Have you tried the Chef's Choice?

Thank you so much for this ! ^^^^ Love knowing people like htis still exist and ply their trade and LOVE the image of you running after him with your knives!

My Williams Sonoma/Chefs Choice 1520 is highly rated and gets my mediocre knives plenty sharp enough for my needs.

I have the Chef’s Choice 4643. I like it because it will sharpen both 15° and 20° edges, and I have both types of knife edges in my collection. I didn’t want to spend the money for an electric one, and the electric ones take up a lot of room. This manual sharpener 4643 goes in a drawer. It makes my knives plenty sharp.

There is also the question of user error. It’s unusual that you say you’ve tried several sharpeners, and none has sharpened your knives. You have to take care when sharpening, and hold the knife properly in the sharpener, and be slow and measured in your movement when sharpening. Follow carefully the instructions that come with the sharpener. Also, perhaps your knives aren’t that good. Look at Victorinox knives by Forschner. They are reasonably priced, and will sharpen beautifully.

Also, your example of a tomato - tomatoes should be sliced with a fine serrated knife not a smooth edged-knife. A frequent test of knife sharpness is slicing a piece of paper cleanly and like it was butter.

We (actually my husband) uses this one on our knives. it is amazing.

I use my small, locally owned knife store for sharpening knives, scissors, and yard tools. Well worth it!

Edge Pro apex,... I've used it for many years and could not be happier with the consistency of the sharp edge.

I use a whetstone—one side is medium and the other fine. I can cut paper thin slices of tomato with a single draw of the blade.

Your knives need to be good to start with to be able to do that with a tomato. Not necessarily serrated. Whetstones will give the best lasting result, but you need skills to get good results. Only practice will get you there. Knife sharpeners might get a knife sharp, but it won't last as long as done by a whetstone.

All my knives are Cutco; and yes the tomato was a bad choice. My knives will not cut paper after using the sharpeners I have. I have a ChefsChoice 478; but I think I'm finding out I got to spring for a more expensive sharpener. The cheap ones just don't do the job.

I think the tomato example was a great choice—that is, if you're knife can't cut a ripe tomato, it needs sharpening.

I use a waterstone.

https://www.highlandwoodworking.com/waterstonesharpening.aspx

I have tried different "manual" solutions, and I simply lack the experience or dexterity to do a good job. And since I only need to sharpen my knives every couple of months, I don't think I really get enough opportunities to build up my sharpening skills.

I have used commercial services, and many of them do a worse job than I would do myself. A few of them actually completely ruined my knives. Taking the knife to a bench grinding wheel and removing 1/8" material is not what I meant when I asked them to sharpen the knife!

I know you can get attachments for grinding wheels to put a great edge on a knife, but again that requires that you know what you are doing.

In the end, I settled for an electric Chefs Choice grinder. You can find different models on Amazon. Read the reviews until you find one that works for your purposes. Then use camelcamelcamel.com to buy it when it is on sale. For a little over $100, you should get able to get a sharpener that is better than anything else that you could do in a residential setting and without being required to learn a new skill.

Most knives, even really cheap mass produced knives, will be able to get a good edge. If you can't cut paper or tomatoes with your knife, then you aren't done sharpening yet. A smooth blade absolutely can cut a tomato just fine, if it has been sharpened recently. But where a good knife will hold an edge for many weeks or months of light residential use, a cheap knife might only do so for a few days. It depends on the type of steel, on the heat treatment, on the initial shape of the blade, and probably several other factors.

Of course, if you love picking up new hobbies, then don't let me stop you. Knives are fascinating technology, and many people really enjoy the process of sharpening a knife by hand.

The simplest solution is to invest in Chef’s Choice sharpener. Not necessarily cheap but they do more than an acceptable job.

If you want razor sharp, as in shaving hair sharp, manual sharpening with or without a jig.

For all of those people that want an easy way to put a sharp edge on a knife with a mechanized grinder, just be aware that you are grinding away your knife in your pursuit of convenience. I have a set of Wusthof knives I bought 40 years ago and I use my equally ancient combo whetstone to sharpen them every several months. It takes me a couple of minutes per knife, and they've lost very little metal. It's also a good idea to use a sharpening steel regularly (they don't really sharpen, they just straighten the edge at a microscopic level so they cut better).

Don't believe you can't do this yourself. At the beginning, I was slower, and I got inconsistent results, but it's not rocket science, and anyone can do it if they practice a little. You can't hurt the knife and the worst that can happen is they won't be as sharp as you want until you get in a little practice. Get yourself a decent combo sharpening stone, soak it in water before use, and start in. Here is a decent stone for $20: Combo Stone

No one taught me how to do this; I just read an article or two and began. These days you can just go to YouTube and watch a couple of videos. Then you can sharpen your knives without abusing them.

A knife sharpener is only one step to a sharp knife. You also need to hone the knife. A sharpener grinds the knife into a point on the blade. Honing straightens the sharpened blade. You use a honing tool more often on your knifes than the sharpener. I usually run my knife through my honing tool quite often before use. I use the sharpener only a few times a year. Nether one needs to be very expensive.

The Chef's Choice sharpener has three different disks. One of them is a honer.

I just heard about this one. Supposedly it's the best there is. I haven't tried it yet but this info came from a reliable source. There are knockoffs out there as well that are less expensive but I don't know enough to point you to one.

If anyone else has used this or heard anything about it, I'd love to hear about it.

$359? Looks like you need an engineering degree to use it! The Chef's Choice works well. Or send your knives out.

hee hee! I had the same thought when I looked at it, which is probably why I didn't do any more research. But my friend says it's able to properly sharpen any shape and angle of knife, something he can't do with his whetstone very well. And also, the knockoffs are quite a bit cheaper--if I can find one I'll link to it.

If your knives are Cutco, send them to cutco for sharpening. They sharpen their knives for free, and if they're damaged they'll replace them.

I’m sticking with my $20 whetstone....

The most important thing to keeping your knives sharpened is actually sharpening them regularly. Personally I'd prefer to have a whetstone I can easily keep in a drawer and take out without any fuss. If I'd have that $359 sharpener, I wouldn't know where to put it in an easily accessible space. The whetstones keep my knives plenty sharp and they will dull because of usage, no matter how sharp I get them.

Chicagoans, we used to have a guy who came through here too (Oak Park), with a cart and bells. We haven't seen him in some years, so I am guessing he retired or passed. He was great though. We would run out of the house too, like a kid after the ice cream man.

ETA: I was just reading about him, and it's probably the same guy (Tony Del Ciello). And he is still around. I guess we have just missed him the past several years.

I use the Chef’s Choice .