How to Sharpen The Benchmade Mini Adamas
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The Benchmade Mini-Adamas is probably the toughest knife in their lineup. Not only does it feel really good in your hand, it also comes in two colors. Made with CPM CruWear (63-65 HRC), this is the hardest steel I have ever dealt with.
Unfortunately, it was duller than a dimwit out of the box. I was up for the challenge. Benchmade claims that their knives are sharpened at 15°. Don’t believe it. All Benchmade knives are sharpened by hand, so you need to find the angle, especially with the Mini-Adamas. The last thing you want is to reprofile the knife. I found the angle at 34° inclusive (17° on each side).
With steel this hard, it is imperative that you draw a burr on each side. I started with 100 grit diamond stones and kept stroking on one side until I finally drew a burr. I did the same thing on the other side. After that I went to town. I progressed through all the gits until I got to 3,000. After that I switched to diamond lapping film.
Normally I would strop with Nano cloth to finish up the job, but Nano cloth wouldn’t make much difference with steel this hard. The results are amazing, and the edge is worthy of such a fine knife.
Happy Sharpening!
Welcome to the Wicked Edge forum Wetworx:
For the new users of Wicked Edge Precision Sharpeners, (WEPS), it’s recommended you start learning to sharpen with your WEPS while sharpening your beater or junk knives. It’s best to save your good knives like your edc, you mentioned above, until your sharpening stones are well broken-in. This is usually about ten junk knives worth of sharpening wear put on your sharpening stones. Coincidentally, that is generally about the minimum about of sharpening experience it take most new users to figure out the basics to using the WEPS.
Make use of the “Knowledge Base” on the W.E. website. Watch YouTube videos on sharpening with a W.E, sharpener. Clay Allison, W.E. owner has a good YouTube library.
Also read through this forum. Most of what’s written here is geared to help the newcomers.
The WEPS will work well to sharpen just about any knife as long as you can clamp it securely in the vise jaws and reach it with the sharpening stones.
Save your Adamas for later.
Marc
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Making use of blue painters tape applied to the knife’s sides below the edge will protect the blade steel from unwanted scratches that can and will happen during sharpening. Also wrapping the knife’s slot and the hinge mechanism with the blue tape will keep steel dust and diamond abrasive out the knife’s works.
New stones as you use then during the break-in period will slough off any loose diamond abrasives along with producing excess steel dust due to the new sharpening stone’s roughness. The diamond dust and steel dust falls off markedly once your stones are well broken-in from use.
Marc
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D2… my favorite steel, simply because it’s air-hardened and so easier to make knives at home. Last fall I made 4 knives with D2 and heated them to 1850F in my propane mini forge. I quenched them between 2 thick aluminum plates and compressed air. I tempered them in a 450F oven for 2 hrs. They sharpen very nicely, but I wondered about their actual hardness, which I expected to be 59-60 rc.
Recently another forum member talked of buying a set of hardness testing files So I bought a set and they all skate, up to and including 65, leaving the steel unscratched. So, it seems D2 may get quite hard.
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