There isn’t enough surface on the cross stick sharpeners to do a good job and the metal side of that will gouge a blade all to hell.
I have used Lasky and Gatco sharpeners for years. Good edge, but a pain to use.
I bought one of these the other night based on what I read in this thread.
Holy Shit! I sharpened every knife in the house in about 15 minutes all to razor sharpness.
Pros: Very easy to use, gets knives very very sharp, also does big tools and scissors.
Cons: Can only do 20 degree and 25 degree angles. I wish it did more. Belt seems to wear quickly.
conclusion: Well work the money.
I’ve been thinking on this topic these last few months. I usually use stones or diamond stones and been wanting a powered sharpener for convenience. The stones are in the tool box in the garage, while I can keep the electric sharpener right on the kitchen counter. I just ordered one of these and it should arrive next Tuesday and am looking forward to it. Thanks for the tip, Amateur Barbarian.
I had a Lansky years ago and was able to quite quickly get a very good edge. Unfortunately, the plastic mount on the stones seemed to break too easily.
I now have the Chef’s Choice 2-Stage and like it quite a bit. It works great for kitchen knives, but not so good on utility knives if you want the tip sharp.
Second this. The Work Sharp Item # WSKTS-W comes with two guides: one for normal kitchen knives, and one for larger items like axes. I used the Work Sharp for my lawnmower blades (that have odd shapes) without the guides and it works just as well. My kitchen knives and lawnmower blades are now razor sharp, and the system was very easy to use.
This works a LOT better than the Chef Master and Spyderco Sharpmaker that I also have.
Does anybody have experience with the Worksharp for sharpening hand tools such as chisels or plane blades?
Sharpened a chisel without problems - the main thing required is that you keep the blade at the right angle.
This thing will basically sharpen anything. Plain blade, serrated, etc. I’ve even used it to sharpen rusty old hoe blades.
And the really neat thing is that it requires no skill. And it comes with a DVD showing sharpening techniques for almost anything you can think of.
I’ve also started leaving a box of Band-Aids in front of the knife holder in the kitchen to warn my wife that the knives are now razors, and to be careful. Supposedly a dull knife is more dangerous in use than a sharp one, but not with my bride.
Thanks for the info. As for the old dull knife bromide, any woodworker can tell you that’s a load of horse sawdust. 
Keeping a proper angle while sharpening is the problem I’m concerned with on this tool. Plane blades need to be somewhere between 25-30 degrees. I’m wondering if a guy could set up some sort of jig for this, although muscle memory tends to kick in pretty quickly, as I’ve found out when using stones.
I have owned or used so many different knife sharpeners I forgot a few of them. I have used Spyderco’s system since the days when it came in a vinyl pouch. Years ago I used and gave away both the Lansky and Gatco systems. My current Sharpmaker also has the optional diamond encrusted hollow steel triangles. A good system if your blades only need a touch up.
Five years ago, I purchased the latest gizmo in the knife world, the Wicked Edgesharpener. Mine needed a few DIY improvements, but other than that, it is excellent. With the most agressive grits I can completely reprofile a blade edge to whatever angle I choose. Key to the system is the ability to keep the same edge angles from VERY coarse grit all the way through increasingly finer grits, ending with diamond paste strops.
This thing will turn a knife with good blade steel into a shaver.
Yes, this one looks really good and I’ll try it too. I’ll compare the two, this one and the Chef’s Choice.
You may want to avoid using any good knives on that. Reviews I’ve been reading say that over time you’ll end up with a rounded off knife point because of the belt flexing. I looked at the Work Sharp tool that is designed to sharpen wide blades and the reviews on that are also less than complimentary, with complaints about burn marks on the metal; burn marks mean that the metal has gotten too hot, and has become brittle. That means it will not sharpen properly. With a grinding wheel, you can dip the blade in water from time to time to cool it. I think I’ll stay with stones.
I see that various electric sharpeners have come up in this thread, but I’m not certain if anyone has brought up one caveat regarding their use. It’s not impossible to over heat and thereby lose the temper of the knife edge.
Didn’t see Chefguy’s last post… never mind.
Okay, thanks for that Chefguy and The Conqueror Worm. I’ll proceed carefully.
I’ve done pretty well with this
I use a whetstone. I’m not a fancy knife enthusiast, but it was all we had at work and I pretty much HAD to figure it out if I actually wanted to cut anything. It takes a little bit of practice, but having someone show you how to do it helps immeasurably. Practice on a cheapo knife first. It seems like it’s impossible at first, but seriously, if I can do it anybody can.
A little more from a knife nut. A knife needs to be “re-sharpened” from the original factory edge maybe just once a year if you’re a light user, to as often as once a month if you’re a butcher or a chef. The term is “re-profiling” wherein you’ll change the sharpening angle to one that suites you better. You start with coarse, going all the way to extra-extra-fine.
Most of the time, you don’t need a full re-profiling. All you will need is a light “touch-up” using anything from a leather strop, leather strop treated with sub-micron grit, oil stone or glass slab, the edge of a phone book, even the underside of your coffee mug.
So if you don’t do cutting with several knives that often, you will find that your sharpening equipment will be gathering a lot of dust. Knife enthusiasts who rotate and use more than a dozen knives would reproflie and sharpen often. And then you have professional sharpeners who own more than a hundred pounds of stones and diamond slabs. But me? I use a two-sided carborundum, a green fine stone, a glass slab and a leather strip with metal polish for my 4 knives. And not too often.
While you are correct that regular stropping of blades will help maintain cutting capability between sharpening, many of the materials you suggest above are not appropriate for stropping. A stropping strap should be a compliant material such as thick leather, perhaps along with a very fine abrasive buffing compound, is the appropriate materially for stropping. Hard materials such as a glass slab, or or abrasive materials are not suitable for stropping, which realigns the cutting edge. A steel, if used correctly, can also be used to align an edge, albeit not how you frequently see it being used freehand. A large flat surface, like a plate of glass, will overwork the edge unless the edge is perfectly straight, resulting in less sharpness.
The unglazed “underside of your coffee mug” will abrade the edge of the blade unevenly and is not a surface against which the blade should ever come into contact.
Stranger
I’ve worked an awful lot of knife edges over the decades. Way back when I served as mate on charter fishing boats, I became expert with stones. Sharpening 24" fillet knives and smaller rigging knives on flat stones was something one did on the stern of the boat to attract customers. Somehow, there’s an aura of fishing professionalism conveyed by drawing massive chunks of steel over a flat stone on the fish box. After a successful trip I could fillet your 25 pound kingfish in a measured 9 seconds flat, or head it, tail it, gut it, and cut the rest into 1" steaks in less than 25 seconds. (Yes, there were bets settled. 
) And you could have shaved your entire body with any of my knives, anywhere along their lengths.
But I’m going to echo the endorsements of the Chef’s Choice 130. I started using it on my kitchen knives, including the heavy bladed ones, and was very satisfied. But I resisted trusting my old fillet knives to the motorized technology. So when it came time to fillet a 40 pound mahi-mahi or 30 pound black grouper, I’d get out my trusty stones and dress my blades, just like I did in 1971. Then one day I said what the heck, run 'em through the grinder! If you screw them up, you can spend Saturday afternoon working the blades back to normal on the old stones.
Guess what? The 130 did a masterful job and I’ve never looked back. Oh, the stones and accessories in their old modified tackle box still go out on the boat with me, because I don’t have 130vac for the Chef’s Choice. But I’ll tell you, if I had electric power out there, my beautiful stones would be decorating a coffee table or bar top right now. The Chef’s Choice is that good.
Point taken. Actually my glass slab using metal polish or just oil is the last stage of my sharpening but I sometimes start my touch-up with it if I want to bring back my knife to hair-whittling sharpness. But most of the time, I touch up starting with the treated leather, and then plain leather.
The edges of a phone book and the coffee mug, those are among the mad-scientist methods used by some forumers over at Bladeforums, which I don’t do myself. Actually the coffee mug bit has historical basis. Knife boys of old used to sharpen (not strop) their blades on the smooth inner rim of large clay jars. The resulting bevel angle of the circle intersecting with the blade section produced an ideal angle. This was among Sal Glesser’s sources of inspiration for the Spyderco Sharpmaker.
I thought I already posted in this thread, but I guess it got lost somehow.
If you have the money, I would buy a tri-stone and a couple of cheaper $15-20 knives to practice on before having at with your nice knives.
If you get a honing steel, I prefer the ones that have flat sides, myself, as opposed to the cylindrical ones.