To start, all you have to do is snap your knife onto the appropriate side of a magnetic block. Then you roll a cylinder fashioned with abrasive ends alongside the blade. A quick honing completes the process.
But the manufacturers’ instructions weren’t clear on how much time or how many rolls it would take to render a sharp blade. When should you flip sides? That’s anyone’s guess. We had to turn to instructional videos to make sure we were doing it right.
Because of the guesswork involved, these sharpeners are not as intuitive to use as our electric-knife-sharpener picks, the Chef’sChoice 1520 and the Chef’sChoice Trizor 15XV; with these, you simply place your knife in a slot and pull it through a set number of times.