The Sharpmaker is a wonderful piece of kit - even a muppet like myself can produce hair-popping blades with reliability. However, there are two things which have always bugged me about it:
1> The tendancy to round off points unless one is very, very careful.
2> The inability to mount both sets of rods at once. This is annoying if it's bolted to a bench, where you don't need to hold it in place so there's no reason not to have all four rods mounted.
I've got a suggestion for two design tweaks which rectify these problems.
The basic idea is to rotate the rods 30 degrees, so that when sharpening on the point of the rod, if you slip, the blade doesn't get dragged across the slope of the abrasive surface mangling the point. Instead, with the rod rotated, it slips off into space.
One then has to add more holes to the plastic box, but the new holes can be staggered, so you can have both sets of rods in the sharpmaker at the same time, one set off-set from the other, and both sets of holes moved towards the ends of the plastic case, so that the rods don't get in eachother's way if the sharpmaker is bench mounted and you want both sets of rods in place.
I think this diagram makes it clearer!
What do you think? Might this work?
1> The tendancy to round off points unless one is very, very careful.
2> The inability to mount both sets of rods at once. This is annoying if it's bolted to a bench, where you don't need to hold it in place so there's no reason not to have all four rods mounted.
I've got a suggestion for two design tweaks which rectify these problems.
The basic idea is to rotate the rods 30 degrees, so that when sharpening on the point of the rod, if you slip, the blade doesn't get dragged across the slope of the abrasive surface mangling the point. Instead, with the rod rotated, it slips off into space.
One then has to add more holes to the plastic box, but the new holes can be staggered, so you can have both sets of rods in the sharpmaker at the same time, one set off-set from the other, and both sets of holes moved towards the ends of the plastic case, so that the rods don't get in eachother's way if the sharpmaker is bench mounted and you want both sets of rods in place.
I think this diagram makes it clearer!
What do you think? Might this work?
