“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 60 years, a small sharpening shop on Melbourne’s Sydney Road closes for good on 30 November. 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 60 years, people in Brunswick have carried their blunt knives to the same narrow shopfront on Sydney Road. They come in wrapped in tea towels, in newspaper, in the cardboard sleeve they were sold in twenty years ago. Sil Collini 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 blunt.”

Sil is 73. He took over the shop from his father in 1983 and has stood at the same bench ever since, sharpening kitchen knives and fixing the fridges and small appliances nobody else in the street would touch. On 30 November, Collini Sharpening & Repairs closes for good. There’s no one to take it on, and Sil’s hands, as he puts it, “have started making the decisions.”

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

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

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

“A blunt 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 steel 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 Sunday roast gets hacked instead of carved. Most of them blame the knife, or themselves, and buy another set.

“People think a blunt knife is the safe one,” Sil says. “It’s the other way round. A sharp knife goes where you point it. A blunt 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 Sydney Road

Sil’s father, Gino Collini, came to Melbourne in 1952 from Pinzolo in the Val Rendena, a mountain valley in northern Italy whose men had been travelling knife grinders for generations. He rigged a grinding wheel to the frame of a bicycle, hung a brass bell from the handlebars and rode the streets of Brunswick and Coburg ringing it. A few years later the bicycle became a second-hand Holden ute.

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

In 1966, Gino traded the ute for the shopfront. He had one rule, and he repeated it so often that Sil 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 honing steel that most people assumed was a sharpener. It isn’t: a honing steel only straightens an edge that’s already there. The gadgets came next, and every one of them landed on Sil’s counter sooner or later.

Sil has a name for that drawer. He calls it “the museum of good intentions.” The honing steel 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 bench. 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 blunt 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 Coburg told me she couldn’t carve the roast lamb any more, because her husband had always done the knives,” Sil says. “What was I going to sell her? A stone she can’t use? One of those gadgets I spend half my day fixing the damage from?”

So Sil did what a man who has fixed fridges and 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 kitchen. Nothing big enough to need its own spot on the bench. 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 bench, 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 Australia has a phone charger,” Sil 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 up the road, from his regulars, from neighbours who’d heard what the old bloke 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. Sil 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.

Kylie Brennan has run a knife-sharpening stall at a Melbourne farmers’ market for 19 years and has watched Sil work since she was an apprentice. She was sceptical. “I’ve spent my whole career telling people to keep electric sharpeners away from their knives,” she says. “Then Sil 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 the kettle to boil.”

She is just as clear about what it’s not for, and so is Sil. It’s made for straight-edged kitchen knives: chef’s knives, carving knives, paring knives, utility knives, the old favourite from your mum’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 Sil cares about most, because it’s the reason he built the thing. His test was simple: could the widow from Coburg do it on her own, at her own kitchen bench, without him standing next to her? She could. It took her about a minute.

People ask Sil 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 blunt 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 whirr 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 Sil’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 any more.”

“Even a cheap knife will take a good edge,” Sil says. “Keeping it is the hard part, and that’s what this is for.” Christmas Day is the moment he thinks about. The whole family out the back in the heat, everyone watching, and the ham either comes off in clean slices or gets hacked into chunks. “That’s a minute of sharpening on Christmas Eve. 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

Sil put every sharpener together himself, at the back bench, the same way he fixed motors for forty-odd 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 tea towel. Most of the rest went out by post once his granddaughter started taking orders online.

This winter just gone, the arthritis in his hands got bad enough that the fine work stopped being possible. “Setting the slots is a hair’s-breadth 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 30 November. His granddaughter Sienna, 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. Sil wanted them gone before Christmas, into kitchens, not into a storage shed.

What the First Owners Say

Sienna 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 these streets for 31 years and I’ve done it for 43. I reckon these can keep doing it after the door closes.”
Sil Collini, Sydney Road, Brunswick, Melbourne