David Weaver
agreed - i missed or forgot if you've mentioned before that you've gone to the dry ceramic matrix stones.

Beginners are often battered with suggestions that they need a lot of steps or really fine stones, presumably in an effort to help them find success without understanding what's going on, and probably in some cases, because the instructor is selling stones (at least one that I can think of).

ritualistic routines just point people away from using hand tools, though, or such things as choosing a skew rabbet plane over a square one (which is a functional improvement of vast amounts, and no harder to keep sharp freehand, but with jigs, it becomes a debacle).

When people say they can't freehand sharpen, I suggest that they buy a washita stone, put a fresh grind on an iron, and freehand the tip of the iron only and work the back and then strop on leather. When the response is that they have better edges than they've gotten before, it's not because the stone is fine (unlikely that they'll have that touch yet), but rather because the get a quick method that they'll actually *do* and can do less than perfectly and still get good results. It's better to go from there to finer than to try to troubleshoot why a fine stone "isn't working right" when it's not touching the edge in the first place. Very easy to add fineness to an already well sharpened iron.