(I apologize for the two overt clippings below out of your comments above.)
MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
Something tells me my 31's will be alive and well at age twenty, if they are taken care of.
Well, now that's where the real rubber meets the road isn't it? For us types who have plenty of other things in life to take up our waning time and energy ... "how do we get 20 years out of stuff that we don't have to take care of"? Truly mess-around-free is the name of the/my K.I.S.S. game.
MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
I simply do not have money to waste. Period. I paid six dollars for a three-step manual knife sharpener that in a nutshell is a terrible sharpener. Fifteen minutes sharpening a knife yields a semi-sharp edge. No way around it I wasted six dollars.
Yup ... I hear ya. A few years ago I spent ~$70 for a manual knife sharpener actually Made in Japan. It really does the job day after day without complaining or requiring any taking care of. It does all of our knives whether they be Japan edge geometry (20 degrees?) or rest-of-world edge geometry by eventually forcing 20 degrees(?) on the edges. As would be expected though, I really had to try hard on figuring out how to pay for it.