The alternative for a sharpening steel?

[EOU]

Would only add this, Ed, to what's been discussed here. Clips are favored by our medical/scientific customers because of their precision and repeatability in measuring highly polished and extremely sharp edges. People who deal in the 7-20 BESS range don't give a hoot about how their edges compare to razor blades or chef's knives. They just know that a 10 worked well on their last laboratory slide and will likely work well again on the next. We sell lots and lots of clips, industrial and consumer, for plenty of other good reasons as well. Clips may be de-tensioned prior to use by wiggling the upright arms back and forth which will then yield precise BESS scores or... you can add 20% to any tensioned clip score to arrive at a very close approximation of a BESS C score. We don't de-tension around here, we just add 20% if we're interested in comparing to traditional BESS scores.