Model crushes mesh when pressing 3 to smooth

[Anonymous]

Hello, beginner to Maya here. I am following a Udemy tutorial to make a K-bar knife and am constantly running into an issue where when I press the 3 key to smooth the model it either crushes into a spiky mess, vanishes or flies off the window. I have no idea what causes it or how to fix it other than constantly having to press the 3 key to see if any edits to vertexes/edges/faces trigger it. Please help, I'm at my wits' end. I've attached screenshots of what it looks like before and after I press the 3 key. 

[mspeer]

Hi!

This could be a problem of your object or the GPU / driver.

Without a scene-file i can't say which of these 2 is responsible.

[Lindsey_Robbins]

You have a lot of faces converging at that one point in the center. Anything more than 5 points into once spot can cause weirdness. Not sure if that has anything at all to do with your smoothing problem, but in general, that's a thing to be avoided. 

[Anonymous]

Here's the files!

[Anonymous]

I think it is better if you show the mesh. Anyway, even with something crazy shouldn't be crashing. Somebody said that more than 5 edges vertex causes weirdness, that is not true.

[Anonymous]

You can always apply a "smooth" on the mesh and see how it behaves.

[mspeer]

Hi!

That's an image and not a Maya scene-file.

Please upload the Maya scene-file (".ma" or ".mb", maybe ZIP it first).

If you don't want to make the scene public, you can also send me a link in a Private Message.