Water Cooled Wet Sharpener System Low Speed Knife Sharpener

Bladesmiths, or knife smiths if you prefer, spend years honing their craft. Some of the top knife makers in the world have knives that can sell for thousands of dollars. They carefully select their materials and consider their design before they even begin to consider putting metal to the grinding stone. When it’s time to create the final blade edge prior to sale, most professionals turn to stones and leather to hand grind and hone the edge. But what if you could take the best rationale for hand sharpening and apply it to a machine? That’s what the Water Cooled Sharpener does for us.

WHY HAND SHARPEN INSTEAD OF USING A GRINDER?

I deal with all kinds of cutting tools from knives to axes to lawn mower blades and. In using a high grinder to sharpen blades, I notice that there is a lot of heat generation and sparks flying. When sharpening lawn mower blades, sometimes the heat gets so high that you can even see discoloration on the blade when it cools. Give that a good tap with a hammer. Chances are, it’s going to chip right out.

The uses water cooling to keep the heat generation to a bare minimum. This eliminates the loss of hardness that comes along with high speed, high heat grinding. It’s also one reason that professional bladesmiths tend to stick to hand sharpening. They know that heat build-up will damage the steel. The  runs cool enough that every blade I sharpened was still cool enough to touch without thinking about it.

Better Blade Control

The other reason that professionals stick to hand sharpening is for the amount of control they have over the blade. Watching a bladesmith in action, their sharpening technique is as smooth a great violinist playing a Stradivarius – it’s an art form. The  offers pros the ability to use their decades-in-the-making honing technique but with the convenience of a motor-driven stone and leather wheels. For those of us that aren’t quite there, ALLWIN offers a series of jigs (sold separately) to help us achieve precision. Jigs are available for knives, axes, turning tools, scissors, drill bits, and more.