These are easy to use and do eXactly what they’re meant to do. Worth the price. Gave them for stocking stuffers 🤶

We bought the MinoSharp 3 Sharpener Black/Red to go with the new set of Global 7-piece Ikasu Knife Block Set we bought for our son for Christmas. He was delighted with the sharpener, even though he has an electric knife sharpener, because the MinoSharp is small and fits into a drawer, whereas the electric sharpener takes up a lot of space and is relegated to a storage area, not easily accessible. The MinoSharp is easy to use and keeps his Global knives razor-sharp. YES, definitely recommend the MinoSharp sharpener!

A friend recommended this sharpener, and it really works! Very easy to use and put a nice, new, sharp edge favorite knife! Exactly what I hoped for.

The reviews for this product are all over the place, but let me see if I can help you sort through it.I bought this product not because I have no idea how sharpen a knife free hand, but because I didn't want to spend a fortune on Japanese water stones just to sharpen a couple of Global knives.You see, Global knives are made in Japan of an extremely high-quality Japanese steel. The steel in a Japanese knife is so strong that it requires special water stones to sharpen it and the factory edge is usually just over 10 degrees. This is very different than western knives, which typically use much softer steels and are rarely sharpened to such an aggressive angle.This tool is meant to let unskilled owners of Global knives quickly return their Japanese knives to something that is perhaps not exactly the extreme sharpness of the factory edge, but an edge that is entirely useful and acceptable. It is not complicated to use and if you are careful you can get a perfectly safe and useful edge in just a few minutes per knife. For serious home cooks, the edge this puts on the knife is certainly good enough to get the job done.But if you put a regular, western knife in this tool, expect to spend a lot of time with the sharpener to get even moderately acceptable results because you are basically trying to re-profile the edge of your western knife into the profile of a Global Japanese knife. You are going to need to grind off a LOT of metal to get to that kind of an edge. It is not uncommon for a western knife to have an edge bevel of 20 degrees or more.Not only is taking your western edge from 20 degrees to 10 degrees a lot of unnecessary work, it is a truly bad idea.The extreme edge profile of a Japanese knife is really only possible because of the quality of the steel. If you don't have a knife with that high chromium steel, you really don't want a Japanese edge on it. That edge just isn't going to hold up very well. It is just the wrong edge profile for softer steel.And if you start re-profiling the edge of your western knife and give up halfway in, you are going to have a knife that is probably just about as dull as it was before you started, or worse.So if you have a JAPANESE knife and you want to sharpen it easily, this is a perfectly fine product that you should have no hesitation about using.On the other hand, if you want to sharpen a western knife, this is just not the tool for you. I suspect probably 95% of the bad reviews of this product are people that simply don't understand that Japanese knives are kind of in a world of their own, and so they need separate, dedicated sharpening tools.I bought this because I only have a few Global knives and a set of really good water stones suitable for Japanese knives is expensive. I use this gadget for the Global knives and sharpen my other ones free-handed with my Arkansas stones. And yes, if I invested in good water stones I could probably get my Global knives a bit sharper than this thing does. But that doesn't make it a bad product, assuming you understand how it works and what it is really for.

This is a wonderful sharpener, and works really well with my Global knives. I've had another Minosharp sharpener before, the one with two smaller wheels. That one was also good, but the wheels were getting worn, and weren't rotating freely anymore. We decided to get this one to replace it. I love the larger wheels on this one. It seems to me that it is easier to keep the knife where it should be as I run the blade back and forth, and the wheels rotate smoothly.Having the coarse, medium, and fine stones is great.. My chef's knife had a small nick on the cutting edge, which was very noticeable. After using the coarse stone once, the nick is almost invisible, and my blade looks much nicer! After working my way down through the stones, my blade is nice and sharp again, and moving through tomato skin like it's butter. I wouldn't be without one of these sharpeners. It's well worth the money, in order to keep my expensive knives nice and sharp, and to keep all the cooks in my household happy.

I'm an engineer, not a cook, so I'm probably looking at this product in a different light. After one use on my (inexpensive) KitchenAid santoku small and medium knives, I was able to slice a tomato just by lightly passing the knife edge along the skin--impressive! I had no trouble getting a second slice that was less than 1 mm thick--equally impressive! Given that I don't own an expensive set of Global knives (the best I ever had was a set of Chicago knives back in the 80s that I had sharpened once, then honed with a ceramic rod periodically), I can't compare this to how a professionally-sharpened Global would slice, but it's definitely the sharpest edge I've ever experienced. Again, that was after a single use on each knife (20 passes on each wheel, per the instructions).One obvious compromise in the design (to my engineer's eye) is that the wheels can't be re-oriented to the opposing angle. Consequently, the last 1/2 inch or so of each end of the blade is going to get sharpened on only one side (as opposed to all the blade surface in between, which comes into contact with both sides of each wheel). Over time (a long time?) this may result in the tip and the butt of the blade not quite being in line with the rest of the blade. While possibly of less concern for a chef's knife (or other long-bladed knife), it may affect the use of smaller knives, in time. If the manufacturer had designed the sharpener so that each wheel had two sets of mounting posts (instead of just the one set), with one set for each orientation, then the wheels could have been changed back and forth between the two orientations in between sharpening sessions, balancing out the sharpening on the tip and butt of the knife's blade.That said, I'm quite impressed with the result when compared to all of the other sharpeners I've used in the past. No, I've never used stones and guides--I'm just not that ambitious. For a sharpener that I'll actually use, I'd have a hard time imagining getting better performance.What puzzles me are the reports of scratches on the sides of blades. The reviewers didn't mention specifically what kind of knives had this problem, but to my engineer's eye, unless the blade is exceptionally thick, I can't see how any part of a blade would come into contact with the slots in the cover (or anything other than the ceramic wheels), when used as directed. There was plenty of clearance on each side of the blade when I sharpened my knives, even on my small meat cleaver. Is it possible that y'all weren't holding the blade vertically? Otherwise, I'd be hard-pressed to explain any contact between the blade and the sharpener other than right on the blade edge. I'd have the same question for those reviewers who reported that the MinoSharp actually made their knives duller--that just doesn't seem possible to me, given my experience, unless they were holding their knives at some angle other than vertical. Anyone have any insights into this conundrum that they'd care to share (with sufficient detail to be helpful)?