Everyone gets their knives sharp with it

Otmar Horl is a tinkerer. He doesn’t really like that name himself, his son Timo reveals. Horl Senior is a design engineer, professionally and privately. One who sees a problem and thinks up solutions. Gladly also overnight. “He goes to bed with a technical problem, gets up in the morning with the solution, sits down at the computer and sketches his idea,” says Timo about his father. The idea, which was to give his life and that of the Horl family a new turn, came about in 1993 – and then disappeared in the basement for many years.

At the time, Horl couldn’t get one problem out of his head: How do you get blunt kitchen knives sharp again as foolproof as possible? Not just somehow sharp, but reliable with a stable sharpening angle. This “conformity” is the holy grail of knife sharpening. Knives are usually sharpened at the factory with a sharpening angle of between 15 and 20 degrees. The finer the knife, the steeper the angle. The trick now is to maintain these angles when resharpening. This requires a lot of practice by hand on the sanding block. Horl came up with the idea of ​​a grinding wheel with a diamond disc that you use to roll up and down on the knife. He tinkered with it, building prototypes, but didn’t pursue the project any further and stashed the work in the basement.

“Isn’t that your knife sharpening thing?” Horl’s son Timo asked his father a good ten years later when they were cleaning out the basement together. Timo looks at the prototype from a different perspective, that of a marketing expert. “The thing was kind of cool. Besides, who can come up with a real invention of their own in this field?” he recalls. Maybe you could make a product out of it. After all, the situation on the kitchen market had changed drastically since the 1990s.

Knife sharpeners are trendy

3.2 million hits, 1.8 million hits and 1 million hits – what connects these numbers? These are the three most viewed German-language You Tube videos on the subject of knife sharpening. No, nobody drags naked there or cuts up whole animals with a sharpened blade. Knife sharpening is interesting even without sensations. Kitchen battles on TV, stacks of cookbooks and recipe communities such as Chefkoch.de – sophisticated cooking has been very popular for years. Many spend the equivalent of a mid-range car on their new kitchen. The most important tool in all culinary creations: the knife.

Although there are umpteen different blade shapes, the basic equipment in the kitchen only includes three: the universal kitchen knife with the wide 20 centimeter blade, the chef’s knife with a length of 12 or 16 centimeters and the paring knife with a length of 9 centimetres. For meat and fish fans, there is still a filleting knife in the block of wood. Great-grandma’s motto “If you buy cheap, you buy twice” has unbroken validity, especially when it comes to knives. Even those who like to cook at home often rarely need more than a high-quality set of knives in life. High-quality starts from 100 euros – at least. Common kitchen knife brands are Zwilling, Wüsthof, WMF or newcomers like Germancut from Solingen. But even high-quality knives become blunt over time. The steel no longer slides through the tomato, it crushes fresh herbs instead of cutting them, and cutting meat becomes saber work.

The power lies in the grinding angle

For a year, father and son literally sharpened their knives for this market. “It looks good because of me, it works because of my father,” explains Timo Horl about the “Horl roller grinder”, which was finally launched in 2017. As with many good ideas, the idea behind the grinder is refreshingly simple. On one side of a drum weighing 500 grams there is a grinding wheel made of industrial diamond and on the other side a ceramic disc for honing the blade. Both discs rest in the ball bearing of the drum and work like smooth-running wheels with their circumferential rubber rings on the kitchen worktop. The knife is placed against a small block of wood, the short side of which is beveled at an angle of 15 degrees. A strong magnet holds the knife in position while the roller is run along the cutting edge. After grinding, the roll is turned over and the blade with the ceramic disc is honed. Only the honing ensures the smooth cut surface and thus sharpness. In the test, this worked extremely well with seven knives of different lengths and widths.

Compared to other sharpeners, the Horl roller grinder is an investment at around 140 euros. Nevertheless, it is well received in the market. Perhaps the success is not only due to the fact that the system simply sharpens knives very well, but also because Timo Horl had the right nose for marketing and an eye for design. The small roller in walnut is an elegant hand flatterer that cuts a fine figure in the kitchen even when it’s just standing around. The numerous alternative products, on the other hand, exude the plastic flair of a food processor that you would rather stow away in the base cabinet with the potato ricer and egg slicer. And the industrial products are still missing something that currently fits the zeitgeist: an emotional story about family and sustainability with a dash of local color.

A “big role” in the family

The little roller sander has plenty of that. It is a Black Forest family product. There is silence about the sales figures, but there must be so many that a family business could grow from the former father-son idea. Today, Timo Horl takes care of product and location development, his wife, as managing director, has all operational processes under control, his mother manages returns, his father drives technology forward and other family members work as employees in managerial positions. Horl now has over 30 employees. Production takes place in tranquil Freiburg.

The second version came out four years after the Horl. With the Horl-2, the rollers run more smoothly and the grinding gauge has an angle of 20 degrees in addition to the 15 degrees. With the Horl Cruiser, a simplified entry-level model with fixed grinding wheels was added to the range. With the “normal” Horl-2, the diamond disc can optionally be replaced by discs made of corundum with a grain size of 3000 and 6000. This makes it really sharp even with hard blades with a high carbon content. Otmar Horl was able to let off steam with the Pro model. Since his training as a technician at a watchmaking school, he has had a soft spot for the finest gears. Inside the 300-euro “masterpiece”, as it says in the prospectus, is a planetary gear. In a single rolling movement, the grinding wheel rotates three times.

Knife sharpening takes time

“A pure collector’s item,” comments Timo Horl. There are also those among the knife sharpeners. In a positive sense, they are nerds who spend a lot of money on knives, collect blades and follow their own philosophies when it comes to sharpening. But overall, the target group has become much more equal in recent years. It is sold in 800 shops, but online sales are clearly ahead. In addition to the German-speaking countries, the sanding roller was also well received in France.

And the future? “We have a ‘Roller Grinder Owners Club’ on Facebook, where features are also discussed. There are voices that want more and more sharpness or this and that technology. But a lot of things are different from our philosophy. Our products should stay slim and, above all, have fun,” explains Timo Horl. It should also be fun, after all, good sharpness takes time. It should be five minutes per side with the diamond grinder, then another two minutes with the ceramic. It is best to sharpen long knives in two steps: first the front half of the blade, then the rear area. It takes a little longer with the aluminum oxide discs on harder steel. But when the knife glides through the material to be cut as if by itself, the effort is quickly forgotten.