I moonlight as a sharpener, mostly kitchen knives. My "thing" is high end Japanese blades. Those kinds of knives I do on synthetic and/or natural Japanese water stones. I also have a couple of belt grinders with a wide variety of belts. My favorite is a modded Kalamazoo 1" x 42" machine. It runs at around 1800 rpm, just about perfect for sharpening, and it has a 1/3 horse Baldor motor. My next purchase will be some of the CBN emulsions my buddy Ken has developed for Bark River.

The only minor "knock" on the WS for me is that for the same money you could get a decent 1" x 30" belt machine. The latter is more versatile and has a much, much wider array of belts. A regular grinder can used to fix tips or do heavy repairs, something the WS isn't really set up to do. But if you just want to sharpen a regular household-type volume of knives I would think the WS would work well.