Hi ThreeSGuy,

I have a different Dovo with that same 6/8 shoulderless blade, and love it. I do hone it with the heel forward, but have never looked that closely at the hone wear. Until just now, and I see that the hone wear line is a tiny bit narrower where you indicate no hone wear on your own. With my own blades, I do a bevel set without tape to be sure that the spine and edge do settle into one another properly. I then continue the honing without tape so that the edge and spine get the same degree of polish. After that, maybe I'll use tape in the future.

A professional honer might not pay this much attention to making the edge user-friendly for future nonprofessional honers, and instead apply strokes or other tricks that you learn over thousands of blades. I have a Dovo that was honed by one of the pros, and it came to me with a wonderful edge. However, it did not come ready for an amateur to maintain it. There's a very slight warp in the blade, and I've yet to get the bevel and edge to match up really nicely. I've gotten better at honing, and can tweak my strokes to follow the blade's peculiar curve, but don't want to work that hard at it and don't find that it lends the blade any charming character. It just makes it a pain to hone.

So some possible histories of your blade are that a) it shouldn't really have passed initial quality control and been sent back for a better factory bevel set, b) the pro honer in Michigan used some advanced techniques to coax a good edge from it, c and beyond) OK, I don't know enough to speculate any further.

But I think the correction will be a tapeless bevel set, maybe at the expense of some gold wash. I don't remember where the gold is on those blades. My model is just plain steel with the notches across the spine. Anyway, that's the aggressive approach I'd take. But I'm not a pro.

Good luck. I hope the actual solution is a happy one for you.