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The Worksharp 3000 is on sale at Amazon for $176.32. They usually go for right around $200. I haven't been looking at them for a while so it is possible that this price is common now.

I have seen these in action and if I didn't need so many other things I'd be all over this. But I might start dropping some serious hints.

http://www.amazon.com/Work-Sharp-WS3000 ... IQAKDSQD5X

Recently, they were going for $125. Check camelcamelcamel

OK, that was not entirely accurate. The maker of the Worksharp 3000 was selling them for $125. I kick myself for not getting one. Even worse, Sears mispriced them at $14 once. A number of people got them at that price!

Mike

I would be very interested to know the opinions of anyone here who used to sharpen their tools the old fashioned way and now uses one of these. Is it a good investment?

I have one, and I use it, but I rarely use the little chisel sharpening part on the side. I also bought the table for sharpening wide blades, and it comes with a clamp, similar to the Eclipse clamp and a little jig for setting the blade angle. I now do all my sharpening on the top of the tool with the table and the clamp. It's much easier to keep it square. It costs more than a good diamond stone and a good 8000 water stone combination, so, in truth, it's probably not worth it for chisels and plane irons. It has some cool capabilities for specialty tool sharpening with a wheel that you can see through for positioning the tool to the bottom of the wheel, but I don't do much of that. Haven't even used that wheel. I do like the results I get with it, though, and the little angle setting jig has a flip method of changing the setting to produce a micro bevel that's nice if you want one.

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Waddy

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I sold my DuoSharp C/XC and Norton 4000 and 8000 grit stones in order to buy one two summers ago. I ended up regretting it, sold the machine at a loss, and had to bought the stones again.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

I have had one for about 18mo I finally sat down with it, a scary sharp setup and norton 1k4k and 8k stones and compared them. For me if I start at 400 and went up to 3600 on the Worksharp I could get consistant results very quickly, sharp enough to shave hairs on my arm. I think the novice can get pretty good results, just take it easy and don't push very hard. BTW I would look on ebay for one.

Richard

James,

What was it about the Worksharp that made you decide to go back to stones? Just curious. I'm working on improving my sharpening, but it has been slow going.

John

I use one of these but only for the rough bevel grinding on my mini-plane irons. The problem for me with any power, spinning, sharpening tool like this is that it is not possible to get a truly flat surface on the back side of a plane iron or chisel. Even in the demo video that came with the unit you can see that when flattening the back of a chisel all the guy did was mess it up.

After I get the 30 degree bevel I want on my blades with the power unit I then switch to flattening the back of the iron and honing the bevel by hand with a honing guide. The way I use it is great for me because I save tons of time grinding the bevels on freshly hardened plane irons.

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