My blades aren flat on the sides – whats the deal?
A – Generally, less expensive blades are of constant thickness, with flat sides. As you get into the more expensive blades, you may see two features: they may be tapered from front to back (wider at front, narrower toward back), and they may be “side honed” (material ground from the sides so that instead of being flat, they are concave). Depending on the blade design, side honing may create a sharper bite angle at the edge. It definitely makes a blade harder to sharpen with level edgees. A blade design variation worth noting is the “Coplanar”. These blades have the high quality steel and stronger construction of high-end blades, but are of constant thickness throughout, thus easy to sharpen well. In addition, they have a unique mounting geometry with certain claimed advantages (because of their flat, coplanar mounting plates, they can be repositioned on the boot without changing the blade angle.).
