Work Sharp Ken Onion Sharpener

In the past I have used steels and sharpening stones for most of my kitchen, pen, folding, sheath knives etc. and they work but they are slow which means that inevitably it's a job that gets forgotten and so your knives end up more blunt that they are practically capable of restoring. I have tried the little angled steel in a holder devices but rarely found they work well. They are either too heavy duty to give a fine edge or too light duty to achieve anything and there is no finesse with using them.This however is brilliant at it's job. I hesitated over paying €200 for a sharpener but having done so I don't regret that at all. To get a knife sharpened "professionally" the cheapest I have seen is €4 so even just going over all our kitchen knifes and cleavers that is €36. Add in some scissors and pocket knifes tools and this will pay for itself quite quickly.The biggest difficulty most people have in sharpening any blade is keeping the blade at a fixed angle. If you move the blade you will round it and that means no sharp edge. This has a rather elegant little angle setting tool that lets you hold any knife blade at the fixed angle you want. The second biggest difficulty most people have is that they typically have one tool, one stone, one grade of abrasive and that means either slow progress or a blade that is unfinished. This comes with five grades of abrasive belt from a coarse "this knife is so damaged it needs some serious repair work" to "I'm going to strop this blade until it can split the atom".Scissors are a little harder to do than knives but below the knife angle is a wider scissor angle. Using that I was able to get pound store scissors to something that smoothly and effortlessly cut fabric with no tears, catches or runs.Any downsides? Yes but they are minor.- The scissor sharpening position is a fixed angle and quite small. I haven't measure the angle but even for scissors it looks to be quite a wide angle. Also the position is quite narrow so larger scissors might be harder, certainly my wife's commercial fabric shears are too large to fit in there.- The stropping belt is only 12mm wide. All the other belts are 18mm so it seems a little odd that just one belt is narrower.- Very small blades are likely to run off the end of the guide before much of the blade has been sharpened.That said it is capable of overcoming any of those. The entire head can be rotated so that you can use the belt as a simple belt grinder. Holding the angle steady would be harder but certainly no harder than using a steel or stone.The last criticism is a rather picky point but I'll mention it anyway. Because this is a belt sharpener as you hold the blade against the belt it will give a convex edge to the blade. This is good for durability but does mean that you can not get the absolute sharpest blade possible. So for my chisels I still do those by hand with a stone and angle guide.I will excuse all those criticisms though because to overcome those I would have to spend upwards of €700 and certainly for most purposes this tool has ways to overcome them.

I used to use wet stones to shapen my expensive Japanese Kitchen Knives. It takes time and effort (each knife takes at least 20 min total as I have to sharpen with different stones), and all my knives eventually got sharpened fine, but never be laser-sharp. Using Ken Onion, all my knives are now laser-sharp!! It is more compact than I imagined, and it is very fast to sharpen. It takes only 5 min per knife! If you wish to keep your kitchen knives laser-sharp, this is the sharpener of the choice! Just be aware that the product photo does not represent the actual item. This product is a normal Ken-Onion sharpener but not with the Blade Grinding Attachment as shown on the picture. I solved this problem by communicating with the seller. Accordingly, the actual price was also adjusted to the one they are selling on own webpage. The seller was very kind to do this.

Amazingly good knife sharpner if a little pricey compared to US prices. Very easy to get the hang of - I was sharpening my 'precious' Global kitchen knives in 2hrs after learning on cheaper old knives. It puts a durable convex edge on blades which is really sharp. My Global knives are accurately slicing mushy tomatoes and cutting onion slices so thin they are transparent again. Im extremly happy with the sharpener its quick, effective even on exeptionally hard steel and appears robust. Far quicker and needing a lot less skill than water stones, diamond stones, ceramic sharpeners, etc

Sheerness: how close the product resembled the geographic boundary of Sheerness wasn’t one of my reasons for selecting this product, but if you squint slightly you can see a resemblance in how the abrasive belt is mounted on the three pulleysValue for money: is it one of the more expensive options for knife sharpening in a domestic kitchen? Yes. Does it Does it do the job? Absolutely.Thickness: Hmmm, difficult to answer this. It is thick in parts but thin in other areas ( one of the belts that come with it is much thinner than the others. On a positive note it does reduce the thickness of the edge of the knife thereby making it much sharper.

It May appear expensive but I am absolutely delighted withnbit so far, the real test will come tsee how robust it is, instructions for use are a bit vague but doesn't take much to work out. belts are identified by pastel colours which would be a challenge for the 10% of the male population who are coloured blind. Coarse and very fine easy but the intermediate ones are more difficult to tell apart, would help if there were grit sizes marked on all of them

Certainly an easy way to get all your blades sharp , easy to use

Terrible seller took weeks to arrive with no communication despite sending many measages. The product itself is amazing

Very good piece of kit