Quote Originally Posted by Philadelph View Post
Interesting. So am I to understand that technically this could drastically reduce the time needed to hone to a sharp edge an old wedge with a huge bevel? .
Yep!

You DO have to hone that bevel--it has to be somewhat close, and you can't have any big gaping chips.

But I found that the real problem with these big fat wedges is that final bit of polishing necessary to get an edge shaving smoothly.

Instead of having to remove metal all along that fat bevel, you just remove a little metal right at the tip. It goes extremely fast. I had been working on this wedge with it's nearly 1/4" bevel for days and making no progress.

Then I taped it, and a few strokes on the 8K and a few more on the coticle and WOW! done!

For the first time, I can see improvement at 100K under the microscope!

But, the downside is that you may have to strop with the tape on, and stropping with tape on the bevel sucks.

I think with a single layer of tape, you can probably remove the tape and still get a decent stropping, but my impression from my work here is that two layers is thick enough to lift the edge a little too far away from the strop.

Perhaps I just need to adjust my stropping technique a little, I'm not sure yet.

Maybe Tim or someone else has some experience with this.

I may fall back to one layer of tape and see how that works. It should be similar, just not as dramatic. Probably have to get a lot closer to a sharp edge first for one layer of tape.