>>2716870For bulk sharpening, and I’m speaking from personal experience, power sharpening is the way. Something like a Tormek, if the t8 is too expensive, consider the t4, t8 is better, t4 will work fine and is about $500 to start up. Once you get the work flow down, especially with the 600 diamond wheel, you can pump through knives in like 6-8 minutes or faster.
If you can’t afford to start with something like a Tormek off the bat, consider a knock off like a Grizzly. Less precise but workable, especially if you mod it a bit and use Tormek jigs.
If you just want to free hand and use stones, you will definitely want some good diamond plates… cheap ones are serviceable, but a DMT Diasharp plate will late many years of use and is t that much more expensive. You’ll want a Coarse and Fine and a good paddle strip (preferably with diamond emulsion compound). You can get this all for around $100, and it will just take practice to get good with it. If you want to offer a more premium service like higher polish, you could get some water stones to use past the fine DMT.
When it comes to high end set angle systems like the Wicked Edge, Tsproff, KME, EPA, ect… they are really good at doing high precision work but it’s really hard to make them into a good source of income. They are pretty slow, so unless you can build up a lot of clients who are willing to pay for $30-$40 edges… even then you will be working with a bunch of very high end pocket knives that comes with a lot of liability and dealing with shipping…
If it’s lower end clients (like flea market sharpening), you can probably get away with a belt sander, but you really need to practice discretion, you can fuck up a knife so fast with a belt sander. Disclaimer: sharpening knives on belts is bad and should not be done on not junk knives, it will over heat the bevel, and it will lower the temper at the edge apex… but if you are sharpening at a flea market… ehhh not that bad
