I’m positive I’ll wax all poetic about all of the ones I’ve got at some point, but as you would expect I have quite a wide variety of sharpening gizmoes and whatsits from various eras. One of them is indeed a Spyderco Sharpmaker.

At the moment I’m rather enamored of my Ruixin RX-009, which is one of those stone-on-a-stick guided sharpening jigs like unto the EdgePro Apex and its myriad derivatives. In fact, the OG Ruixin sharpner (which I used to have one of, and finally managed to give away) was pretty much a 1:1 clone of the EdgePro, and seems to be what kicked off the exploding popularity of similar devices. I like how this version has a clamp which grabs your knife and keeps it in place, and there’s a mechanism built in wherein you can flip the blade over to work both sides alternately while keeping it in the same position every time. This is absolutely bomber for bullying wonky edges back into trueness and/or your preferred edge angle, although it does have some inherent physical limitations in both what size blades you can fit into it — small ones are tricky — and also what angles it can achieve before you hit your own clamps with the stone, also depending on the size of the blade.

Hardcore internet knife bro types will insist that there’s absolutely no other way to sharpen a knife properly except freehand on a (optionally very expensive) set of bench stones, because any other sharpening jig is inherently limited in flexibility and “only” a bench stone can sharpen “all” knives. This is self-evidently high octane horseshit, because just to name two examples it’s very difficult to sharpen recurved blades (karambits, essentially) and serrated knives with a large flat bench stone. But being able to freehand it is still not a bad skill to have.

I’m of the opinion it really doesn’t matter much how you arrive at the conclusion of a sharp knife only provided you can do so in the first place, and preferably without dealing wanton damage your knife’s steel in the process.