I have done 1.5 knives with Choseras. The blades are 3" and the last 1/8" at the tip is not polished. On the 2nd one I started tonight I made a focused effort to lay the stone flat on tip (using tip to heel, edge trailing strokes). I have gone through my first 3 stones and still have this problem. It looks about like 1000#. (Did 100 to 1000 diamonds first).

I was afraid about getting more tip in the stone in fear of rounding of the tip.

Anyone else had this problem?

Do I just need to put the tip a hair more into the stone?

If the spine tapers toward the tip, the fixed sharpening angle actually decreases as the spine of the knife gets thinner. This requires more work toward the tip of the knife.

However, there is also the possibility of some flexing at the tip away from the stones from too much pressure.

First I would try easing up on the pressure with the 2K or 3K Chosera to see if that helps get that last bit of the tip. If not, then I would step back to the 400 or 600 diamonds and do a little more scrubbing toward the tip, then even it out with some sweeping passes before heading back to the Choseras.

I hope this helps!

Thanks Tom,

The knife is a Benchmade mini griptilian in 154 cm and a Benchmade 525 in CPM M4. I am using very light pressure and these blades are pretty stiff. I know for sure that the entire tip was completely sharpened by the diamond stones without missing any spots.

I will drop back to 400 and try again, less pressure, making sure I am getting all the way to the tip.

BTW, my angle cube seems to work very well. I have the upgraded arms and dialed in both diamonds and choseras to 15 +/- 0.5 degrees.

How many strokes do you do on your first chosera after the last diamond stone?

not sure if the choseras are the same but I don't count strokes. I go by appearance and feel/sound. For me, it works better because I am prone to losing count while I sharpen.

Given the knives and the steel, it's probably a distal taper, even if it is very slight. In that case it's just a matter of monitoring your progress at each grit.

As for the number of strokes I use, I'm of the mind of "when in doubt, use more product"

There is no set number of strokes that work for everything. You need to account for the steel type, abrasion resistance and hardness. I generally do a lot of strokes, especially on the coarser grits. I scrub until I get the burr/scratches established on both sides of the blade, then sweep until it is a uniform as possible, maybe 100+ sweeping strokes, and then I do another 20-30 very slow and light sweeps before going to the next level.

You do need to check the progress at each level. A 0.1 degree variation can cause issues as you go higher in grit since the stones become less aggressive and might not be able to compensate for the variation. The new arms on the WEPS are super accurate, and you can really dial in the angle cube, but it never hurts to manually check the edge under magnification to make sure the edge of the edge is being abraded.

Thanks Tom,

I started over last night with the 400 choseras and everything is working fine. The rough spots on the tip disappeared quickly. I just angled the stone a little more towards the tip. I just wasn't getting all the way on tip before. It was just a matter a adjusting to the feel. At first i thought I was going to round the tip off or cut the tip into the stone. But in the end I put a little more tip in the stone and it worked great. Just a different feel from the diamonds, which don't has as much feedback.