The principle is so simple I almost feel stupid for buying it. It's just a block of wood with a few appropriate sized holes drilled into it at a specific angle, plus some more to store the rods they give you. It's almost like "the wheel".. so obvious and simple, yet ingenius. But it's priced accordingly and they do all the drilling for you so this is a great buy and well worth not having to get a piece of wood, drag out the drill and bits and then mess with getting the angles right.



I opted to go for this ceramic rod version over the diamond rod version because the ceramic will NEVER wear out. The holes are slightly oversized to make insertion easy and they settle to their rested position so every "swipe" maintains a consistent angle. 25° gives a more robust, yet still very sharp edge, and 20° for hair popping sharp.. two nice choices. IMHO, 25° is great for hard use fixed blades and 20° for blades destined for more delicate things. I put a layer of tape around each rod to ensure a better fit though because I didn't like the slight "slop". There's even extra room between these two for maybe four more holes (two more angle options) as it's just a block of wood. The rods are made in USA while the wooden block comes from China. (1.3 billion of them and growing, yet they've still got trees to spare?)



It's such a simple and low cost thing that solves the issue or being ham handed when it comes to putting a consistent edge on a knife. This is a maintainence solution though, and once your razor sharp knife starts getting dull, a minute on this will have it shaving hair again. This is NOT a thing you'd want to use put a bevel on a super dull blade or turn a butter knife into a slicer. I mean, you "can", but you'd be swiping at those rods for a really long time.



Regarding the "but" in the title: Any rod type sharpener will potentially round-off and blunt the point as you draw it off the stick each time, so don't. Not the fault of the Lansky, it's just the nature of sharpening sticks, especially rounded ones. The Spyderco Sharpmaker has triangular rods with flats and aren't as bad but can definitely cause the problem too. This is easily avoided by starting the stroke down the rod TIP FIRST and PUSHING the blade forward as you go down rather than the other way around which seems to be the popular way of doing it. Trust me, because it's a real PITA having to reprofile a knife point. As long as you keep this in mind you'll be good-to-go with this sharpener.