18 to 20 degrees works for me ....

here is a nice article http://sharpeningmadeeasy.com/Juranitch1977Feb.htm

and here http://www.caseyspm.com/Knives.html

Smaller angle on the coarser stones until very sharp and then a couple of degrees larger for the edge finish on very fine stones (burr removal). This makes it just the slightest bit duller but the edge stands up much longer.

It seems he sharpens with a large angle idk,  maybe 20-30 and he doesnt grind it all that hard, not too hard not too soft,  one motion for each side of the edge,  in our house we have lots of sharpening systems,  those fixed ones that u just run the edge through,  and old fashioned 3 stage sharpening stone, diamond hone, ceramic, steel,  I just have to learn proper technique

i sharpen knives by rubbing them against a whetstone till it's sharp. i don't give a damn about angle, stropping, etc. if it removes metal in the direction i want it to, it's sharpening it.

My father was a master knife sharpener/maker.  Sadly, I never quite got his touch, but I have improved gradually over my lifetime.  I can get a quality knife sharp enough to shave my arm with,  which is good enough for me.  There's one thing that I've found that would probably be helpful to everyone.  Slow down.  You can apply the exact same pressure to identical knives on identical whet stones, using identical angles, but if one knife is moving quickly over the stone and the other very slowly, there will be a world of difference. You have to move your knife slowly enough to feel a heavy drag on it as you sharpen.  If you go just a tiny bit too fast that drag will instantly disappear completely.  The slow knife will sharpen in much less time and better than the one that's moving quickly over the stone.  This tactic can make all the difference in the world.

can someone explain what the burr is? when i sharpen knives i never get it, but occasionally i get a fuzzy line of metal- like all the metal has collected on the edge. sharpening the other way doesn't even come close to removing it, so i just wipe it off.

The "burr" is a wafer-thin strip of metal that appears at the edge of the blade when you're sharpening, once you have made the bevel on each side meet at a V.

I'll tell you a little about how to detect a bevel.

Imagine you have been sharpening the left side of your knife. Holding it by the handle, you've been making a left-to-right motion like you're trying to slice a piece off the top of your sharpening stone.

Still holding the knife by the handle in the "saber grip" (with the blade coming out of your fist like a thumb), bring it up so that the edge is to the ceiling and the point is toward your face. (Be careful, of course.) You're staring at the tip of the blade, with the edge up.

The burr that you will have raised will be a very thin wafer, bent away from the vertical toward the right.

Now, look at the right side of the blade with the spine toward your face, edge away. (The point will be pointing left.) Look down at the flat side of the blade at an angle, and from where your eyes are, shine a white or blue LED flashlight down at that same angle. Make sure that you don't reflect the light straight back off the flat of the blade into your eyes. Since the burr will be flipped up from the plane of the blade, it will reflect back a thin, halo-like edge at you.

Your next step will be to lightly grind the right side of the blade, at a slightly steeper angle than before (i.e. you pull the spine a little higher off the stone) to try to strip away this little wafer of metal. The burr will feel to your finger as though it's razor sharp, and it is, but it's just a weak wafer, as I said. Try cutting with it and it will either fold or break and your knife will be dull again.

It takes very gentle pressure to grind off the burr. Too much, and you will just create a burr on the other side! What you need to do is grind it very gently on one side, then very gently on the other, back and forth, one stroke per side, lighter each stroke. Eventually the burr gets shrunk down to nonexistence. Use the LED trick to check your progress. You'll know you're finished when you look closely at the edge as I described, and instead of seeing the reflected light from the burr, the light just drops off the edge of the blade into the distance. The actual edge bevel should not be reflecting light at you.