Tormek Customer For Life!

[lights_out]

Hello all! My name is Steve and since I bought my T7 last August I have been sharpening anything and everything in and around my house that has an edge on it. I LOVE MY T7!!! I've tried many other systems and this is by far the best and most fun of them all! I've been lurking around here for months, reading and soaking up as much information as I could, but something happened to me recently that had to be shared.

More than anything else I use my T7 to sharpen knives. I've gotten pretty good using the SVM-45 knife sharpening jig. Recently I noticed that after I sharpened the second side of a knife, the bevels didn't match, one being wider than the other. After checking using a straight edge, sure enough there was a difference of 5 degrees. I e-mailed Tormek telling them about my problems and hoping that it may be covered under warrantee. While waiting for a reply I saw that my SVM-45 had somehow gotten bent, which was odd since I never dropped it. So I put it into my bench vise and tried to straighten it. I learned two things that day: 1) aluminum doesn't bend; 2) aluminum snaps. Guess what happened next... SNAP, right at the shank. Man was I bummed.

Shortly after I got the reply from Tormek customer service suggesting I try a couple of things, but they too concluded the jig had gotten bent. I replied back telling them it doesn't matter as I snapped it. Tormek customer service replied again telling me how sorry they were that I broke it, and they would send me out a new one free of charge. I was floored! I couldn't believe that they were going to replace an item that I broke. Well, Tormek just got a customer for life! I was a fan of Tormek before all this happened but now they can add me to their list of die hard supporters!!! I just wanted to share how well Tormek takes care of their customers.

[Mike Fairleigh]

Kudos for Tormek customer service, for sure.  However - I've noticed (and I've seen this posted elsewhere also) that the knife jigs do not hold the knife perfectly centered on the long axis of the jig.  In other words, when you clamp a knife into either of the jigs, only one side of the jig adjusts outward to accommodate the knife; the other side is fixed.  So, the thicker the blade, the greater the offset.  For knives of "normal" thickness, such as kitchen knives, the offset probably won't be noticed.  But for thicker blades, the result is very noticeable, even problematic, because you end up with a difference in grind angle, and therefore bevel width, on each side of the blade.  I'd love to hear from Tormek with any advice on this issue.

In theory this could be addressed with a different knife jig, but it seems like a difficult thing to engineer and still maintain the strength and simplicity of the existing jigs.

[lights_out]

I read about the thicker blade issue in another thread and it does make sense. However, I tested the jig using a straight edge of about 1/8th inch thickness and it was reading about a 5 degree difference between sides. Then by looking at the profile you could see the jig was slightly off. Anyways, unprecedented response by customer service.