It's a lot of work, usually, to establish a new bevel angle and put a mirrored edge on it.
The Sharpmaker is good at maintaining a bevel that is already set at 30 degrees or 40 degrees. But it's not good at producing that bevel, especially if the factory edge is quite a bit more obtuse or uneven, which is common.
A 40-degree edge is more robust, less likely to dent or roll or chip on challenging tasks. But it doesn't cut quite as well as a 30-degree edge (15+15 degrees). The high-end steels will easily take a 30-degree edge.
A hybrid edge can be made using a 30-degree primary bevel and then adding a 40-degree microbevel. The microbevel -- which is like an edge on an edge -- adds strength to the edge. It's really easy to keep the microbevel sharp with the Sharpmaker because it requires you to remove very little metal.
The first step to sharpening your edge with the Sharpmaker is to find out what kind of edge you have on your blade. If you paint the edge with a Sharpie and make a dry pass with the stones set at 30 degrees and at 40 degrees, you'll get a rough idea of what your dealing with. Spyderco tends to use more acute factory edges on its high-end steels. Chances are that the 40-degree stones will scrape off the Sharpie ink at or very near the working edge, which means that you can use the 40-degree stones to sharpen the edge.
Chances are that the 30-degree stones will scrape off the Sharpie ink near the edge shoulders, which means it won't sharpen the edge until you reprofile the edge to 30 degrees.
You have two good choices if you want to use the 30-degree stones to sharpen your edge. 1) You can send your knife off to one of of the sharpening gurus on the forum to establish a perfect 30-degree primary bevel. Or 2) you can purchase a guided, diamond-based sharpening system like Wicked Edge or a guided system with a variety of very coarse stones, such as the Edgepro. There are cheaper guided systems, too, but make sure you can get coarse stones or diamonds to remove metal move efficiently.
The key to sharpening is to raise a burr on each side. The burr is a smear of metal that the stones push off the working edge of the side you're sharpening. The burr gets smeared to the other side. You can feel it by scraping your fingers perpendicular to the opposite side you're sharpening. The idea of sharpening is to raise and remove the burr along the entire edge of both sides. You remove the burr by reducing pressure on your stones and by moving progressively though finer and finer stones.
The mirrored edge is more work. It starts with a perfect bevel profile that you create with coarse stones. You have to be able to match this angle throughout the sharpening process. Some people with a lot of experience and skill can do this freehand. Most can't, so you'll need a guided sharpening system. The Sharpmaker is a guided system, but it's a little loosey-goosey for a mirrored edge because not many people can maintain a perfectly vertical stroke from start to finish.
To get the mirrored edge, you progressively move through finer and finer stones. You can't make too large a jump in stones, and you can't move on from each stone until you've removed all the deep scratches left by the previous stone.
) There are several users around here that have and use the DMT Aligner kit.