I just bought a Spyderco Sharpmaker and I can't get the dark stones into the holes...they appear to be bigger than the white stones!

Anybody encountered this? I'm afraid to be rough with them as I don't want to damage the plastic base...could give me bad angles.

Okay. I sort of got it to work but I've come to the conclusion that the grey rods are bigger than the white rods and that they're not pefectly equal. I can only get the one grey rod in if I use a particular rod on a particular end with a particular facing...and even then I had to lightly tap it in with a hammer.

Wasn't this supposed to be a high precision sharpener? I was about to resharpen my entire collection but I'm a lot less confident in this unit now.

Contact Spyderco. My rods are exactly the same size. Maybe you got a less than first quality set of rods.
You should be able to insert the rod on either end and in any orientation.

I agree with Billym. Spyderco should fix you up.

As I use them they're getting looser...though the white rods are quite sloppy in the one side.

I used it to sharpen my CRKT M16 and it's pretty damn sharp considering it's the first blade to go through this thing.

I'm going to call Spyderco on Monday.

I know mine were kinda tight when I bought it (which I suspected was for a good fight to help hold an angle), but thye did all fit in there. I would give them a call.

Very odd. I have two, and all the rods fit very precisely. Definitely call Spyderco. Their customer service is superb. I dropped a knife in a parking lot and it broke. Freak accident - it was clipped in my pocket, got snagged on the door frame walking into my motorhome and fell to the ground. They replaced it immediately, because Spyderco knives aren't supposed to break. In fact, they gave me 2 knives because the broken knife was long out of production, and cost twice as much as the current production similar knife.

Kevin B.

I've just sent an email to Spyderco as I've finally had an opportunity to measure the angles...unfortunately it's after I've already sharpened all my knives.

It became obvious to me once I started sharpening a hard knife with S30V steel that something was definitely wrong. The angle of the left and right sticks are both off. One isn't angled enough and the other is too angled (I'm not happy about what this has potentially done to nearly all my knives). There is also a difference between the angles of the course rods and the fine rods...which leads me to believe my knives aren't as sharp as they could be...or should be.

I think I'm going to dust off my Lansky system, pick up an extra course diamond hone for it and re-bevel everything...start from scratch using the Lansky. It might not be my favorite but it does make a sharp knife.

Over two months have past........
Now you have given up on the SM without giving Spyderco an opportunity to fix it. I would stick with the SM over the Lansky.

Are you sure your desk/bench/whatever-it’s-sitting-on isn’t just totally off level? If both sides are off by the same amount in the same direction, it might be something to check.