“Most sharpeners get one thing wrong.” A 73-year-old knife grinder explains what it is – and why his last 212 are now half price

After 58 years, a small sharpening shop in Pittsburgh closes for good on November 30. The man behind the counter spent three winters building a little machine so his customers would never need him again. Now his hands have made the decision for him.

For 58 years, people in Pittsburgh have carried their dull knives to the same narrow storefront on Liberty Avenue. They come in wrapped in dish towels, in newspaper, in the cardboard sleeve they were sold in twenty years ago. Herc Maffei unwraps each one, runs his thumbnail across the edge, and usually says the same thing before the customer has finished explaining.

“It isn’t worn out. It’s dull.”

Herc is 73. He took over the shop from his father in 1984 and has stood at the same bench ever since, sharpening kitchen knives and fixing the small appliances nobody else in the neighborhood would touch. On November 30, Maffei Sharpening & Repair closes for good. There’s no one to take it over, and Herc’s hands, as he puts it, “have started making the decisions.”

The closing is only half of it. The other half is the thing Herc built in the back of the shop, and why he’d rather see the last 212 of them in American kitchens than in boxes on a shelf.

“Most of What Comes Through That Door Was Ruined at Home”

Ask Herc what he sees on his counter and he doesn’t start with dull knives. He starts with damaged ones.

“A dull knife I can fix in a minute,” he says. “What breaks my heart is the knife somebody tried to fix themselves.” Edges chewed into little saw teeth by a ten-dollar pull-through gadget. Tips rounded off. Scratches up the side of the blade. A good carving knife with a nick in the middle from a honing rod held at the wrong angle.

And then there are the people who never tried at all. They just pressed harder. The tomato flattens instead of slicing. The onion skin squeaks and the blade skids sideways. The roast gets sawed instead of carved. Most of them blame the knife, or themselves, and buy another set.

“People think a dull knife is the safe one,” Herc says. “It’s the other way round. A sharp knife goes where you point it. A dull one needs force, and force is what makes it jump off the tomato and into your thumb.”

Butchers and chefs have always known this. They don’t have more talent than you do. They have a routine and a reliable angle. Everybody else was supposed to have one too, once.

The Bell on Liberty Avenue

Herc’s father, Achille Maffei, came to Pittsburgh in 1949 from the Val Rendena, a mountain valley in northern Italy whose men had been traveling knife grinders for generations. He bought a used panel truck, bolted a grinding wheel to the back, hung a brass bell from the mirror and drove the streets of Bloomfield, Lawrenceville and Polish Hill ringing it.

“When the women heard that bell, they came out with every knife and pair of scissors in the house,” Herc says. “I rode along from the time I was seven. My job was to hand him the next knife and keep my fingers out of the way.”

In 1968, Achille traded the truck for the storefront. He had one rule, and he repeated it so often that Herc still hears it in his father’s accent: The angle does the work, not the arm. Hold the blade at the same angle every pass, let the stone do its job, and even a cheap knife will take an edge.

Then the bell went quiet. Knives got cheap. Block sets arrived with a shiny steel rod that most people assumed was a sharpener. It isn’t: a honing rod only straightens an edge that’s already there. The gadgets came next, and every one of them landed on Herc’s counter sooner or later.

Herc has a name for that drawer. He calls it “the museum of good intentions.” The honing rod that never sharpened anything. The pull-through gadget that tore the edge into a ragged line. The suction-cup sharpener that wouldn’t stick to the counter. The whetstone bought after a YouTube video, used twice, and put away when it turned out you need years of practice to hold the angle by hand.

“None of these people were lazy,” he says. “They tried. They just never had a tool that held the angle for them. So they’d come to me once a year, and spend the other eleven months cutting with dull knives.”

Three Winters in the Back of the Shop

The idea came from his customers. Around 2021, the same faces kept coming back a few weeks after he’d sharpened their knives, embarrassed, asking whether there was something they could use at home. “A widow from Bloomfield told me she couldn’t carve a chicken anymore, because her husband had always done the knives,” Herc says. “What was I going to sell her? A stone she can’t use? One of those gadgets I spend half my day repairing the damage from?”

So Herc did what a man who has fixed small motors for four decades does. He started building one. Three winters, at the back bench, after closing.

He knew what he didn’t want. No coarse grinding wheel, because that’s what gives electric sharpeners their bad name. No open, spinning wheel that throws grit across the counter. Nothing big enough to need its own spot on the countertop. And nothing that asks the user to hold an angle, because that’s exactly what nobody can do.

What he ended up with is small enough to live in a drawer:

• A fine ceramic wheel instead of a coarse grinder. Ceramic is what the old-timers used on the bottom of a coffee mug. It takes off only a whisper of steel per pass and leaves a clean, smooth edge.
• Two fixed slots, one for each side of the blade. The angle is built in. You don’t hold it, you don’t guess it, you don’t need a steady hand.
• A clear protective cover over the wheel. The fine metal dust stays inside instead of landing on your counter, and your fingers stay away from the wheel.
• A flat finishing stone on top for a quick touch-up between sharpenings.
• Power from a USB cable. “Every kitchen in America has a phone charger,” Herc says. “Why should you need another plug?”

Then he tested it. Over three hundred knives went through the prototypes before he built the first one he’d sell: knives from the parish kitchen at the church down the street, from his regulars, from neighbors who heard what the old man at the repair shop was up to.

“Those Ads Say Electric Sharpeners Eat Your Knives. They’re Half Right.”

If you’ve been online lately, you’ve probably seen the ads for rolling sharpeners that rank electric sharpeners dead last and warn they’ll “grind years off” a good knife. Herc doesn’t argue with that. He argues with what it leaves out.

“They’re talking about the old machines,” he says. “Coarse stones, no guide, the sharpener on the back of the can opener. Those will take a knife apart. I’ve seen hundreds of them.” The difference, he says, is the abrasive and the angle. A fine ceramic wheel and a fixed slot do the same thing a good whetstone does in good hands, just without the years of practice.

Dana Kowalczyk has run a sharpening stall at a Pittsburgh farmers’ market for 19 years and has watched Herc work since she was an apprentice. She was skeptical. “I’ve spent my whole career telling people to keep electric sharpeners away from their knives,” she says. “Then Herc handed me one of his and a box of my customers’ knives. The edges came out clean. No chips, no saw teeth, no rounded tips. For the everyday knives people actually own, it does the job I do, in the time it takes to boil water.”

She is just as clear about what it’s not for, and so is Herc. It’s made for straight-edged kitchen knives: chef’s knives, carving knives, paring knives, utility knives, the old favorite from your mother’s drawer. It is not for serrated bread knives. Nothing that pulls through a slot sharpens a serrated edge properly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is about to ruin yours. It also isn’t meant for single-bevel Japanese knives that are sharpened on one side only.

How It Works, Even If You’ve Failed With Every Sharpener Before

This is the part Herc cares about most, because it’s the reason he built the thing. His test was simple: could the widow from Bloomfield do it on her own, at her own counter, without him standing next to her? She could. It took her about a minute.

People ask Herc whether a USB motor is strong enough. It is, he says, as long as you do what most people find hardest: stop pushing. “Everybody who’s ever used a dull knife has learned to press. Here you do the opposite. If you lean on it, you’re working against the wheel. Light pulls, and it does the rest.”

It makes a quiet whir while the blade is in the slot, a few seconds per pull. A whole block of knives takes about ten minutes. After that, a few pulls every couple of weeks keeps them there.

The Knife You’d Stopped Using

The most common thing Herc’s customers tell him isn’t about a new knife. It’s about an old one. The carving knife from the wedding set. A mother’s paring knife with the handle worn pale. The heavy chef’s knife that got demoted to the back of the drawer because “it doesn’t cut anymore.”

“Even a cheap knife will take a good edge,” Herc says. “Keeping it is the hard part, and that’s what this is for.” Thanksgiving is the moment he thinks about. The whole family at the table, everyone watching, and the bird either comes apart in clean slices or gets sawed into shreds. “That’s a minute of sharpening the night before. That’s all it takes.”

Here’s how it compares with what most people already have in the drawer:

Why the Last Ones Are Half Price

Herc put every sharpener together himself, at the back bench, the same way he fixed motors for forty years: fitting the wheel, setting the slots, running a knife through each one before it went in the box. Since spring 2024, about 1,400 have gone out the door. The first ones went over the counter to people who walked in with a knife wrapped in a dish towel. Most of the rest went out by mail once his granddaughter started taking orders online.

Last winter, the arthritis in his hands got bad enough that the fine work stopped being possible. “Setting the slots is a thousandth-of-an-inch job,” he says. “Some mornings now I can’t close my hand around a screwdriver. I won’t send out something I can’t stand behind.”

So the shop closes on November 30. His granddaughter Teresa, 20, who handles the shop’s online orders, counted what’s left on the shelf: 212 finished sharpeners, each one tested. There won’t be more. Herc wanted them gone before Thanksgiving and Christmas, into kitchens, not into a storage unit.

What the First Owners Say

Teresa asked a few of the people who bought one to send a photo from their kitchen. Four of them did.

The Questions Readers Keep Asking

“My father sharpened knives for this city for 35 years and I did it for 42. I’d like to think these keep doing it after the door closes.”
Herc Maffei, Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh