Several weeks back I got an email from a fella asking me if I’d be interested in trying out a sharpening tool he was promoting. I love free stuff, so, ‘Sure!’.

Thus far, my hands down favorite knife sharpener has been from these guys. The one that I highly recommend has been this one. And while it’s been awesome for sharpening my pointy stuff, it doesn’t quite fit in the pouch on my knife sheath.

So, I received this stone and pouch in the mail the other week. It’s a pretty unassuming stone…a ceramic-ish looking stone that is rounded on one edge and beveled to a point on the other. Here’s the website, and there is a video on YouTube to explain it’s use:

Yes, its a pretty DIY video but production values don’t really have much to do with whether information is  accurate or useful. It would have been nice to have some good close ups, but you get the gist if you watch it all the way through.

Anyway, I watched the video and decided I’d try it out on one of my hard-used knives…specifically my Glock knife that I use for hunting. Here’s what it looks like these days:

It had a small nick in the edge about 3/4 of the way down the blade and the video said that using the wedge/pointed shape of the stone would take care of that so….off we went. Three strokes each side using medium force, and repeated this a dozen or so times. Then, as the video says, I used the rounded side to sharpen things up. And…it worked. How sharp? Well, there’s always the ‘will it cut paper’ or ‘will it shave the hairs on your arm’ sort of tests which are kinda unquantifiable. Like everyone else, I test the edge with my thumb and pull the blade across my thumbnail. If the edge bites into the thumbnail , I know its really sharp and will cut. My unofficial test is to slice up some cardboard boxes…I try doing that, gauge the effort required, then sharpen and try cutting again. The subjective difference in effort required tells me what I want.

I did find that this stone did not work as effectively on thin, flexible blades. I suspect this is because as you move down the length of the blade, the force you exert cause the blade to bend away from you..throwing off the whole process. So, for a long thin-bladed slicing or fillet knife it might require you to do something to hold the blade in a rigid, unflexing manner. For my Glock knife, which has absolutely zero flex in it, not a problem. For pretty much any knife that isn’t a fillet knife, there shouldn’t be any issues.

Did an outstanding job on my Glock knife, and, interestingly, a prety admirable performance on my good kitchen Henckel knives.

What I’m most interested in is whether the stone would fit in the knife sheath I like to use. (The SpecOps sheath) As it turns out, the stone is about the size of a couple sticks of chewing gum…so not only does it fit in the pouch, you could actually fit more than one in there. So if you have a knife like the USAF ‘survival knife’ or a Randall with those pouches on the sheath, this thing should fit in it just fine.

So, what’s the final word? It seemed to do what was promised and it did something the Worksharp did not do, which is fit into the pouch on the sheath. I think, for me, the greatest use for this is for an in-the-field sharpener. Gut your elk, break a few joints, touch it up on the stone, cut some more, break it up some more, touch it up on the stone…that sort of thing. It also did a really nice job taking a nick out of the blade, which kinda surprised me

Durability? Can’t say. I did drop it once on my kitchen floor and it didnt break or shatte, but that’s strictly anecdotal. However, it’s small size and mass means that it probably would survive being dropped more than a larger, heavier stone would. .

I’d like to get a couple more of these for my other knives and kits. I can see where I might, when at the house, do my sharpening on something larger like a Lansky sharpener system or a series of Smith stones, but as a field sharpener this thing has some nice merit – it works, seems to not require much attention to angles, and fits in a tiny space – all big pluses when you don’t want to carry more weight than you have too.