Kershaw's $12 Everyday Sharpener Is Two Stages of Insurance
The most common reason a knife stops being useful is not a broken lock or a chipped tip. It is a dull edge nobody bothered to fix, because the sharpener was at home and the knife was not. Kershaw's Everyday Sharpener attacks that problem directly: a two-stage pull-through tool under 2.5 inches on its longest side, listed at $12 and currently discounted, small enough to live in the same pocket as the knife.
The mechanism is the familiar kitchen-sharpener idea, scaled down. A coarse side uses tungsten carbide inserts to reset an edge that has rolled or dulled, and a fine side uses ceramic rods to refine and hone it. For an EDC knife that cuts tape, cardboard and zip ties, that sequence is enough to restore a working edge in under a minute, with no water, no angle control and no skill.
The body is ABS plastic, which is the correct choice for a pocket tool: light, tough, and cheap enough that losing it does not hurt. The open handle design gives you somewhere to put your fingers without them wandering into the sharpening path, and the whole thing weighs less than a set of keys. Kershaw does not publish the sharpening angle, but pull-through sharpeners of this type typically run around 20 degrees per side, which suits Western kitchen and utility knives.
What it cannot do is as important as what it can. Tungsten carbide removes a lot of steel quickly, so repeated use on the coarse side will shorten a blade's life; a 20-degree fixed angle will never suit a knife ground at 15 degrees per side; and no pull-through tool will produce the polished apex that a guided system or a whetstone can. This is a field expedient, not a sharpening solution.
Verdict: buy it if you want a working edge available anywhere and you accept that it is a stopgap for the knives you actually carry. Skip it if you own good knives and care about their geometry, because a $30 guided system at home will treat them far better.
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