Restoration of an Old Knife and Review of Electric Knife Sharpener
About two weeks ago, a friend of my sister’s who is now a chef discovered that I had Chef’s Choice Trizor XV Electric Knife Sharpener. Like most of my cooking equipment, I found out about this knife sharpener through Cook’s Illustrated, as it was the highest rated electric knife sharpener. However, you know you have something good when a trained chef sees it and his face lights up, followed by: “Oooh, that’s a good one!” As a result of this encounter, the next time my sister’s friend came by the house, he came with a set of his dullest knives to be sharpened. It wasn’t until after I had finished sharpening his knives that I realized that it would have been a good idea to document the process and blog about it, but it was a bit too late for that. Fortunately, today I found an old and slightly rusted vegetable cleaver in one of my drawers and I was inspired to restore it and blog write about my knife sharpener.
Now for the amount of cooking that I do, I really don’t need an electric knife sharpener. In fact, I already had a pretty nice manual knife sharpener (also Cook’s Illustrated’s top rated choice). However, last year for my birthday, my parents remembered me geeking out about this particular electric knife sharpener a year or so before that, and I was delighted find my Chef’s Choice electric sharpener underneath the wrapping paper. Like I said, for the casual home cook, there really is not a need for an electric knife sharpener. As long as you take proper care of your knives, you can really get by with just a manual knife sharpener and a honing steel.
Quick side note for those who don’t know what a honing steel is. A honing steel is that metal rod you see chefs on TV slicing and dicing their knife against before they cook. Many people think this is “sharpening” the blade, though technically that is not correct. Basically, a honing steel is used to realign the blade and is not actually removing material. For a better explanation, you can watch this quick video of Alton Brown from his show Good Eats.
Both the manual and electric sharpeners are both going to remove material to redefine the blade. In most cases of casual use, a good manual sharpener is going to get you back in business. However, where the electric sharpener really shines is its ability to more effectively cut away at the edge and can really bring a dull knife, or even a knife with some chips it back to life.
Additionally, the electric knife can redefine the angle of the knife blade. While most decent knives these days are being made with the traditionally Japanese, 15° angle these days, many older styles of European knives are traditionally at 20° or 22°. Having a wider angle does make it harder for the edge to wear down, but you get a much cleaner cut with a 15° angle compared to 20°/22°. With good quality steel and proper care of your knives, most chefs prefer the sharper 15° angle.
Before we get into the details of the knife sharpener, I do want to mention, that the more traditional method of professionally sharpening knives is to use a whetstone. Using different levels of grit, you can use a whetstone to grind down your edge to be razor sharp. However, whetstones are quite tricky to master and an amateur is probably going to do more damage than good to their knives without a lot of practice.
Now let’s get into the details about the knife restoration!
STEP 1: Attempt to clean the rust.
I looked up online that you can clean rust off of stainless steal using a mixture of 1 tablespoon of baking soda and 2 cups of water. With this solution I tried to scrub the rust off of the blade without much success. Maybe I was doing something wrong, and I later tried a more concentrated solution which may have helped a little, but did not completely remove the rust. Fortunately, most of the rust was close to the edge and I correctly assumed that it would be mostly grinded off during the sharpening process.
STEP 2: Check how dull the knife actually was
Before trying to restore this knife, I was curious to see if there was any edge left. Upon inspection, I could see a couple of notches chipped out of the blade in various locations. Unfortunately, my iPhone camera is not very good at focusing close enough to really see what I am talking about with a picture. Without doing anything to the knife, I attempted to paper test, where you try and slice through a piece of paper with the knife. When your knife is share the paper test is incredible satisfying, but when your knife is dull, sometimes you can’t even saw through the paper.
Without doing anything to the knife, I managed to saw through the paper, leaving it crinkled and roughly cut. Out of curiosity, I then used my honing steel to see if that would help. One interesting thing I noticed, was that there was a significant amount of resistance on the right side of the blade when I pulled it against the honing steel. After honing, I was still able to roughly slice through the paper, maybe a little easier than before, but that still left the paper crinkled and roughly cut. Next, I tried using my manual sharpener. Again, this next stage of sharpening made the paper test a little easier, but the cut was still rough and there were still notches in the blade.
STEP 3: Using Stage 1 of the electric sharpener
The electric sharpener has 3 stages: 1. Sharpening, 2. Honing, and 3. Stropping/Polishing. Stage 1 has the coarsest grit diamond coated disks for removing material. For a knife that is already 15° and in relatively good shape, you may only need one or two pulls through each side of stage 1 before moving on. However, when converting the angle or trying to get out a notch in the blade, you are going to need a lot more. The instructions for the machine says that it can take 20 or more pulls to convert an edge and for the vegetable cleaver that I was restoring it took a whopping 26 pairs of pulls to get out a notch no more than 0.5 mm.
After my 26 pairs of pulls which took me somewhere between 5–10 minutes, the notches were gone (as was most of the rust) and there was a small burr on one side of the edge. This meant it was time to move onto Stage 2.
STEP 4: Stage 2 — Honing
Now that all the tedious work had been done. As per the instructions, I only needed to do 2 pulls through each side of Stage 2. There was and should have still be a burr on one side of blade. This stage took less than a minute to get through.
STEP 5: Stage 3 — Stropping/Polishing
This stage is also relatively quick. As the instructions suggests, go through with 3 pulls each side and then finish with 2 quick pulls through the finish the job. At this point, I could feel that the burr was gone and there were no notches in sight.
STEP 6: The final paper test
Now that the knife was nice and sharp it was time to see how it fared against the paper test. With its brand new, notch-free edge, my once dull vegetable cleaver sliced easily and cleanly through a piece of paper. I may have had so much fun that I turned that piece of paper into confetti.
The Review:
With my newly found vegetable cleaver nice and sharp, its time to talk a bit about the electric knife sharpener itself. There are multiple good reasons why Cook’s Illustrated recommends this beast of a machine. Since I have gotten this sharpener, I have restored a lot of knives for various family members and friends. I honestly have not really needed it for my personal knives yet because they are relatively new and I take good care of them. The biggest advantage to this knife sharpener over a traditional whetstone is the consistency in the angle. Each stage has spring loaded guides that hold the knife at the proper angle every time. If you are trying to use a whetstone, you need to figure out and maintain the angle freehand while you attempt to sharpen your knives. It definitely took some practice to using this electric sharpener, but it was a relatively small learning curve.
That being said, it still is a bit difficult to guide the butt of the knife through the sharpener at the start of each pull. A lot of the knives I’ve sharpened, including the vegetable cleaver, tend to have a little extra material removed at the butt, and sometimes the tip), which is due to the knife slipping down closer to the grinding wheels. This problem could potentially be minimized If there was an add on piece that could give the knife something to rest on in front and behind of each sharpening stage.
While we are on the subject of guiding the knife through each pull, I did want to quickly complain about one thing. As you pull the knife through each stage, there is a small plastic notch for the blade to rest and keep it straight. While the instruction booklet does say,“additional pressure is unnecessary and will not speed up the sharpening process. Avoid excessive cutting into the plastic,” it can be easy to find yourself cutting through some of the plastic as you can see if the picture below, during the monotony of pulling the knife through the sharpener for the fiftieth time. Though, the booklet does also say, “Accidental cutting into the enclosure however will not functionally impact operations of the sharpener or damage the edge.” So, I’m not too worried.
Another nice feature, that I only recently discovered, is a small removable magnet that catches most of the metal shavings. The magnet does not catch all the shavings, so I like to have a paper towel underneath the sharpener when I turn it upside down. As shown in the picture below, the magnet is just slips into a slot on the bottom side of the sharpener. It is kind of annoying to clean up the metal shavings though, especially since I don’t want to leave bits of metal dust around the kitchen. If I had a stronger magnet, I would try to use that to attract the metal shavings away to throw them out. So far the best thing I have found, is to use a couple of pieces of masking tape to pull off the shavings. I have yet to completely clean of the magnet, but as long as I clean most of it after every sharpening, I don’t think I’ll run into any issues.
It would be nice if the was an easier way to release the metal shavings. Perhaps some type of thin cover over that magnet that could be removed in a way that separated the shavings from the forces of the magnet.
Overall, this electric knife sharpener is great. It is super easy and fast to do quick touch up work and it can even restore knives that have been neglected. Though keep in mind that its going to take some time and patience to get notches out of the blade. While there is a small learning curve to using it properly, it is much easier to use than a whetstone and much more consistent if you are a sharpening novice like me. As with any product there are always areas that could be improved like cleaning the magnet, but overall, this is a great product. Considering that sending your knives out can cost between $10–20 a knife, this sharpener will eventually pay for itself if you are constantly in need of sharpening or have a bunch of old knives you want to restore.
