Good points there Yellowhorse. I don’t have a problem with people buying good tools, I have enough of a problem with that on my own.
I do have an appreciation, and more often, a need to keep blades really sharp and to use the right tool for the job at hand. So if someone wants to fire up their Wicked Edge to sharpen their steak knives that’s fine with me. My neighbor, who is an award winning wood carver does just that, but he’s retired and has a lot of free time.
The point is that however sharp your cutting edge might be, it will start to go dull as soon as you start using it to cut something, and the point I was making is that it’s pretty easy to maintain an edge with simple tools and with some practice. Even ceramic blades go dull with use and will need to be re-sharpened, and I’ve sharpened those as well.
Sharpening skills are learned like anything else, by practice, and as most of these consumer pocket knives are really pretty poor cutting tools and don’t have the proper metallurgy to maintain a durable edge in actual use, it’s something one needs to know how to do quickly and efficiently if one actually wants to use these knives to cut things.
With that in mind, every single professional butcher I have met or known uses a steel…every one, and it’s in their left hands many, many times every hour they are on the job.
But in your example, regarding carpet laying tools, I have actually done carpet installation. The job I was hired for was to lay carpet, and to do that I used basically two blades, a razor knife and a pad knife. The razor knife has a straight cutting edge with a sharp point, and the pad knife is slightly curved and looks like a short butter knife. I’m right-handed, so those two blades were kept on the right side of my belt with my axe…on the left side I had my stone and an oil bottle.
Now those blades are made from very hard high-carbon steel. They are professional tools made from much better steel and are much harder and durable than any pocket knife. The grain structure of the steel is very fine, and they will take a very sharp edge. They are heat-treated hard to support the sharp edge, but consequently, are also brittle and will easily snap if bent. By comparison, pocket knives do not have any where close to the same quality of steel or the refined heat treatment to support a razor’s edge in actual use.
Even with those better steels, in actual use, carpet and backing are highly abrasive, so the blade’s edge needs to be dressed constantly…every 5 minutes or less…and mostly less. But that’s no problem, when the razor edge would dull a bit, I would just reach into my left belt pocket and pull out my little stone and dress the edge back to razor sharp in about 10 seconds. And believe me, I hated to stop cutting and lose even that tiny little bit of time off of actually putting the blade to the materials.
But the sharper blade adds up to more production at the end of the work day. The sharp edge cuts faster and cleaner and does a neater job with a lot less effort. If there was a better blade that stayed sharp longer, I would have bought a dozen of them, and if there was a sharpening system that got the blades sharper, quicker, and easier than that good little oilstone i carried in my belt I would have owned it.
I agree that the Wicked Edge system or some other “fixed angle jig” type tool makes a demanding precision sharpening task like, for example, sharpening a Hand Plane blade much easier. (In case you’ve never used a hand plane, those need to be very, very sharp or they make a mess out of the wood).
But if I had to take the time to walk out to my truck and sharpen my carpet blades on some gizmo every time they needed to be touched up because I couldn’t figure out how to get the blade angle “right”, I’d be wasting my day sharpening my knives instead of working on the job, and if I wasn’t already fired in the first hour, I’d probably still be working on those projects now.
Actually, in the real world, if I didn’t have the basic skills to maintain my tools and keep them sharp, I wouldn’t have been hired in the first place, even as an apprentice.
For me, at least, knife sharpening is a very basic skill, easily and quickly learned with a little understanding and a little practice…in a few hours really. It doesn’t require expensive equipment or an electron microscope to do it well…but those items might be nice to own anyway, if one wants them in their garage.
I tend to believe that often the simpler solution is actually better, but then I prefer cars without computers too…
Not only that, there are honing ‘steels’ (various types), ceramic (various types/grits) and leather (various types) modules available for this unit besides the few dozen different diamond and stone modules that swap out in under 30 seconds. There are vendors that make specialty modules for this as well. Do you really think you can hold a perfect angle (fully adjustable in the Wicked Edge) evenly across the entire length of a blade by hand? You are just kidding yourself. Better yet, check out your last sharpening job under a good magnifying glass. You probably won’t like what you see. Look up professional knife sharpening services and see what the pros are using. Almost none of them do it free hand any more. How one can trash something that one knows nothing about - is beyond me.