I am far from ant-Horl. It just can’t be overstated how completely incompetent I am at knife sharpening and I would probably manage to fuck up with one. Below is a great write up from one the sharpening nerds on reddit.
This morning I bit the bullet and bought the Chef’s Choice 15XV that is usually recommended in these threads. It’s about the same price as the Horl and I think it will be easier for me to manage.
Reading the conclusion of you Reddit link:
I see two possible use cases for the Horl rolling sharpener:
An easy-to-learn way for people who want sharp knives who don’t want to delve deeply into sharpening, but want better results and a less desctructive way to sharpen their knives when compared to using a pull-through sharpener or a bad professional with a belt sander.
More ambitious people who are willing to spend some money and some time in order to get great sharpening results, but don’t want to delve into whetstone sharpening for whatever reason.
I am clearly case 1. I have not bought any accesories and am fine with the results I get. I don’t want to spend much time learning to sharpen knives like a Japanese Zen Master, I’d rather use them with an easy to obtain level of reasonable sharpness.
I was not aware that the Horls are so controversial among the sharpening community. I was not even aware that there is a sharpening communitiy (facepalm - what was I thinking, this is the internet!). They seem to be a clear case of YMMV.
I was getting ready to give this a +1 but I see I am the one that recommended it back in 2022.
Takes me a few minutes to sharpen all our knives. No fuss, no muss.
This thread is the first time I’ve heard of the Horl knife sharpener and I just watched a YouTube video to see how it’s used. I can see that it might work well for a big chef’s knife but a small paring knife? I don’t think it would get high enough to work.
Here’s a screen grab from the video that @running_coach posted upthread:
The numbers indicate the amount of pressure required to break a test thread after sharpening. My comments from a quick perusal:
The Wicked Edge was the best but that’s a $900 machine, and not significantly better than a whetstone provided you know how to use a whetstone. The Lansky was almost as good but in a quick perusal of the video it looks complicated. The “Chef’s Choice” mentioned is the electric pull-through; they also make a manual pull-through. Basically all the sharpeners tested performed reasonably well except Spyderco.
As I mentioned I have a Zwilling (Henckels) pull-through type and though it’s adequate I expected better from a quality knife manufacturer. It has four slots, coarse and fine for 15-degree Asian knives and ditto for 20-degree western ones. It doesn’t produce excessive steel shavings on the coarse setting – just a light dusting – and none at all on the fine one. I use the coarse setting if the knife is dull enough to need serious sharpening, but disappointingly, I seem to get a sharper edge if I finish it with a Henckels honing steel rather than the “fine” sharpening slot. The honing steel actually does do a little fine sharpening, not just straightening, as a small amount of steel dust accumulates on it.
I had a Henckels manual pull through sharpener and it performed poorly which was almost certainly operator error. It removed lots of material and fucked up my Henckels knives. I got rid of it and paid someone to come over and sharpen them.
When I remodeled my kitchen a couple of years ago I gave away the old knives and got a set of Victorinox knives. My Chef’s Choice electric pull through contraption will arrive tomorrow which I hope will work for me.
You will all be glad to know that it worked really well. I should have gotten one years ago.