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So I pulled out my T-7 that I haven't used for a while.  I mainly use it for knives and the occasional chisel & plane iron.  I decided that I needed to fix all of the nicks in my chisels, so I trued the stone.  I dropped the support arm on the stone to check for high spots and then adjusted appropriately.  I haven't done this in a while, so I was following the manual and started with the diamond tip on the outside of the wheel.  For 3/4 the stone, the tip didn't even touch, and then it really dug in.  I dropped the microadjust by half (halfway between two number, about 0.005", not 180 degrees), and same experience.  Rinse and repeat.  Finally got a clean sweep across the stone, I think on the fourth or fifth try.

What did I learn?  I guess that I really lean on the right side of the stone.  To my eye against the support, the stone profile looked nice and true, but it was really triangular in shape.  Perhaps I should true more often.  I did get a lot of practice moving the tip at a uniform rate across the stone.  Some of those thread patterns were pretty cool looking.  In all, I think I went down about 0.05".  Not really too much.

Here I posted about 5 years ago about oboe reed knife sharpening.  It seems like a million years ago.  Somehow, Ken remembered that I had posted about it and asked how it was going.

The short story is that it isn't.

Here is the long story.  Click away if you don't want to read it.

I think that the reason my daughter picked oboe was that it was unique and difficult.  After her senior year in school she decided that she was basically done with music and that it was time for college.  She had no further interest in performing, marching band, or taking lessons.  Part of the issue was that her teacher moved to California, and she didn't like any of the three other teachers that we tried.  She still plays the piano, but no longer competes in it.

At first, I was a little annoyed, an oboe and all the accessories were quite pricy to acquire.  But at some point I have to let go, so I did.  I was able to sell the oboe for close to what I paid for it.  So the use of the oboe cost me about $200 for four years.  Just a large deposit.  The oboe specific stuff I sold to her original teacher in California at about my cost.  So no real money lost there.  I kept the DMT stones that I had bought.

The knife shown in the post was donated to the school.  With the environment in the schools, I wasn't comfortable with her carrying a knife.  In my mind it was an essential tool to properly play the oboe.  In the administration's mind it a weapon that would have, if she had been caught, resulted in her expulsion.  Nothing teaches no responsibility like not allowing any responsibility in the first place.  Therefore, it was donated to the music teacher, who kept it in his desk drawer.  To my knowledge, it never harmed any students.

The original teacher was very skeptical of the knife.  She admitted that it was sharp, but still considered the knife unusable.  I am not sure of why, she would never really articulate.  I suspect that like many of us, myself included, there is a natural resistance to change and things that are different.  I would like to think that if I had put in more effort, I could have worked with her to come to some conclusion, but I didn't.  I was too busy doing other things.

So I now have no oboe knives in my possession.  My daughter is a sophomore at Northern Arizona University studying Mechanical Engineering.  She works in the lumber department at The Home Depot.  She told me last week that she is planning on going to SE Asia over the summer of her junior year for fun. 

She is doing well.  I am doing well.  We are just not doing oboe stuff anymore.  I'm sorry if that doesn't really help anyone in sharpening, but if you need some info about oboes, I still talk to her original teacher on occasion.  Let me know if I can help out.

So I am kind of hit or miss on this forum.  I do read it a lot more than I post.  Ken sent me a PM about Edge on Up's products.  I went and took a look.  They look like fabulous products.  For the past few years, I have been contemplating how to "measure" sharpness.

I had a concept in my mind, that I didn't really do anything about.  It is very similar to Mr. Brubacher's Edge Testers.  Not the same, but similar.  Good for him, and too bad for me.  I guess that I should do something about the ideas floating around in the old nogin.

Oh, well, another opportunity lost.  Good Luck Edge on Up.

My wife has a big Boston Paper Cutter (I believed that they are called a guillotine stile) that is not sharp.

I breifly looked at it last night, and it looked to me that the blades were simply square.  Has anyone sharpened these?
One blade is on the swinging handle, and that other at a 90 angle on the bed.  Each one has about 4 screws holding them down.  I notieced that there apppeared to a be a curve somewhere in the process, but I don't know where.  If the handle is about halfway down, there is a gap where the two blades have already met, but where they are currently meeting, it doesn't look like there is any gap at all.  I don't know if the curve is in the blade, or in the handle.

Any help would be appreciated.  Each blade is about 24" long.

Thanks,
Brett

So my daughter is learning to play the oboe, and at a point where she needs to be making oboe reeds.

Her teacher seemed very dubious of using the T7 to sharpen oboe knifes them and was wondering if anyone here has done them before.  I agreed to get her some bench stones, but I still think that the T7 could do a better job, or at least as good of a job much quicker.

Anyway, one brand of knife has a different bevel angle on each side.  When I asked about that, I was told that it was to eliminate the burr, but that doesn't make any sense to me.  Any ideas as to why one would do this?

Thanks,
Brett