Originally Posted by
mparker762
What the big bevel does is make it slower and more tedious to create a properly sharp edge, so there's a tendency to jump to the polishing stones before the edge is really sharp. Using tape reduced the amount of steel you needed to remove to get it sharp so that it was actually sharp by the time you moved to the polishing stage. This is a common technique for honing wedges because there's so much metal to remove that they're slow on the coarse grits and interminably slow at the higher grit levels. It's much easier to hone them with a 4000 grit hone to remove as much metal along the entire side as possible, then put a layer of tape on the spine to raise it up so you're only honing a small bevel after that.
As for the second point you're making, what you'll find is that gradually that second bevel will increase in size until it encompasses the entire main bevel, at which point you'll be right back where you started.
For the wedges, you solve this problem by every now and then removing the tape and honing the entire side flat again on a 1000 grit hone, or 1000 grit sandpaper, or something like that. Of course, on a flat sided wedge you don't have to worry about the bevel getting unsightly large...