Chef’sChoice Diamond Hone AngleSelect Sharpener 1520

Expected more from a commercial-grade device – A little about me on this topic: I’m no professional at sharpening knives manually by any means. I perform poorly on whetstones and have no idea why I have ugly scratch marks and inconsistent angles despite trying my best and having hours upon hours of practice. That said, I do get there eventually, but not before spending hours on each knife, and ruining its original beauty. If you ever asked me to manually sharpen a knife for you, you will end up asking me to buy you a new one. By “getting there”, I mean I do end up with a very sharp knife that’s capable of shaving hair off my arms. Eventually, I stumbled onto the beauty of the Fixed Angle sharpener, a very simple contraption where you use a smaller whetstone secured to a rod, applied on top of a knife that you hold flat against a platform. This device was an absolute beauty it kept my angles consistent, saved plenty of time to achieve even better results, and even enabled me to achieve mirror polishes on the sharpened edges, something I can never achieve by manual grinding, despite my best attempts.

I have been using my Chef’s Choice Angle Select 1520 on very seldom occasions. This is my first and only electric sharpener, having to resort to this type of product because I recently moved, and lacked kitchen space to accommodate a dedicated portion of the kitchen bench to set up my fixed angle sharpener. I bought this product after trawling through countless reviews on similar products by Chef’s Choice and other competing brands, with the 1520 to be one of the highest rated products with a reasonable price tag.

OVERALL DESIGN AND BUILD QUALITY

Very standard design motor and switch on the left that doubles as where your spare hand should rest to steady the unit, and three pairs of grooves (you grind each bevel at a time, this is marketed towards the commercial users, so don’t be lazy) for you to feed a blade through on the right. It’s adequately heavy. This is not a product that you want lightweight. It’s mainly designed for right handers, but I don’t have any issues with the general usability as a left hander. Build quality feels absolutely solid, and from what I can tell with the competing products, this is not a compact appliance, and rightly so in this particular case. One thing I failed to notice before buying the unit is how the “angle select” component is achieved. There are three pairs of grooves, labelled 1, 2 and 3. My expectation was that there would be some mechanical lever that switches the angle of the platform that guides your knife along the grinding disk, and that the 1, 2 and 3 grooves denoted stages of abrasion. I was wrong. Turns out, slot 1 is for 15-degree course grind, 2 is for 20-degree course grind, and 3 is a “stropping” disk also at 20-degrees, but with a softer material. Not something I was happy about, but then again, my mistake for not reading things through properly. The grinding disks are diamond coated - one of my main requirements to ensure longevity - and also replaceable, another factor I considered essential when looking at the lifecycle of a product.

Grooves are designed for standard kitchen knives or thinner Chinese vegetable cleavers. It won’t do my cast iron or stainless steel meat cleavers, as they are too thick to get into the grooves.

A bonus feature is the magnetic catch. Metal filings from your knife are captured by a magnet. When washing a freshly sharpened knife, I was pleased to find that the edge was quite clean (although I’d recommend you still clean your knives thoroughly anyway).

USABILITY

The unit is powered by a 60W motor. At startup, the bearings are very silent, and the build quality sounds smooth. It’s designed to be very forgiving, with the grinding disks loaded against a spring to limit the force you exert your knife onto the grinding disk. I found this design aspect to be quite clever, as this will prevent excess friction that could cause heat and ruin the temper of your knives, or the profile of the knife, and also prevent the disks from warping.

By now, this is where I hit a major problem, which also coincides with why I intentionally mentioned the word “seldom” at the start of this review. There appears to be a mechanical physics issue related to system stability inherent in the design of this product. When you run a knife through the unit, you offset the angle of the disks inside, no matter how slight. As your knife leaves the disk, no matter how slowly, this offset suddenly goes away, and to the system, it appears like a sudden flick. Then, system instability is achieve, and causes a chain reaction where all your disks begin rattling violently, maintained by a resonance that seems to be a produced by a factor of the spring tension, size of the grinding wheels, and the speed of the motor. The unit will not recover on its own the spring in this case ironically becoming a cause of the problem, rather than helping dampen the oscillation. The only way to settle it down is to either shut the unit off so that the disks stop spinning (or at a low enough angular velocity) and have a chance to return back to a perpendicular angle, or what I sometimes like to do is to shove a paddlepop stick on the non-abrasive side of the disk to force them back to alignment.

This issue is particularly annoying, as not only do the knocking sound of the oscillations sound unpleasant and loud, you also would not want your knife going in there, as the angle of the disk will be quite erratic, inconsistent, and you might end up with a microscopically serrated knife instead of a smooth sharpened edge.

The Legacy Company, if you happen to read this, please take note. And also revise how your test engineers approached this product if they even existed in the first place.

PERFORMANCE

Issue of instability aside, my first impressions of the sharpening performance was that it was very wide. I thought 15 degrees was supposed to be a lot narrower than what this unit produced. My Shun carving knife was sharpened out of the factory at an advertised 16-degrees and this seemed way sharper than what came out of the unit. Even on my fixed-angle sharpener (with no guide other than my personal preference), I would be going around half the total angle.

That said, it was pointless for me to use groove 2. If I didn’t like the 15-degree angle, then forget about the 20-degree grind. The product information recommended it’s “signature” Trixor edge, basically like a quasi-convex edge done only by two angles. I’m sure you can visualise. Again, pointless to try, as I like my knives sharp!

I did try out groove 3, just to assess how well it “strops”. Result is, it doesn’t. It felt like it contributed towards NOTHING. It does not give you a polished edge as advertised.

The grinds from the course ends appear roughly similar to what I’d expect from a 400-grit stone. It’s not bad, but certainly more like a factory edge than a smooth edge. In fact, while wiping the blade dry with a paper towel, the blade catches a lot of the tissue fibre, confirming that the blade is riddled with microscopic serrations rather than a clean, straight edge.

Another item to note is that the sharpening feels very aggressive, even on the stropping disk. No matter how gentle you intend, even if you alternate sides at each pull, you will burr to one side. This is the unfortunate aspect of an electrical sharpener, because you ultimately have limited control.

IS THIS RIGHT FOR ME?

Finally, it’s time for you to decide if this product is suitable for you. I’ve noted things I admired about this product, as well as its unfortunate downfalls. Ultimately, for the general user and even (dare I say) the general chef, this product produces practical results, and provides considerable convenience when compared to your other conventional alternatives. It just depends on whether you’d settle for “good enough”, when given other choices.

No, you can’t see your reflection on the sharpened bevel. No, it can’t split a hair. No, it can’t even SHAVE a hair. But yes, it can cut tomatoes, and yes it can chop mushrooms without crushing them. I haven’t tried this but yes, It’d most likely perform well on a paper test (which, let’s be honest, is pointless as even a knife of mediocre sharpness can easily perform this task).

At $300-ish dollars, there are cheaper alternatives, as well as much more expensive alternatives. I’ll consider this pricing as being quite reasonable.

PROS: - Reasonably priced - Bevels ground individually - Weighty and feels stable on the bench - Good motor performance and bearings - Usable sharpening results - Clean results compared to whetstone sharpening (due to filings captured by the unit)

CONS: - VERY DISAPPOINTING design flaw, evident of a company cutting corners on testing and product evaluation prior to release - Burring to one side practically unavoidable (recommend accompanying this unit with a plain, non-ribbed, non-abrasive honing steel, or running the knife with the unit switched off towards the end if not otherwise possible) - Only one “stage” for 15-degree users - “Stropping” stage does not produce any discernible improvement - Won’t sharpen thick cleavers (not really a con for me)

Superb sharpener – These are the results (a score out of 5) for my knives in a domestic kitchen setting in Australia. 1. Swiss made Victorinox carving knife: Scored 5/5. 2. Set of six Japanese GLOBAL knives: Scored 5/5. 3. Swiss made Wenger pocket knife: 4/5. Sharp, but not quite as good as Victorinox/GLOBAL. 4. Cheap stainless steel knife 0/5. For some reason it just didn't get sharp after 50 or so pulls, and I suspect that's because the knife is of inferior quality. For those knocking this sharpener, I suspect you haven't read the instruction manual since there is a learning curve involved.

Bitterly Disappointed – I purchase 2 of these one as a gift and the other for my personal use. This is a waste of money. Although it says it is capable of sharpening Japanese knives I would not put any knife through this getting the knife in is a task and pulling it through it tends to do what I can only describe as skip so it does not sharpen the the whole of the blade I tried this on my German Wusthof knives first. I thought I would give it another try after watching a few YouTube videos and still the same result. I am now stuck with 2 of these doorstops because I can not in good conscious give the other one as a gift. I will never use this product again

poor durability – This electric knife sharpener cost over $300 and was promoted as lasting for thousands of hours of domestic use. It was ok to start with but the efficiency of sharpening got less and less with time and after 6 years it is virtually useless. What is particularly annoying is that the abrasive disks cannot be owner replaced. It has only been used for one household and not any professional purpose. Do not recommend this product.