So, you’ve spent much time picking a knife (or two) for your everyday carry. Now that you’ve got a sharp piece of kit, have you considered maintaining your knife’s sharpness over time? Sure, you’ve got a knife with quality steel and excellent edge retention, but with regular use, all knives eventually become dull over time. Yes, even the most expensive ones.
This problem has vexed us all since the first humans started using a sharp rock flake as a knife in the past. That first knife user may have opted to find a new shard of rock, but as we developed bronze, iron, and steel implements, people discovered that rubbing it against abrasive material like stone at certain angles leads to sharper results. During the industrial age, the Sharp Blog notes that artisans in France developed a method where people could lie down on their stomachs to grind knives more efficiently. But you won’t have to do any of that because there are more comfortable and convenient ways to keep your knife sharp no matter where you are. And while you don’t have to go to extremes like I do in ensuring every knife in your house, down to the steak knives, are razor sharp, you should know that having a knife ready to go is safer and easier to use.
Having a good and reliable knife sharpener is essential to your everyday carry. Just as having a quality knife is important, having a knife sharpener that works is essential, too. The best knife sharpeners maintain and hone the edge on an already sharp blade, making your overall experience using the knife as fresh as when you took it out of the box for the first time. You can fix a damaged blade chipped or dented over time with the right tools. Finally, and more advanced in scope, you can modify existing blades to have an edge characteristic you prefer.
This post was last updated on 12/18/2023.
Our Top Picks
The Best Overall Pocket Knife Sharpener: Work Sharp Precision Adjust Elite [Buy]
The Best Pocket Knife Sharpener on a Budget: Lansky Deluxe 5-Stone System [Buy]
The Most Premium Pocket Knife Sharpener: Wicked Edge Pro-Pack II [Buy]
The Best Powered Pocket Knife Sharpener: Ken Onion Edition Knife & Tool Sharpener [Buy]
The Most Portable Pocket Knife Sharpener: Diamond Machining Technology Diafold [Buy]
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The Best Overall Pocket Knife Sharpener :hsc_emoji_trophy:
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The Best Pocket Knife Sharpener on a Budget
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The Most Premium Pocket Knife Sharpener
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The Best Powered Pocket Knife Sharpener
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The Most Portable Pocket Knife Sharpener
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Work Sharp Precision Adjust Elite
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Lansky Deluxe 5-Stone System
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Wicked Edge Pro-Pack II
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Ken Onion Edition Knife & Tool Sharpener
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Diamond Machining Technology Diafold
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Bottom Line
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It’s easy and convenient, and it beats using a dull knife or having to wait for a professional to come along and do it for you, and that’s why it’s the best overall.
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While it’s not as easy to use as the Work Sharp Precision Adjust Elite in getting you the right angle, it’s OK for most uses until you can save up for something more professional.
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The Wicked Edge Precision Knife Sharpener Pro-Pack II is the ultimate choice for sharpening premium knives with custom blade angles. It’s beginner-friendly, ensuring precise results straight out of the box.
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The powered nature of the Ken Onion Edition Knife & Tool Sharpener from Work Sharp makes quick work out of sharpening even the most premium blades and pretty much every other tool in your workbench.
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You can keep these in your toolbox or everyday carry kit to ensure your blade is ready to go when needed. And because it uses diamond material, it will last longer and not require constant maintenance to stay level like a traditional whetstone.
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Best Pocket Knife Sharpeners for 2023
The Best Overall Pocket Knife Sharpener: Work Sharp Precision Adjust Elite
The Work Sharp Precision Adjust Elite takes the guesswork out of sharpening your knife. Where other sharpening systems require building up experience and confidence to get good results, I like that the Precision Adjust Elite automatically handles finding the correct angle for you. All you have to do is clamp your knife into the holder, select the sharpening rod you need, lock it into place, and sweep it on your blade’s edge. Then repeat that on the other side, and you’re good to go. It’s easy and convenient, and it beats using a dull knife or having to wait for a professional to come along and do it for you, and that’s why it’s the best overall.
The Best Pocket Knife Sharpener on a Budget: Lansky Deluxe 5-Stone System
One of the secrets to getting the sharpest knife is to pass your blade through progressively more fine grit material. This lets you create the edge and hone it into a razor-sharp blade. But collecting full-size whetstones in every grit is expensive, so if you’re on a budget, you can size things down to the Lansky Deluxe 5-Stone System. It does away with the large whetstones in favor of a clamp design, but you get five different sharpening stones as part of the package. While it’s not as easy to use as the Work Sharp Precision Adjust Elite in getting you the right angle, it’s OK for most users until you can save up for something more professional.
The Most Premium Pocket Knife Sharpener: Wicked Edge Pro-Pack II
The Wicked Edge Precision Knife Sharpener Pro-Pak II is the most premium pocket knife sharpener with its marble base and super-accurate digital angle readout. With the readout, you can be sure you’re precisely at 18 degrees or anywhere else you want to be. After all, if you’re buying premium knives with custom blade geometries set at angles that a pull-through knife sharpener will ruin, only the best will do. This simple technological addition makes the Pro-Pack II that much easier to use. While you can get similar results with whetstones, even a beginner can sharpen a premium knife with this sharpener as soon as it’s out of the box.
The Best Powered Pocket Knife Sharpener: Ken Onion Edition Knife & Tool Sharpener
The powered nature of the Ken Onion Edition Knife & Tool Sharpener from Work Sharp makes quick work out of sharpening even the most premium blades and pretty much every other tool in your workbench. With traditional sharpening methods, the more premium and challenging your steel is, the longer it will take to sharpen with a stone. Some really hard steels at Rockwell units over 60 HRC can take quite a while, especially as you get to the finest grits. This powered device uses alternating belts powered by motors to do the job quicker. Just be sure you’re using the right guide for the angle, and watch the blade as you do it because if you remove too much material from your blade, you can never put it back on.
The Most Portable Pocket Knife Sharpener: Diamond Machining Technology Diafold
The use of industrial diamond in this pocketable whetstone eliminates the need for an elaborate setup involving buckets of water and holders for traditional stone or ceramic sharpening tools. You can keep these in your toolbox or EDC kit to ensure your blade is ready to go when needed. And because it uses diamond material, it will last longer and not require constant maintenance to stay level like a traditional whetstone. The butterfly knife-style opening mechanism of the tool is charming, but it doesn’t have the pivots needed to be an effective fidget tool on the side.
Our other recommendations
Spyderco Tri-Angle Sharpmaker: Spyderco’s Tri-Angle Sharpmaker is compact enough to fit in a toolbox, and it sets up the angle to place the abrasive rods without too much fuss. All you need to do is pass the blade through the rods, and because of its open nature, you can sharpen large knives and tools with just a few sweeps through the system. The Sharpmaker has been an old favorite for knife collectors for years, and for good reason; few systems are as quick and easy to use while still being effective.
King Whetstone: Traditional ceramic whetstones can be pricey for beginners, so I recommend combination stones from King Japan. This model features 250 and 1000-grit surfaces on opposite sides of the stone. The coarse 250 grit is for fixing chips and seriously damaged blades before finishing with the more fine 1000 grit section. As you progress in skill, you can add other whetstones to the collection to build a solid and versatile collection of sharpening stones.
Lansky Blademedic: It’s all in the name: this is the tool you keep on hand in your emergency pack or camping gear when you need a sharp knife fast. The carbide and ceramic V-shaped pull-through slots are pre-set at 45 degrees, corresponding to the standard edge of Western-style knives and tools. The diamond rod can be used as a honing steel, and the exposed ceramic section can be swiped across serrations to get them working. Just know that this is the wrong tool for long-term maintenance for most high-end knives, so use it sparingly for emergencies.
Smith’s TRI6 Arkansas Stone: Smith’s TRI6 Arkansas stone provides three different grits of that well-regarded sharpening material. These use oil instead of water for lubrication as you use it to maintain the edge of your knife. As you hone the blade further, it’s easy to swap to different grits by turning the triangular holder to what you need.
Different types of Knife Sharpeners
Electric Knife Sharpeners
These are the easiest to use of all the knife sharpeners. But they’re also perhaps a bit too easy because their fast speeds can destroy a knife if the sharpener is not set up correctly. There are also better options for knives with serrations. Knives with deep recurve, changing edge angles, and dramatic geometries will also not fare well with an electric knife sharpening system. For everything else, they often come with blade guides for multiple sharpening options.
Handheld / Pull-Through Sharpeners
Pull-through knife sharpeners are pocketable and good to have in an emergency, but their pre-set angles usually differ from what premium knife makers set their blades to. Some knives, like Japanese chef’s knives that only have an edge on one side of the blade, will be seriously damaged using a pull-through mechanism, as Chef’s Armoury points out when they wrote about pull-through knife sharpeners not being the best choice in the kitchen. But a pull-through sharpener will do the trick when having a sharp knife of any style is better than nothing. Just know that you might be messing up your knife more in the long run, necessitating a professional fix.
Knife Sharpening Systems / Guided Systems
These systems lock your blade on a clamp horizontally, vertically, or at an angle of your choice. You then pass a rod across the stationary blade at a set angle. This gives you precise control compared to a traditional whetstone. As users of BladeForums mention, sometimes it’s hard to get a consistent angle when you’re in control of it as you pass the blade across a traditional stone. The downside is that these systems are bulky and require some setup and assembly, making them more suitable for home use. They’re also not the best choice if you have extremely small or very large knives, as they are set up for the standard pocket knife or chef’s knife length.
Sharpening Stones / Whetstones
A flat sharpening stone, known as a whetstone, is the most traditional method to sharpen blades. And while it takes a lot of practice to get the job done, you get the best results out of these systems in many ways. When you have total control over the knife as you pass across the stone, you get visual, tactile, and auditory feedback you don’t get with other systems. When an amateur seriously messes up their expensive super-premium blade through an automated or preset system, it will take a set of traditional whetstones and a sharp eye to get it back into shape. None of the other systems that do things for you will solve chipped or broken knives, but with traditional whetstones, you can recreate edges or even take budget knives that were never sharp, to begin with, from the factory and turn them into usable cutlery with just the application of elbow grease.
Sharpening Steel
One misnomer about honing steel is that it sharpens a blade. It doesn’t. Instead, it makes minor nicks on a blade and bends them back into shape on an already sharp knife. This minimizes the need to go to a sharpening system until needed.
Maintenance Tips for Pocket Knife Sharpeners
Maintaining a good edge on your blade is crucial because it makes it easier and safer for you to use. A dull knife will slip instead of slice and, in the worst case, slip right onto your fingers. While this is primarily a problem if you’re using your knife in food prep, you’ll start wondering why your premium MagnaCut knife isn’t cutting through material quickly if you never sharpen it. Maintaining the edge of your blade as close to its original sharpness as possible will also eliminate the need for serious repair, which takes lots of time, special equipment, and expertise.
Choosing the Right Sharpening Slots and Surface
The rule of thumb is to stick to the slot or angle corresponding to your knife’s factory edge and angle. This may take some research or specialized equipment to determine accurately, but many production knives usually stick to standardized angles and ranges, such as between 20-30 degrees.
Coarse Stone vs. Fine Stone
You should also go from coarse to fine-grained material. Otherwise, you’ll spend much time on a fine stone when the knife needs serious repair. If a knife is well-maintained and sharp, you can start with the finest stones for touching up. Some knife sharpening systems will tell you in words that the material is coarse or fine. Lower numbers are coarser, and higher numbers are smoother and finer if the system only provides you numbers that correspond to grit. You can also touch them to help determine which is which.
Best Pocket Knife Sharpener FAQs
What is the best thing to use to sharpen a pocket knife?
An abrasive stone is the best way to sharpen a pocket knife. Whether you pick a traditional whetstone, a pull-through sharpener, or a precision system, they all use abrasive stones to get the job done. A precision or electric system will be the easiest of all options for a beginner.
What do professionals use to sharpen knives?
Professionals use traditional whetstones or electric belt systems of various abrasive coarseness or fineness based on their needs. Traditional whetstones offer immense control and customizability but take substantial effort and time. Electric systems suit fast-paced production environments and knifemakers working on the clock.
Do knife sharpeners ruin knives?
Knife sharpeners don’t ruin knives. People who don’t know which knife sharpener to use in the correct situation ruin knives. And the worst thing would be to end up with an expensive, premium knife that’s never been resharpened or maintained after opening hundreds of packages, performing worse than a serrated butter knife.
Is a sharpening stone better than a knife sharpener?
Knife sharpeners all use a sharpening stone of some kind, even ones that use industrial diamond material. But a traditional sharpening stone, Arkansas stone, or puck offers the best results for anyone who has learned to leverage them to their full advantage. Until you’ve had some practice, stick to an automated or precision system that holds your hand and stops you from ruining your blade.
How we picked
Decades of experience and deep connections in the everyday carry industry give us a unique viewpoint on the market to inform our product recommendations. We have the depth of information for thousands of products that have come before and an extensive eye on the market to see what’s new and trending for each piece of gear. The result is a buying guide that we feel is informative and useful for EDCers of every trade, industry, and budget.
What is Everyday Carry?
Everyday Carry is both the concept of what people carry in their pockets and the process of picking out gear that thoughtfully considers what one wants or needs in their daily life. It encompasses everything from style to preparedness to utility, meaning an entire industry full of valuable tools and essentials to choose from.
Why you should trust us
Our team has decades of combined experience in all aspects of everyday men’s essentials, from wallets to pens to bags and everything in between, and we know where to find great gear ideas that you may not come across at your local stores or when shopping online. Our expertise in the industry and familiarity with design, materials, and usability help you make more informed choices when it comes to picking up your next piece of gear.
