Sharpening with a HF 1x30 belt sander

My Sharpmaker hasn't been cutting it lately so I decided to try a new method. I bought the HF 1x30 belt sander, a few belts from Lee Valley including a leather belt and some white compound for Pop's knife supplies.

Anyway, I get some rip open the boxes and start setting everything up. Propped the sander on a milk crate, throw the belts into a moldy box next to me, plop down on my garage floor, turn on this marvel of Asian engineering and pull out my first knife to sharpen.

I decided on my 0200 to be my first victim...err test, since it was beat to hell and didn't come back. I take a few swipes along the belt and there goes the edge. Damnit . Not wanting to spend to much time screwing a single knife up I go and grab another one. This time it was my Ka-Bar heavy bowie. No that I have a plethora of experience under my belt I figured I'd fair better this go around. The next few minutes were a blur. I went through my 80 micron belt, 40, 20, 15, 9 and my leather strop in what seemed like seconds. I then test this blade on the forest of hair growing on top of my thigh, make a slow swipe and HOLY HORSE SHIT. Hair goes popping off of my leg and I run to grab as many sharp objects as I could find.

Now looking back at the 10 knifes and 20 garden tools I went through and the short amount of time I spent trying to learn this form of sharpening I can say that I am very pleased. All the rounded convex edges and mirror like polishes I am amazed at the speed and quality of my edges compared to my Sharpmaker.

The end.

Ok now to some questions I have. How often if at all will I need to clean my belts and how? Also when I am sanding off the black coating on one of my blades I couldn't get the coating of some off in the middle of the blade between the spine and edge. I'm guessing this is because the belt rounds a little from the pressure of the knife. Is there and way to fix that?