Thread: Warthog Knife Sharpener Question

Well, I had a play round with the new sharpener today (Spyderco Gauntlet) and thought I'd report back for anyone interested.

I like it. Not a hell of a lot there to look at for the money, but it does seem to sharpen knives easily and well. If you want to see how it works there are various videos around that explain it better than I can. So just a few thoughts:

> The standard ceramic rods would be all that you need to bring a knife back from 'normal' bluntness. A few strokes each side of a slightly/reasonably blunt knife and it was well sharp enough for most tasks. A quick lick on a leather strop with green compound to finish and it would shave hair off my arm no trouble.

> The CBN rods are aggressive. They're supposed to be 400gr and probably they'll smooth up a little in use, but for now they certainly pull off the steel. They're good though - I used them on a well-abused Swiss Army Knife and it cleaned up the edge nicely. You might think that going from the 400gr CBN straight to the 1000gr ceramic is too much of a jump, but it seems to work. I just sharpened with the CBN a few degrees below the standard 40 (see below), then went back to 40 when I used the ceramic and got quickly to the point it only needed a strop to be shaving sharp.

> Reading up on this before purchase, plenty of the 'experts' on the overseas forums lamented that the angle is preset at 40degrees inclusive (same as the lowest setting on the Warthog), can't be adjusted lower, and that's why they wouldn't be buying one. Well I think that's pretty funny, because after taking it out of the pack and looking at it for a couple of minutes it was pretty obvious you can change the effective angle just by rotating the base. Have it sitting on the table in front of you like normal and it'll sharpen at 40degrees. Spin the whole sharpener 90degrees and the effective sharpening angle is zero (i.e. the rods are straight up and down from where you're standing). Put it halfway between (i.e. 45degree base rotation) and you'll be sharpening at about 29 degrees. The whole thing is basically adjustable to as fine an increment as you feel like measuring. Want to have your outdoor knives at 40 deg and your kitchen knives at 30 deg? No problem. Want to have a primary bevel at 30 deg and a microbevel at 40 deg? No worries. This may not work so well with the triangular stones on the sharpmaker model, but fine with the 'cats-eye' stones on this version.

> Works well for small knives as well as large - particularly the small pocket knife blades that you couldn't grab with a lansky clamp and which I have trouble setting my lansky magnetic holder up for.

> One thing that did keep cropping up when I read about diamond or CBN rods (regardless of manufacturer) was the need to sharpen with a very light touch. Too heavy won't break the diamonds themselves but they'll be pulled off the plated surface of the hone. If there is truth to the Warthog sharpeners wearing out hones (and I don't have one so this is just guessing) I wonder if the springs are a touch too heavy? Particularly at the higher set angles maybe the hones are a little too hard for the knife to push away during the stroke?

Anyway, my lansky and magnetic holder setup will still get use for major edge work and one or 2 specific knives, but this will serve the purpose I bought it for. Thanks for all the advice that got me to this point.