

Instead you have to manually set the blade’s angle in the slot and then manually maintain that angle as you slowly draw the blade through the sharpening element. The Work Sharp E3-again, the nearest competitor in our test-doesn’t have an equivalent mechanism.

But it adds a feature that others lack: spring-loaded guides inside the slots that grip the blade at the correct angle and keep it from shifting around during the sharpening process. Like most electric sharpeners, the Trizor XV uses rigid, angled slots to help orient the blade. When sharpening by any method, it’s critical to hold the blade at a consistent angle: If you don’t, the result is a rounded-over, dulled edge, rather than a sharp one formed by the apex of two consistent bevels. One reason the Trizor XV produces consistently sharp knives is its design, which makes it virtually impossible to mess up the sharpening process. (If you’re running the numbers and coming up short, bear in mind that resetting the blade for each pull, and intermittently testing the edge, adds considerably to the total time elapsed.) And on badly dulled knives, we sometimes ran to 30 pulls on the Work Sharp E3, which took about 8 minutes. The total number of pulls sometimes topped out lower, at around 20, but because every pull took about 8 seconds, when going by the instructions, the total time was greater. By contrast, on the Work Sharp E3, it took at least 5 minutes to sharpen an 8-inch knife, and often longer. Following the instructions, we found that every “pull” of an 8-inch blade through the sharpener took between 5 seconds (on the coarse abrasive) to just 1 or 2 seconds (on the fine “stropping/polishing” abrasive), and the total number of pulls topped out at around 30.

From start to finish, it took us a maximum of 4 minutes to bring an 8-inch knife from a sandpaper-dulled state to a like-new edge.
