Question about Spyderco Sharpmaker.

[taiChiFighter]

I've been looking for a sharpening system that is effective, useable in the field, versatile enough to sharpen larger 6-7" blades and, ideally, do serrations. There are systems that do one or more of these but the only thing that seems to meet all of my requirements is the Sharpmaker with the caveat that it sucks at re-profiling. Isn't that problem solved with the diamond stones or am I missing something?

Ps. The edgepro apex looked good but it isn't designed for the field and won't do serrations.

 

[philuk44]

I'm too cheap to buy the diamond stones. I've had some success with "wet and dry" sandpaper wrapped around the standard stones and held in place with a clip for re-profiling. I'm not one of the sharpening gods on here but the sharpmaker gives me some pretty good results. I find a very light touch is best when finishing an edge.

Give the sharpmaker a try - it should do all you need of it.

 

[njadam78]

Even with the diamonds its still pretty slow at reprofiling. Its does reprofile but depending on how much steel has to be removed it can take hours. But its does a great job on knives you dont have to reprofile. Id say its great for the money. Becareful you dont round your tip. Always stop with the tip still on the stone.

 

[MTHall720]

I have recently decided that for a lot of my blades the Diamond rod that I have does well in most cases but I still use my coarse DMT Diamond for reprofiling.

 

[HoosierQ]

I love the tool but life is too short to try reprofiling with it. I would think the diamond rods would be better, but not great...the rods are just not big enough. I freehand with diamond plates and then, sometime, finish the job off with the Sharpmaker. My little saying is that, excellent tool that it is, it should really have been called the Sharpkeeper. Heck, there have been times when I reprofiled with a mill bastard file, then took sandpaper to smooth things out, gave it a few laps on the diamond stones, and then brought in the SharpMaker. I am very please with the result.

 

[jbmonkey]

i don't know about field use. you'd need a flat level surface. better to just carry a stone with you and freehand, imho.

i like the sharpmaker and the diamond rods are not course enough to do reprofiling quickly other than really soft and poorly heat treated steels. i finally bit the bullet since i didn't want to spend the big bucks to move to a egde pro or wicked edge setup. so i grabbed some of the congress 60 grit ruby and 80 grit mold master stones. i also grabbed some 120 grit res-cut ones. the triangle ones.

the only downside of the triangle ones i've seen in buying 6 of them is some are thicker than others which changes the angle slightly. my way around that came about with two low tech solutions to this issue. one was shimming the smaller stones to have the same angle, as the thicker ones. the other was to rubberband the top of the stones together to have the same consistent angle across the grits.


now i can re-profile using what i call the ctssss(crimson tide shooter sharpmaker sharpening style. cmae from a video he posted) very quickly. cut down terribly ground bevels on a 8cr13mov knife in like 20-30 passes to 30 degree inclusive or 15 degrees per side. moved on to a queen d2 country cousin butter knife edge. worked on it for maybe 8 minutes last time and made a huge dent in the work. i should mention i had been working with the sharpmaker diamond rods for days and made little to no progress on the d2.

so the point of this rambling is/was...i think the sharpmaker is not so great for field use, but depends on what one's definition of "field use" is?

the sharpmaker works great to re-profile is you use the course congress tool stones. i'd prefer sypderco make their own courser stones for this sharpener, but these congress while not perfect work and make re-profiling fast and easy.

 

[pwet]

they should produce a full range of diamond stones ... moldmasters, ruby etc will wear, and flattening them back won't be possible long term as the stones won't fit. in the other hand, the stones are inexpensive enough to make it affordable, don't know how fast they wear.

 

[boki_zca]

Get a Norton coarse/fine india stone! Thats all you need, and theyre cheap too!