Sharpening the tips with sharpmaker

[Shevlock]

I have a benchmade model 43 bali, and its my only knife. I'm sort of new to knives in general, but I can put a pretty good edge on the knife with the sharpmaker... except for the centimeter or so to the tip. The tip itself is pretty dull as a result... and I'd like to get the whole thing shaving sharp.

What am I doing wrong?

 

[MBWirenut]

You can push out on the blade so it makes better contact, or what I do is manually sharpen the tip. lay the rods in bottom of the holder and use them like a stone.

 

[KeithAM]

Mark the edge with a magic marker. Then do 10 or so strokes on the Sharpmaker medium rods. I suspect it will show you that the rod is hitting the edge on most of the blade, but not at the tip. This means that the edge bevel at the tip is greater than 40 degrees inclusive.

You have a couple of choices if this is the case. First, you can, as MBWIrenut suggests, freehand sharpen the tip. For this, a course stone will be much faster than the Spyderco medium rods. If you don't already have some experience with freehand sharpening, however, the result may not look all that great, if that matters to you.

The other option is to reprofile on the Sharpmaker. For this you could use the medium rods, which may take a long time, of you could hold a course stone against the Sharpmaker rod to establish the angle. I reprofiled a couple of knives last night using the latter method -- I held an extra course diamond hone against the Sharpmaker rod in the 30 degree "back bevel" position. It worked very well.

In either case use the marker to check your progress.