Smith's Pocket Pal Knife Sharpener Review

The Smith's Pocket Pal is pretty self-explanatory - it's a pocket-sized knife sharpener. To use it, simply draw your knife blade through one or both of the two replaceable sharpening blades. There is a carbide side to shape the knife blade, and a ceramic side to give it a nice, sharp edge. Not shown in my pictures is a fold-out tool for sharpening serrated knife edges.

How well does it work? Well, I haven't used it too extensively since I received it as a Christmas gift a couple years back, but that's because most of my cutting needs are done with utility knives with disposable blades that aren't meant to be sharpened; however, I recently used it to sharpen a few kitchen knives as well as a pocket knife.

My results were a little mixed. The kitchen knives were hit or miss. Some seemed to sharpen up nicely while others didn't seem to have much effect. This could certainly be at least part to the poor shape some of those knives were in. Also, the quality of the knife might make a difference (the knives that didn't sharpen very well were older, cheaper ones from my college days).

As for the pocket knife, I noticed a big improvement after sharpening. I got this knife years ago as a teenager but the blade had always been pretty dull. Now, with a sharp and actually useful edge, I may start to carry it around with my on my keychain.

Overall, I think the Smith's Pocket Pal is a handy little tool. For less than $10, I think it does a good job for the price. I admittedly don't know very much about knife sharpening (there's practically a whole science behind it and professional sharpening stone sets can cost hundreds of dollars), but I'm generally happy with the results from this very simple process.