KitchenIQ 50353 Angle Adjust Adjustable Electric Knife Sharpener

Knives come in all shapes and sizes. Some are made with traditional European or Asian style blades and these blades have traditional angles. Others can fool you. Say you have a popular German style knife. You would think it has a traditional German angle. Then again, maybe not. Knives can range in angles from 10 degrees per side up to 30 degrees per side. Most electric knife sharpeners change the angle of the knife to match the sharpener. This can remove a lot of metal and reduce the life of the knife.

The engineers at Smith’s have designed a revolutionary knife sharpener that changes the angle of the sharpener, not the knife. Simply turn the knob to the desired angle and both the coarse and fine sharpening slots change at the same time. The angles can be from 10 to 30 degrees per side, making this the most versatile electric knife sharpener available by allowing it to sharpen very thin angles all the way to extremely wide angles.

The KitchenIQ Angle Adjust Electric Knife Sharpeners offers two stages of sharpening for double beveled straight edge style knives. These coarse and fine slots feature KitchenIQ’s proprietary technology of interlocking wheels with a set of diamond interlocking wheels in the coarse slot and ceramic interlocking wheels in the fine slot. Traditional electric knife sharpeners work in a combination of numerous steps and only sharpen one side of the knife at a time. They often scratch and damage the knife blade. The Angle Adjust Electric Knife Sharpener delivers fast factory quality sharpening of both sides of the knife blade at the same time. The sharpener also includes a manual sharpening slot for most styles of serrated knives.

Common sharpening angles are marked on the sharpener’s knob. There is also a detailed list of angles inside the owner’s manual. If the angle of your knife is not listed or unknown contact your knife manufacturer.

With all of the changes made recently by the knife manufacturers it’s becoming harder and harder to tell an Asian style knife from a European version. In the past, there was a large difference between the angles per side of the blade between these knives. Asian knives were originally designed for slicing fish and vegetables. The knife edge needed to be very thin and very sharp to make these intricate cuts. So most Asian knives angles we set at 16 degrees per side or lower. European knives were traditionally designed to cut through thicker cuts of meat and bones as well as root vegetables. These were made of hard metal and their edges were very sharp but they were produced with wider angles, the most popular being 20 degrees per side. However, with the growing popularity of Asian knives the European knife makers have added to their lines and in some cases are offering their knives at the same or smaller angles as the leading Asian brands.