a nick. Now I use a belt sander for that.)
2. Guided systems are too much of a PITA for me to find, dig out, unbox, set up, and jack around with to do "touch ups" regularly, which is key to keeping knives sharp.
So I didn't. Now that I have the muscle memory to do it freehand, it's no big deal to grab a stone off the shelf and spend 2 minutes touching up a knife, even in the middle of cooking. (Regular practice will also keep your muscle memory maintained.) If I just want to
very lightly touch up an edge, I use a pair of "crock sticks" which are "kind of" guided but nowhere nearly as complex as most jigs.
3. I'll never get as close to "geometric perfection" doing it freehand as I might with a guided system. But I do get our knives plenty sharp for whatever jobs we want them to do, and I do it without having to shut down the kitchen table for a multi-year highway construction project. I also get a lot more personal satisfaction out of freehand sharpening than I ever got with guided jigs, since any monkey can do it on a jig, but it takes some skill to do it freehand. It takes a little bit of time to learn, but after that I suspect it's like riding a bike -- a lifelong skill.
My only regret is that I didn't invest the time to learn freehand sharpening decades ago. (I did the same thing with touch-typing.) YMMV and good luck with whatever you decide.
