Okay folks, I have to swallow my pride here because I have always been a hand-sharpening guy. I use waterstones followed by a leather strop with Green Chromium Oxide. However, three things caused me to start looking at powered sharpeners:

(1.) Flattening blades- I hate doing it, and I find myself doing it a lot because I'm always getting new planes, chisels, or blades
(2.) I'm getting into knife making and I wanted something to quickly dress an edge on a blade blank (with very limited budget)
(3.) My neighbor. This one is the most important.

You see, my neighbor puts up with my woodworking at odd hours, and building hotrod VW's in the driveway that I fire up at odd hours, and a wealth of other stuff I do. In turn, whenever he needs something I always oblige and fix it for him or build it, or whatever he needs. Lately he has discovered my love for sharpening stuff. Being Carnival, he was preparing their big annual Carnival feast, and he brought an armload, and I mean literally an armload of knives to be sharpened. They were the worst knives I have ever seen, and in the worst condition. They had literally been hammered with a hammer to crack conch and lobster shells. I needed to grind every blade, and my grinder is a high speed wheel that gets hot really fast and not really good for cutlery.

So I went online, searched around, and ended up getting this little gem:

http://www.worksharptools.com/work-sharp-2000.html

The Work Sharp 2000. They have a 3000 model with more options, but actually I found this one on eBay for 1/2 what it sells for retail and it was new in the box. I highly higly recommend you spend the extra for the "2000kn" with the "kn" being for "knife." It has a belt sharpener attachment for sharpening knives. Ahhhh my neighbor will be so pleased. Now I can zip his knives through in seconds! You can buy the knife sharpening attachment separately but if you buy the whole kit you basically get the knife sharpener at about half the price and you get more sanding discs and I believe you get one more wheel than if you just buy the base model.

Not only that, it has the see-through discs and you sharpen your plane irons and chisels on the bottom, but you can see the edge as you are grinding. Look at the link and it shows all that so I won't explain further. I took an old rusty chisel, put the 120 grit wheel on, and bbbbzzzziiiiipppp!!! I mean three seconds and it had a fresh bevel.

Now I am still a purist, and I intend to use this to flatten irons and chisels, and to first-step hone bevels, but I will still use my water stones and strop to dress the final edge. For my neighbor's cheap Chinese stainless stell knives, however, this is really all you need. I find the cheaper stainless steels don't really get much benefit beyond 1000 grit.

If you get the whole kit like I did- the 2000KN, then along with the knife attachment, you get two extra wheels (and they are reversible, so that's three wheels total giving you six sides to stick the discs to) and TONS of extra belts and discs. To my surprise when I registered for the warranty online, they had an offer where they gave me another free set of discs and they even paid the shipping. Cool deal!

So I never really thought I'd buy one of these but I am so glad I did. This thing saves a wealth of time flattening blades, setting bevels, and honing edges. For the cheaper knives it's all you really need. For my finer cutlery I still finish with the waterstones, and the same goes for my chisels and plane irons. However, it saves a whole lot of time and I can go straight to the 1000 grit and use the machine to get rid of nicks and to flatten blades. I am very impressed with the design and the quality of construction, and it comes with a 2 year warranty.

The only thing to note is that the 2000 model spins at 1750 RPM, and the 3000 spins slower- I believe it's 800 RPM. They have heavy glass wheels for the 3000 but don't sell them for the 2000 for safety reasons due to the higher RPM's. They also don't sell the leather stropping wheel that they sell for the 3000, and there are a few other attachments only available for the 3000. I'm not sure if you can strop at 1750 RPM. I thought I might try making a round leather pad to stick to the wheel and see if it works. I think it would be good to strop on a leather wheel because you could just touch it to the wheel and keep your blade at your proper angle. I think the 3000 is about $100 more than the 2000, and for what I am doing it's not worth the extra. The 3000 also has a wider slot for chisels and plane irons, which would be nice, but I'm happy enough.

Before I bought this I checked out the Delta model, which got a lot of bad reviews, the Tormek, which is just doggone expensive, Jet which didn't seem to have any advantage over this one for the cost, and then another one that I can't remember the brand name but that sucker was $750, so it was out right away on price. I still don't see what the $750 one does so well that makes it worth as much as a table saw! In my book as far as bang for the buck this one is the clear winner.

Despite the above glowing review, I don't work for these guys or get any kickback for giving them a good review. I am not saying, however, that if they happen to see this reveiw and want to give me a kickback that I would turn it down, (Please make that check payable to Malcolm Schweizer, or I take cash- small unmarked bills) but at the moment, I am just giving it because it's well-deserved. I was a skeptic but definitely they won me over with this tool.