One reason for the thrift store recommendation is to learn/practice Steve's by hand technique.
One other thing that I think would be a good item to have is a ceramic hone. I was asked to sharpen some knives by my friends restaurant recently. I took them home, cleaned them and ran them over the leather wheel then the hone. That was all they needed and my friend found out the hard way, how sharp they were. (cut himself without noticing)
Now I bought them the T4 and for their uses, they are excited at how easy it is and it saves me some time. (and I get to play with it)
Enjoy your time with the new toy.
I'll hitting up the thrift store and Goodwill this evening. I need some more things to practice with. I'll be bringing my other sharpening systems with me to the market. Yesterday I did about 6 more chisels. Those are a cakewalk. Just need to be sure everything is squared up.
I then grabbed every pair of scissors in the house. I started with the really cheap (the Bic lighters of scissors) just in case that went sideways.
Turns out, the scissors were even easier than the chisels.
I then moved on to my axes. I had one that looked as if it were used to break up concrete. It was all messed up.
Those came out beautiful as well. I'm rather sure they've never had a edge like this before.
Then...I tried some small disposable knifes....And here is when and where I learned that the Tormek can chew up a knife if everything is not setup correctly.
The first and cheapest of the knives was a 4 inch folding pocket knife. Manufacture unknown. I suspect that they may have been too embarrassed to put their name on it. It's now about 1/4 of the knife it once was.

The next 4 pocket knifes I did turned out beautiful. I'm going to clean them up and put them out for sale at the market.
This afternoon, I'll have a go at some fixed blade knifes. We'll see how that goes.
My goal is to become familiar enough with sharpening most everything that someone might bring me at the Farmers Market, that I'm not constantly referring back to my manual.
After jacking up that first knife, I'll have to be triple sure that everything is set up correctly each and every time. That was a lesson well learned.
The another issue I ran into yesterday was a horrible howling sound that started happening within a few minutes of starting the machine.
After isolating the location, I applied some wheel bearing grease to the stone/honing wheel shaft and it was quite once again. Not sure why that happened. At that point it had only been in used, since taking it out of the box, for maybe an hour. The manual mentioned having to grease the shaft once in a while. I was not expecting to have to do it so soon. Oh well....I'll add some axle shaft lube to my list of things to take with me to the market. That would have made me NUTS if I had to live with that for 4 hours at the market. These are the sort of things that I need to learn about and be prepared for.
I'm looking forward to seeing what I can find at the thrift store and Goodwill this afternoon. So far, the Tormek has been a pleasure to use. It appears to be very well thought out, designed and engineered. EVERYTHING works as designed. There have been a few little quirks here and there but nothing surprising and certainly not show stopping.
I suspect that I'm going to run out of items to practice on well before the weekend is over.

Thanks for the tips and suggestions, please keep them coming.