After one year - EZE-LAP Knife Sharpening Stone

I bought three 8 x 3" stones about a year ago: coarse, medium and fine. I'm hobbyist woodworker but I'd say in the last year each plate has seen a few hundred sharpenings between my tools and knives.

Overall I'm very content with the stones' performance. The coarse cuts quickly, as expected. It does lose the initial 'grab' after a dozen or so sharpenings, but that's to be expected after the stone is worn in. I'd say it now takes me just a few strokes (with pressure) to get a burr on a chisel on the coarse plate. Some abused plane irons take up to a minute - but hey, it's still only a minute. Medium and fine still cut aggressively, though noticably slower than the coarse.

I do a coarse to medium to fine to a strop loaded with green paste progression. The whole thing takes only a couple of minutes per tool and the edge is always great. Perhaps not as refined as when using my Arkansas stones, but at a fraction of time and with much less mess. Bottom line is that the stones cut so fast and require so little effort that I no longer dread resharpening my tools (and sometimes do it several times in a course of a particularly long session in the shop).

After one year, the corase stone, seeing the most abuse, has still plenty of juice left (and I've worn two diamond plates to nil in the past so I know what that feels like). At this rate I'd expect a couple more years at least, and maybe even a few more. The other two could last me a lifetime.

The only negative I can thiink of is that the fine and the coarse stones don't 'feel' perfectly flat. It is especially perceptable on the fine stone - there's almost a barely perceptible 'wavy' pattern, but I don't think this affects the quiality of my edges at all. Even for lapping whetstones I'd say the stones would more than suffice. All in all, this didn't seem like worth taking a star off.

Overall highly satisfied. Would definitly buy again.