I don't remember off the top of my head if a Tormek is vertical or horizontal -- if the stone is vertical is will grind a slight hollow in the bevel (the wheel is 9 or 10 inches in diameter I think). Not a huge issue unless you have ground them with a very blunt angle on each side.
I use a fairly simple trick for determining my sharpening angle on a blunt knive (or one sharpened on a pull through sharpener, as they always seem to leave very wide sharpening angles and huge shoulders -- take a square cornered piece of paper and fold it in half through the corner. This give 1/2 of the original 90 degree angle -- this is what the total edge should look like on a Victorinox, roughtly 22 degrees on each side.
Fold the paper again through the point equally, and you will have 22.5 degrees, or roughly the angle at which the knife needs to be to the stone. Will get you quite close.
Now for the "I can't get a burr" part -- if this knife has been sharpened very much at a shallower angle, or sharpened quite a bit on a Tormek, it is likely very fat behind the edge. Two ways to check -- sight down the edge from the heel (known as the choil -- the knife should point directly away from your eyes so you see the cross-section of the blade from the heel) -- fairly fat with a steep bevel to the edge means the blade needs to be thinned, else it will wedge horribly, splitting things like carrots with the shoulders above the bevel rather than the edge cutting. Or you can simple hold the blade lightly in between your forefinger and thumb and slip from the spine down and off the edge. If you feel a distinct "lip" as they go off the edge, the knife is quite thick behind the edge.
If the knife is thick behind the edge and you are sharpening at an angle more acute than it has been sharpened in the past, it will take quite a while to grind off the excess steel. Took a long time on my friend's Vict. to get to the edge, it had been dragged through a pull-through a lot and was quite fat. Really needed to be thinned, but I didn't have time, just sharpened starting on my King Deluxe 300 to more like 15 degrees a side. Took long enough at that, and the tip is still blunt (a design feature, not a bug....).
I recommend the black Magic Marker trick, as you can easily see where you are grinding on the blade. You won't feel a burr until the bevel you are grinding intersects the bevel from the other side, and Vics are fairly tough. On a 1000 grit stone it's gong to take a while.
As far as pressure goes, the weight of your hand is plenty. Shaptons are pretty hard and don't wear quickly, but excessive pressure will dish them much faster without gaining much in grinding speed. If you are making black swarf (ground off metal) you are using enough pressure. Flip the knife fairly often so you don't displace the edge from the centerline of the blade by accident.
I think you will like the edge you get once you finally grind the knife to a proper bevel -- Vics are not the hardest knives out there, but once you get the grinding to shape done with proper bevels and possibly thinning, they stay sharp pretty well and will tolerate 15 degrees per side if you are careful with them. It won't be anywhere near as much hassle re-sharpen in the future if you touch it up often rather than letting it get into really bad shape before you do so.
I'm working on a pile of wood plane blades I obtained recently as an example of waiting far too long. These poor blades were visibly rounded off at the edge, I cannot imagine how much effort it must have take to force them to cut. Nicely smoothed off, no palpable edge at all by touch. I'm having to grind off at least half a millimter of steel on most of them to get rid of the rounded edge and to get a clean apex (plane blades are flat on one side, usually have a 25 or 30 degree bevel on the other). The steel is O1 at probably 60 RC -- it's taking a long time on a coarse diamond hone. Some of them may get a quick run with the bench grinder and a soft stone to remove the bulk of the metal, it takes forever on a 2" hard blade by hand!
A couple of minutes on an Arkansas stone a few times would have eliminated much of this effort....
Peter
lus1:
