I just bought one of these machines, after seeing a friend of mine use his. My friend sets up this little machine at all the local gun/knife shows and charges people anywhere from $2-5 to sharpen their knives. Money well spent, IMO. SO much better than those leather wheels that burn the temper out of your edge and roll the tip off.
This machine is a no-brainer; meaning that it would be difficult to screw up using it. You simply clamp the little angle clamp onto the back of the blade and set the bottom half of the angle clamp onto the little knob on this machine. As long as you don't allow the clamp to slide off the knob, your angle is guaranteed to stay the same. Plus, this motor is not spinning fast enough to build up much heat, unless you really press down and stay in one spot too long.
My friend sets up and uses his this way:
Starts by putting the clamp onto the blade(making sure to cover the blade spine with some kind of paper first, otherwise the clamp leaves marks on your blade), begins with a 120 grit to establish the edge angle. Switches over to a worn 400 grit belt and then finishes with a 1000 grit ceramic stone(manually) to polish the edge and knock off the final burr. Believe me, when I say, a knife really doesn't need to get much sharper. Total elapsed time? Maybe 5 minutes. :thumbup:
I have one of the large Buck/Strider spearpoint folders, and it came with a pretty steep edge angle(not really that sharp). For about a year, I worked on making this knife sharper, by changing the edge angle to a thinner one. Wasn't really getting anywhere. In a couple of minutes, my friend and this little machine had my knife sharpened to a perfect 20 degree angle and razor sharp. Needless to say, I was impressed. So much so, that I bought one for myself.
