Belt sharpeners are the quick-grinding kings, but speed comes with costs. They’re noisy. Consumable belts are a secondary cost. And even with belt sharpeners marketed for kitchen use, we at GearJunkie recommend using a face mask to keep from inhaling steel dust if you’re grinding at low grits or for more than a few minutes at a time indoors.
At high speeds and high grits — especially on a belt with stiff backing — friction (particularly at the tip) can overheat a blade. Dunking a blade in water helps, but it can be messy and time-consuming, and (for folding knives) it can get rust-prone swarf in the pivot without cleaning. yellow polishing wheel
Systems like the Work Sharp Ken Onion MK.2 scale down the power and speed of a grinder. With more slack, the chances of the belt overheating a blade are lower — though that slack means that you’ll get slightly more of a convex edge. Adjustable angle guides make sharpening more precise and easier. That said, the dust and noise remain.
On the other end of the scale are powered grindstones. Although there are some systems like the Tormek T-1, which are meant to be used dry, the majority of grinding systems meant to be used for sharpening are water-cooled, like the Tormek T-4.
These are the behemoths of the list and easily the most complex systems. Their grinding wheel — either a whetstone, CBN, or diamond-embedded wheel — rotates through a water trough. They remove material incredibly fast. Running at low speed, they make little noise. With the stones constantly covered in a film of water, you’ll never overheat the blade, and the swarf collects neatly in the trough.
Wet grinding systems are endlessly customizable, with jigs for every occasion. However, unless you’re either sharpening professionally or working with tools that need to be sharpened regularly (landscaping, woodworking, cooking, etc.), it can be hard to justify the bulk and expense.
Kitchen sharpeners aren’t a class unto themselves. That said, keeping kitchen cutlery sharp comes with certain considerations.
Countertop space can come at a premium. A full suite of soaking whetstones or a large powered grinder of some sort can take up a lot of space. A belt sanding system could contaminate food around with steel dust.
On the upside, most kitchen cutlery steels are considerably softer than most EDC steels. Likewise, it’s easy to touch up kitchen knives on the regular.
Pull-through sharpeners are very popular for kitchen use because of their size and ease. However, we at GearJunkie don’t recommend most of them. Most pull-through sharpeners use thin blades of tungsten carbide oriented in a V-shape to scrape material from a blade.
Aside from limitations like being slow for heavy sharpening, a limited ability to change the angle, and how easy it is to be inconsistent when drawing a blade through, these carbide sharpeners can damage blade edges.
Carbide blades are brittle. Steel, like wood, has a grain. Grinding both sides of an edge while scraping off the burr by drawing steel along the grain against a brittle material, and putting pressure on a very thin cross-section of the edge at a time, is an easy way to chew it up.
Electric pull-through systems that sharpen one side at a time using a belt (like the Work Sharp Ken Onion MK.2) or a grinding wheel (like the Tormek T-1) are much better and faster. They also allow you to adjust the sharpening angle.
As long as you’re not cutting with a straight edge on glass or ceramic plates or cutting board (an activity that both frustrates and keeps professional sharpeners employed), which is just about the quickest way to chip and dull an edge, most of the time kitchen knives will only need quick touch-ups to realign the edge.
A steel honing rod or strop works really well for realigning and polishing. Ceramic hones or strops rubbed with a sharpening compound remove more material, making them better for light sharpening as well.
Most sharpeners tend to break down pretty neatly into a few different price brackets. On the ultra-budget end of the scale are the DIY solutions that run a few bucks: sandpaper clamped to a mousepad or a homemade strop of leather glued to a 2×4. Then you’ve also got your fully electric countertop rotary sharpeners, which can command north of $500. Consider what you’ll be sharpening most, and how nice of a polish you want to put on your blades.
The $15-35 range is where you typically find touch-up tools like quality strops, hones, and pull-through sharpeners. The Smith’s Diamond Combination Sharpener ($20) is a great field tool, but it won’t do much more than tune up an edge.
Bench stones, especially when comparing oil, whet, and diamond stones, can range quite a bit. However, the vast majority fall into the $30-100 range. For home and hobbyist sharpeners, stones like the Suehiro CERAX 1010 ($33), Sharp Pebble 1000/6000 ($40), and DMT Dia-Sharp ($55) will offer the greatest versatility and bang for your buck of any offering.
From $140 to $350 is where most precision sharpeners fall: angle-guided system kits (most manual clamp or table-centric systems, and some powered). These typically come with a suite of different grit abrasives. The manufacturing companies also typically offer numerous optional attachments for different types of blades.
Equipment in this range is typically much faster and more precise than freehand sharpening. The Work Sharp Ken Onion MK.2 ($300) belt sanding set-up is a dream to use and super versatile. With experience and accessories, these systems can be expanded into nearly pro-grade kits.
At the $400-1,500 end of the scale, we get into pro-grade systems that are capable of precision, versatility, and exceptional speed. Gear like the Wicked Edge Gen 4 Pro, the Tormek T-4 (and its bigger brother, the T-8), or full-on belt grinders can speedily regrind dozens of blades in a day.
However, the expense is hard to justify for non-pros — be they professionals at sharpening or in fields that involve working with a lot of sharp tools, such as trail builders, chefs, woodworkers, landscapers, and more.
What’s best is heavily situational. For our pick, the Work Sharp Ken Onion MK.2 is a versatility-minded tool that can handle almost everything you throw at it, with a modicum of precaution.
Otherwise, for simple, cost-wise versatility, little can beat a good whetstone like the Suehiro CERAX 1010 or Sharp Pebble 1000/6000.
Professionals usually have a number of pieces of equipment that excel at different things. However, they largely fall into three categories:
Manual, angle-guided systems like the Wicked Edge Gen 4 Pro are often used to achieve precision, mirror-polished edges, especially on smaller blades.
For heavier sharpening water-cooled grinding wheel systems like the Tormek T-4 and T-8, and belt grinders (bladesmithing grinders at the extreme end and systems like the Work Sharp Elite Knife Sharpening Solution for smaller jobs) are common choices.
Lastly, good, old-fashioned whetstones still have their place, especially for extremely acute or asymmetric edges, such as those found on Japanese chef’s knives.
What really makes a professional job is understanding what type of edge a given blade requires, and how to use the tools available to get it done.
Pull-through sharpeners that use a carbide blade to sharpen both sides of a knife at the same time can damage edges very easily. Electric pull-through systems that sharpen one side at a time with a belt or grinding wheel, on the other hand, such as the Work Sharp Ken Onion MK.2 or Tormek T-1, can be fantastic.
Sharpening often won’t damage an edge. However, sharpening inherently requires removing material. Doing so too often and with too heavy a hand will eventually grind the edge of a blade higher and higher up, towards the thicker spine of the blade. This leaves it thicker and less slicy behind the edge.
An easy workaround is to regularly touch up a blade with a ceramic hone or a strop loaded with compound. Regular maintenance with light-handed tools can make it so that a blade rarely has to touch anything beyond relatively fine stones.
In all likelihood, you cut yourself. A dull blade doesn’t just make a task harder, it makes it more dangerous. Not to mention, knowing how to sharpen a blade is a timeless skill.
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Ian Graber-Stiehl has been a science writer for the past 8 years, covering issues and topics in conservation, ecology, climate change, and public health, before he joined the GearJunkie team. He’s written for over a dozen outlets, including Scientific American, Popular Science, Nature, Gizmodo, and Men’s Journal. Before his writing career, Graber-Stiehl dabbled as a TV critic, culture commentator, travel, and food writer for outlets such as NPR, Slate, and Vulture. Outside of being a writer, Ian is a lifelong outdoorsman. As bikepacker, backpacker, bushcrafter, archer, hunter, angler (trout and bass), forager, canoer, professional blade sharpener, and all-around Black hiking redneck hipster, Ian says he straddles that strange, cultural divide between the REI Co-op and the Cabela’s camp. He has a passion for the outdoors and is a self-described “gear obsessive,” always keeping a finger on the pulse that is the outdoor industry. He currently calls Illinois and the midwest home, but spends at least 60 days afield annually.
Nick LeFort is a contributing writer of GearJunkie and makes guest appearances in a handful of other outdoor and craft beer publications. He is also the author of his own blog, The Tribe of Flannel, and part-owner of Ragged Mountain Knife Works.
LeFort has been writing for over 30 years but spent 10 years writing professionally about knives and tools, off-roading, overlanding, and outdoor living. Prior to GearJunkie, LeFort was the Director of Knife and Tool Testing for Gear Institute.
Based in Connecticut, LeFort is an avid wanderer and loves spending as much time as possible in the outdoors with his two daughters. That includes doing his best to find all the best muddy ruts throughout New England to see if he can ever get his 4th Gen 4Runner stuck. So far, so good.
In 2017, he helped open a brewery in Connecticut and is an avid supporter of local breweries and helping them market themselves successfully in a real bear of a market.
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