My Sharpening and knife related videos

[grepper]

Hi Mark, thanks for the thorough reply. I’m going to replay the setup video and the referred video.

After that, I’ll see what happens. Thanks all!

No problem Doug!  I'm always more than happy to assist and answer any questions I can.

[grepper]

It took me a few tries to learn the motion.  It helps to play around with moving the blade with the belt grinder turned off.  Then try it on some practice blades.

If you check the sides of the Kallyrest tiltable rest part (the part that tilts that the knife rests against), there are two threaded holes on each side of the rest.  The holes are there so that, “sides” can be added to the rest.  These sides extend beyond the back of the belt on each side of the rest.
 
Sides on the rest completely eliminate the tendency of blades pulling into the belt.    While the tendency of the belt pulling the blade downward is not much of an issue on larger blades, sides can be especially helpful with very small and thin blades like pen knife blades.  While sides totally eliminate the tendency of blades wanting to pull into the belt, it’s still a good idea to use the slight upward pressure on a finger on the spine of the blade simply because that technique provides very precise blade to belt pressure control and increased blade stability while dragging it across the rest.
 
The rest on the Kallyrest is 7/8” wide, 1/8” smaller than the belt width.  It was designed that way to insure that the edge could be sharpened right up to the handle of the knife.  Of course that is not an issue on many knives but it can be on some. 
 
With sides in place on the Kallyrest, the edge can be sharpened up to about 1/8” from the handle.  Sharpening that last 1/8” of the edge right next to the handle can be done by lifting the blade away from the rest and doing that last bit hand held.  It’s not a big deal to do that, but I thought it should be mentioned.
 
With just a little practice sides are generally not needed.  I for instance don’t use them.  That said, in testing, sides work extremely well and make sharpening on the Kallyrest pretty much a no-brainer.  Their only downside is that last 1/8” of the edge issue on some knives.
 
Sides for the Kallyrest will be available soon.  Here is an image of the Kallyrest with rest sides so you can get an idea of how they work:

      

[chino]

Nice Mark, I like it!

[Mike Brubacher]

Grepper has it right. On most "kitchen cutlery size knives" you have plenty to hang onto and lots of blade surface area to keep flat on the rest. Small blades make me think about what I'm doing and I don't like to think. On earlier prototypes, Grepper provided sides for test purposes and they eliminated most of the "thinking" part. I look forward to sides again. I don't sharpen many small blades but I imagine that when the sides do go on, they'll stay on.

[blgentry]

I've never used the sides, so I don't have direct experience.


But I do sharpen blades *right* up to the handle pretty frequently.  So I'd want a way to quickly "disable" the sides.  I wonder if it could be something as simple as a stop pin at the bottom that the sides rest on.  Pull (or unscrew) the stop pin, and the sides fall away, hinged by a top screw that holds them on to the rest.  Or maybe you would just flip the sides out of the way and the stop pin would be a permanent stop.  Maybe the top (thumb) screws could just unscrew a quarter turn or something to make them "loose" so you could flip them out of the way.  Then, when you want them, flip them back into place, the stop pin stops them, and tighten the upper screws down again.  Just spitballing.

If I had to choose between always having sides or not having them at all, I'd choose no sides.  But the option would be nice I think.  I've sucked a blade or two down into the belt.  No catastrophes, but it's always an uncomfortable event when it happens.

Brian.

[grepper]

Thanks for the great feedback and good ideas Mr. Brian.  It’s good info that you sharpen right up to the handle frequently.  That’s very interesting and exactly why the Kallyrest has a 7/8” wide rest piece.  Glad that design is being put to good use!

A lot of thought has gone into trying to make the sides easily attached/removed and we are still working on it.  There are many considerations to make it work well with the current rest design.  The screw hole nearest the belt is very low on the rest.  The lower screws or whatever need to be very flat and not protrude much from the side or the knife handle would hit them.  If the handle of the blade hit a screw head, that would increase the distance from handle to belt and more of the edge could not be directly sharpened.

The sides need to be as thin as possible and made of plastic.  Permanently attaching posts in thin plastic is problematic.  
The sides need to be well attached to the rest.  They can’t wobble or become detached in the middle of sharpening.

One idea we kicked around was to have magnets in the center of the rest with metal pins on the sides so they could snap onto the rest.  Sound good on paper, but attaching metal pins to 1/16” thick plastic has its issues.  The magnets would have to be strong enough to securely hold the sides in place.  Folks would grab onto the side and pry it off.  That would put all sorts of lateral stress on the pins and the little pins would soon get wobbly and the MTBF would be ephemeral.  

Another idea was to have o-rings in the bore of the holes in the rest.  Metal posts on the sides would press tightly into tho holes and be secured by the o-rings.  Sounds cool, right?  Just push the sides on and pull them out.  A couple of issues however:  The same issues with pins in thin plastic apply to this too.  Additionally, machining tiny grooves on the inside bores of the holes is problematic.  Assembly time would be a real pain.  I for one would not want to sit down with 500 rests and 2,000 tiny o-rings and have to insert them into tiny holes.  Assembly time has to be considered.

I only mention the above thinking to demonstrate that easy attaching/detaching of the sides is important and is under consideration.  When the fine points of implementation are considered it’s not as quite as simple as it seems at first blush.

A custom injection molded plastic cap that slides over the top of the rest and is held in position with one thumb screw would be ideal.  The problem with that is having molds made is expensive and production needs to be scaled to thousands of units for acceptable ROI.  And… the Kallyrest just ain’t there yet.  It’s the details of actual implementation and production considerations that always turn into a head-scratcher.

My current thinking that sides will attach with two small thumb screws (like the screws on the ATF-10G) at the top of the rest and two regular flat head screws in the lower holes.  Not as slick as I would like, but in reality would only take about a minute to attach/detach.  

Please keep the great feedback and idea coming!  It is super appreciated and every idea is seriously considered.

[blgentry]

So I made a video of me carving some meat.  In this case, Top Round London Broil.  Which doesn't have much to do with knives, even though there's a knife in the video.

Amazingly, this video now has more than 4 times the number of views of my top knife video (minus my several year old WorkSharp Ken Onion video).  Almost 1000 views in about 3 days.  Guess people are more interested in food than knives.  Who knew?!?

Is anyone here interested?  Maybe so here it is:





Brian.

[Mike Brubacher]

I'm going to post a video of me tying my shoes, Brian, to see if I can "outview" you on YouTube. Everyone has to tie their shoes.

[blgentry]

I'm going to post a video of me tying my shoes, Brian, to see if I can "outview" you on YouTube. Everyone has to tie their shoes.

Haha!

Believe it or not, there's a guy that has a fairly popular web site that has cataloged some enormous number of ways to lace and tie shoes.  I was briefly using one of his methods on a problem pair of shoes I have where the laces come untied often.

I'll save you the google search.  Go on.  You know you wanna look.

https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/knots.htm

Brian.

[grepper]

You’re right Brian.  Not only did I want to look, I had to look!  So I did.

Then I put on my shoes.  I’ve been tying my shoes my whole life and never gave it a second thought.  However this time it was different.  When I went to tie them I suddenly became overwhelmed and froze in confusion.   Too many choices of knots.  Too many possibilities!  I was lost.  Hopelessly and forever lost.  In a helpless state of consternation I just gave up and put on my slippers.