ReSharp Robot Kiosk Automates Tedious Hand-Sharpening of Knives

It’s no secret that many retail locations are struggling these days. With more offerings online for an increasingly diverse array of products — and with giants like Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target competing ever more aggressively for retail dollars — it is more important than ever to have a variety of draws to bring customers into a brick-and-mortar site. One very unusual new offering that a retail location might offer to its clientele is something never previously available: automated knife sharpening. The service is the brainchild of Dmitriy “Jim” Kolchin, whose ReSharp Knife Sharpening loans knife-sharpening robots to hardware stores, grocery stores, and other retail locations looking to lure customers onto the premises.

Kolchin’s ReSharp began life as a very successful — to the tune of $120,000 — crowdfunding campaign, www.kniferobot.com. Since then, Kolchin (with Angel Investor and mentor Dave Lyons) has produced successive generations of the robot. His G1 ReSharp lives at an Ace Hardware store location at in Palo Alto, where customers’ knives are inserted, scanned, and a beautiful burr-free edge ground onto them. The process takes just a minute and the machine is extraordinarily easy to use. What was previously a tedious and often difficult task — grinding a sharp, clean, consistent edge on a knife — is a matter of clockwork precision and high-tech automation for ReSharp.

Kolchin himself is something of an American success story. He immigrated to the United States at just 20 years old with all of $200 in his pocket. In the years since, he’s been married, become a father, and started multiple businesses, of which ReSharp is merely the latest.

The robot is innovative in that it solves several problems faced by those who seek to quickly and efficiently resharpen knives. In commercial settings, for example, it’s necessary to resharpen knives often (such as for butcher shops and high-traffic kitchens). But hand-sharpening a knife is a tedious and imprecise operation at best. Sharpen the blade too aggressively and you risk grinding away too much metal, shortening the useful life of a working blade. Use automation like a grinding wheel and you risk heating up the steel through friction, ruining the blade’s heat treat and thus its temper (and again shortening its useful life if not rendering it useless altogether).

ReSharp, therefore, represents what Kolchin sees as the future of knife sharpening. His machine offers better polishing of the edge as well as the least needed removal of material (thanks to computer scanning of the blade). Heat produced in the blade is also kept to a minimum. The computer control creates precise angles that result in sharper knives.

A tremendous amount of work went into ReSharp, but Kolchin believes it was worth it. “I’ve learned a lot,” he explains. “From computer vision basics, to electrical engineering, to product design. In the process I learned how important it is to create a product that people truly want. There are no shortcuts. I put in a lot of hard work to get here. I love this country and I’m excited about the opportunity ReSharp represents.”

There is no fee to host one of Kolchin’s robots. Rather, ReSharp loans the machine for free, maintaining it and splitting the revenue from it with the host store. To get a ReSharp robot at your retail location, contact the company today through their website.