10 Best Pocket Knife Sharpeners

Honing should be done every 2-3 times you use your knife. Honing aligns the tines of an already sharpened knife and enables it to cut better and feel sharper.

In practice, with normal use, you need to sharpen your knives after one month at the most to obtain that feeling of a new knife again. Our opinion: sharpening on a whetstone is best. Regular maintenance with a ceramic sharpening rod is easy and quick.

Hunting and pocket knives that are used for cutting tougher materials will be sharpened to a recommended angle between 22 and 30 degrees.

Regardless of the brand or material, your new knife seems to always offer the perfect cut. Every motion you make with it is effortless. These build up little by little, making you spend a tiny bit more effort with every cut. Precision becomes harder to achieve.

Sharpening your own knives may seem intimidating, but it’s a cost-effective way to take what could be trash (your dull knives) and turn it into treasure (a brand new set!). Manual and electric knife sharpeners are easier to use than sharpening stones, and the best ones are quick and versatile.

These knife sharpeners are incredibly easy to use, and having used one on my old-school Sabatier knives for years, I can report that they quickly turn a blunt knife sharp, and as of yet those knives are in perfectly good nick. These are best avoided with Japanese knives or brittle ice-hardened blades, however.

You should absolutely clean and sanitize a knife after sharpening. During the sharpening process you will notice a mixture of very fine metal, stone, and water that will have the consistency of a paste. You do not want to remove that during the sharpening process. That helps to achieve your final edge.

Ideally, you should sharpen your knife while it is still relatively sharp. If you do this, the knife will only need five or ten minutes against the stone to sharpen. If you put off sharpening until the knife is truly dull, then you will need to spend significantly more time.

Over time, honing your knife won’t be enough to get it to make efficient cuts. Too many of the burr’s microscopic teeth have broken away. It’s time to create a new burr by using abrasive material to remove the old one. Your honing steel isn’t capable of doing this.

The middle of the edge, often called the “sweet spot,” is for those everyday knife tasks of slicing and dicing vegetables, meat, and fish. The heel is yet another tool, where the edge widens to a wedge shape.