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I've only just moved to a 10" Wet-stone to form a hollow ground bevel, and have a DMT DIAFLAT-95 95 Micron for flattening my waterstones. I have a 400/1200 diamond stone followed by 2,000, 5,000 and 10,000 Japanese stones then maybe lightly strop to sharpen edges.
I' been tempted by this 2 point registration method to hand sharpen to save time rather than faffing about with my guides, and wondered roughly how far do you go before regrinding?
Just trying to balance regrinding setup time, vs jigs setup time.
As the hollow ground blade is sharpened, the area to remove is increased and sharpening will take a bit longer.
So, 1/32, 1/16th, remove half or 3/4 the hollow grind?
Do you regrind the blade completely or leave a touch of the sharpened edge?
Also, in what direction do you sharpen? Straight/diagonal/figure 8.? Hope this all makes sense.
Any tips very welcome.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

Hollow grinding makes the subsequent honing extremely quick. You can do the work you need to do in half a dozen passes. As such, you don't pay the massive time or sharpening steps penalty with the extra fine stones (>4,000 grit.)

On the question of registration.... I find that's a big advantage of soft Arkansas stones charged with a sprinkle of lapidary abrasive. The stones themselves are fairly hard, so there is nearly zero risk of a pass digging in like with a water stone. The lapidary abrasive cuts nearly as fast as a comparable water stone. Oil or water, it doesn't matter, and clean up is soap and water.

The other benefit to freehand honing is that the final edges are significantly more durable compared to jigged edges. The slightly convex apex created by human motion runs a lot longer on wood. I'm not talking about a Paul Sellers roundy edge. Just jig sharpen to around a 1000 grit water stone and then go to freehand for honing.

I’m pretty close to just pulling the trigger on a Worksharp. I have the scary sharp abrasives with glass plates from Taytools. I use them with the Veritas guide. It works fine, it just takes longer than I want.

To be honest, I don’t at all care about the fine craft of sharpening. I don’t need mirror edge tools. I don’t want to just put on mellow music and have sharpening Sunday. That will trip the trigger for some, I just don’t care enough about it.

What I want is reasonably sharp for the work I do and achieved in short order. Worksharp or the Sorby that Don shared previously are where I think I’m headed.

I used to have a Tormek. That thing was just mocking me by the end. Slowly spinning and working at whatever pace it wanted!

Brad


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I have a Record knock off off the Tormek, and after a couple of days realized it was cutting really slowly because the wheel loads up with the steel cuttings.- Max speed and use the coarse side of the dressing stone as soon at it loads up, really speeds things up a lot.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

...
To be honest, I don’t at all care about the fine craft of sharpening. I don’t need mirror edge tools. I don’t want to just put on mellow music and have sharpening Sunday. That will trip the trigger for some, I just don’t care enough about it.

What I want is reasonably sharp for the work I do and achieved in short order. ...
Brad


My thoughts exactly.

I've been sharpening tools since the 60's so I have tried a lot of different things and along the way I've collected a lot of stones and machines. I don't use stones very much, when I do it's my DMT 8" stones. I do have a Tormek but I changed the sharpening wheel out for a diamond wheel that only needs a bit of water spritzed on it and a composite honing wheel that works wet or dry. I also have the shaped leather honing wheels for sharpening gouges that attaches to the composite honing wheel. The Tormek is a lot of money for what I use it for which is only for sharpening knives and honing but I had already bought the thing so at least it's useful now. Several years ago I bought a Sorby Pro Edge mostly because I wasn't happy with the Tormek (see Brad's comments). The Sorby is awesome for chisels and plane blades, not so great for knives and no better than the Tormek for gouges. I thought about a Worksharp but guess I've got stuff set up good enough so I can get a satisfactory edge on anything pretty quickly and, like Brad, that's all I care about.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

my views on the worksharp are as follows:

great tool for repeatability...you set it at the desired angle setting and off you go over and over again.
you really HAVE to use a crepe block repeatedly
beware of keeping the chisel against the wheel for too long, this builds up a lot of heat in the chisel and to boot loads up the sandpaper quicker (or so that appears), I keep a glass of water close and just dip the chisel then wipe it off
it's a great tool for general sharpening but certainly not all that for removal of chips and such (drop a chisel on a tile floor and be prepared to spend a lot of time with this tool)
buying an extra glass plate or 2 is what I did so I could have closer progressive grits working to final grit
you really have to have the adjustment spot on for a micro bevel as if it's even a little out of square when you increase the bevel setting by 5* the skew gets worse and the micro bevel doesn't match the main bevel...I started carrying mine to jobsites in the factory box and I guess it jiggled a bit and knocked it slightly out of ideal....good thing I gave up micro bevels so it's really not a great concern for me now

in summation I find it a great thing to have around as I never had much satisfaction with a Veritas mark II as repeatability was extremely difficult

I also have a work sharp and love mine. I have put a lot of miles on it.

It is fantastic for quickly removing dings and chips. Because of the nature of very very fine grit sandpaper loading so quickly, it doesn't do quite as well once you go much past p400. I think p800 is about my practical limit, though I have purchased and used stuff past p2000.

One concern comes with availability of 6" PSA backed sandpaper discs. Sandpaper is extremely fast cutting, but quite short lived as a sharpening media. Worksharp's precut 3m discs are pretty good, but expensive. They are also not commonly available. I found I could readily buy quality 6" PSA backed discs at the local hardware stores through p320 or p400 grit, and then simply cut out the center holes. Then, suitable sanding discs in higher grits can be purchased online for a lot less. Just cut out the center hole with an x-acto knife after sticking it to the glass disc. The thing is, as Mike mentions, the finer grits (past p400) load EXTREMELY quickly. You will need a crepe rubber cleaning block.

Two specifics:
1. The worksharp tends to leave a MASSIVE burr/wire edge. You will need some strategy for dealing with that. Prior to my stones, I went with p1000 PSA on a surface plate followed by a strop charged with chrome oxide. Now, I simply clean off the wire edge on an aluminum oxide charged soft Ark and buff.

2. Jig sharpened edges tend to be very keen, but considerably less durable than freehand sharpenend edges. "Good enough" is good enough until the edges roll or chip long before they actually wear dull. Sadly, trimming the ends off of spruce braces and chiseling the waste off of soundboards after gluing to the rims drove me to distraction with how quickly the razor edges fell off, and then they were crumbling and mushing their way through spruce rather than cutting it. Now, that is simply not a problem.

Anyway, best of luck. It's a quality tool. I'm not about to give mine up.

It will heat up if you hold it. I hit it for quick bursts, kind of like peck drilling and no problems.

I also bought extra plates, but after everything is sharpened, I only use one plate with sandpaper on each side. I use the medium grit, then flip it for the final grit.

Mine sits on a bench and has never lost calibration.

I also stopped using microbevels now that I have the worksharp.


The same company makes a knife sharpening tool. I keep it on the bench right next to the chisel sharpener. About 10 seconds is all it takes on that to shave arm hair with my pocket knife.