Wow, really? You have a sharpmaker and an edge pro, but you choose to freehand? I would love to have that skill! How did you learn to do it? It seems so difficult.
Repetition, I've got thousands of hours practice, I sharpen a couple hours a night on average, I sharpen everyone's knives for them, I carry a set of small diamond hones in my bag and I have a few homemade strops I use.
As for how I got here, I've been free hand sharpening since the 70s, granted I sucked at first but through trial and error I learned. The most important thing is muscle memory and that comes with practice. Practice, practice, practice and when you think you've practiced enough, practice more.
I maintain my angle by using my thumb as a guide, I lay the spine of the blade against my thumb and run my thumbnail on the stone as the guide, this gives me a consistent angle and after I get my burr, I strop,
on leather, cardboard, thick paper all work reasonably well.
One of the biggest mistakes most people make is they tend to over sharpen their blades to much and like with golf, baseball and tennis you need to follow through on the strokes. The tendency to lift the spine of the blade off the stone as you finish your stroke is natural, this will round the bevel and depending on how bad you are can actually make your knife duller because your rolling over the acute angle you're trying to make. The best way to combat this is to stroke past the stone and not lift the blade off the stone till you're past the edge of the stone.
There are so many tutorials, and threads on sharpening it can be overwhelming, but they all have one thing in common, practice, even the EdgePro has a learning curve. Find a full knife buy a set of oil stones, coarse, medium and fine, you can usually find these for about $15-$20 a set, start with the coarse stone and set your bevel and progress to the medium stone and start making a burr. This will progress into the finer stone with the same goal of achieving a wire edge/burr.
This is then either polished off with the strop or by lifting up on the spine a little too remove the burr by creating a micro bevel that removes the burr.
Another thing to consider is what kind of cutting you want to do a good toothy working edge at 25° will last forever when cutting cardboard and similar materials. If you want to shave letters of news paper you need an acute polished edge but they typically are not good for much more showing off your sharpening skills or operating on the pets, (just kidding) I do keep a record edge on some of my multi blade for removing splinters and fine cutting.
Look around, even here IIRC there is a sharpening sticky in the maintenance sub forum.
Hope this helped, feel free to pm me if you have any other questions, if I don't have an answer, I'll find someone who does.
Keep em sharp my friends!
