On the cutting edge: For knife sharpeners, there’s never a dull moment - cleveland.com

Garth Proctor sharpens knives for Maggie Young of Lakewood outside Rego Brothers Lake Road Market in Rocky River.Mike Mentrek, special to cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Around this time of year, you may run into shoppers at some local markets who are wielding knives and looking for Garth Proctor and Kevin Scheuring.

They harbor no ill intent toward the two men; they’re just hoping to have a better-carved holiday turkey.

Proctor and Scheuring are professional knife sharpeners, part of a dwindling number of local craftspeople who offer the service to home cooks.

They say the winter holidays bring a bump in business, as customers planning turkeys, briskets or hams bring their dulled carving knives out from the back of their kitchen drawers.

Kevin Scheuring operates his Knivhugga service out of the Coit Road Farmers Market, where he also sells knives he has rehabbed.Mike Mentrek, special to cleveland.com

Theirs is largely a walk-up business.

Scheuring operates his Knivhugga service (the name comes from a Swedish word he translates as “knife stab” and is a nod to his Scandinavian heritage) out of the Coit Road Farmers Market in East Cleveland, just outside of Cleveland Heights. He also has served as the market’s volunteer manager for the last 17 years.

Proctor’s is more of an itinerate service: He can be found set up at the Rego Brothers Lake Road Market in Rocky River and the Rego’s Neighborhood Market in Strongsville on alternating Fridays; in season at farmers markets in Chagrin Falls and Medina; and starting in January at the North Union Farmers Market in the Van Aken District in Shaker Heights.

Convenience is a big part of the appeal. Customers can drop off their knives, do their shopping and return to collect their newly sharpened tools. The curious are also welcome to stay and watch the multistep process.

Kevin Scheuring gives a resharpened knife a final honing.Mike Mentrek, special to cleveland.com

A routine sharpening takes five minutes or less, Scheuring and Proctor say.

They both charge a rate of $1 per inch of blade length for a basic sharpening, with additional charges for specialized knives and tools.

Both men do their sharpening almost exclusively on electrically powered machines, rather than by hand, running knives over a series of spinning wheels or belts of various materials and grits to get them to a sharp, finished edge.

Proctor takes his gear with him to the markets where he operates -- all he needs is a 10-foot-long table and an electrical outlet, he says.

Garth Proctor brought along his knife gnome to Rego Brothers Lake Road Market in Rocky River.Mike Mentrek, special to cleveland.com

Scheuring’s stand is at the back of the Coit Road market, a work space chock-a-block with belts and drivers set up next to displays of rehabbed knives that he also sells.

Though kitchen knives are their specialties, Proctor and Scheuring will sharpen lots of other types of cutting implements. They’ll do scissors (even pinking shears, Proctor says), gardening hand tools, axes, hatchets, loppers and more.

Proctor says the most unusual thing he’s ever been asked to sharpen was a scythe. For Scheuring, it was a purposely dulled sword used as a theater prop, brought in by a Russian retired actor.

On a recent afternoon, Proctor was set up outside the Lake Road Market. It was easy to see how he got to his tally of having sharpened an estimated 2,300 knives in the past year.

Garth Proctor runs a knife through a set of spinning ceramic disks to achieve a sharp edge.Mike Mentrek, special to cleveland.com

He had a steady stream of business: homemakers with handfuls of kitchen knives, a gardener with a pair of shears, a woman with some high-end Japanese cutlery, a chef from a nearby restaurant and more.

“Do they have to be good knives?” a passerby asks about the types of products he services.

No, he’ll take all comers, Proctor says, repeating a point that Scheuring also stresses: “They’ll work as good as a $500 knife once I’ve sharpened them.”

Proctor and Scheuring will do repairs on knives as well, restoring a chipped blade to usable condition, for instance.

Kevin Scheuring's workspace at the Coit Road Farmers Market is filled with grinding belts, drivers and knives.Mike Mentrek, special to cleveland.com

Proctor jokingly takes credit for once saving a marriage when a customer brought in a $1,500 sushi knife that his wife had dropped, point-first, onto a marble floor, cracking off the tip. Proctor was able to reshape the cutting edge and salvage domestic harmony.

Scheuring can also arrange to have customers leave knives at his home in Cleveland’s South Collinwood neighborhood, where he can sharpen them and usually have them ready for pickup the next day (details below).

Proctor will also travel to do private sharpening “parties” for individuals or groups, such as gourmet and herb clubs or quilting circles. He also regularly sets up shop outside the elevators at the Carlyle Apartments in Lakewood.

Neither of them does sharpening directly for restaurants, which they say can become too much like manning an assembly line. But they do work for individual chefs.

The restored knives Scheuring sells at his stand cover a wide range of purposes, from fillet knives to kitchen hatchets, and span eras back to the 1960s.

He says he doesn’t consider himself a “knife snob,” and instead aims to find varieties that customers can be comfortable with and afford.

Both men came to knife-sharpening after doing other jobs, and they say that having watched grandparents work on knives decades ago helped plant the seed of the career change.

Proctor, of Lakewood, was a calligrapher for American Greetings in the early 2000s and managed the bookstore at Cleveland State University for a number of years before that.

After leaving American Greetings around 2008, he came across a notice about a knife-sharpening class taught by Steve Bottorff, whom he described as the now-retired guru of local knife sharpeners.

He tapped into Bottorff’s knowledge to get the right equipment, then started offering his services through the North Union farmers markets in Shaker Heights, Crocker Park and Chagrin Falls.

It’s now mostly a part-time retirement gig for him, he says.

Scheuring operated a spice stand at the Coit Road market for 18 years and was actively involved in cooking classes offered there. He was looking to add a knife sharpening service at the market -- Bottorff had operated there for a time but gradually cut back -- when he had an early-morning epiphany: What if he became the knife-sharpener?

He saw an opportunity to move away from what had become -- to use an apt term -- a grind with his spice business and try something new that would still serve his goal of helping market customers embrace home cooking.

He said that aside from advice he got from Bottorff, he learned the trade through lots of practice. He bought up scores of used knives online and at yard sales, sharpening four to five of them per day, day in and day out.

He’s now operated Knivhugga for about three years.

As for on-the-job hazards, neither Scheuring nor Proctor have many battle scars to show from their work. In fact, their fingers are part of their tool kit, as they run them along a knife’s edge to tell whether it’s been ground smooth.

And “Ouch!” can sometimes be an endorsement.

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Scheuring recalls spotting a knife owner at the Coit Road market a week after a sharpening session. When Scheuring asked if the work on the knife blade had turned out to be satisfactory, the customer responded by holding up a bandaged finger.

Scheuring is at the Coit Road Farmers Market, 15000 Woodworth Ave. in East Cleveland, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Saturday, and on Tuesday evenings during the warmer months. He can be reached at 216-235-2753 (texts preferred) to arrange drop-off of knives to be sharpened at his home.

On alternate Fridays, Proctor is at Rego Brothers Lake Road Market, 20267 Lake Road in Rocky River, from noon to 3 p.m. (He’ll be there next on Nov. 22) and at Rego’s Neighborhood Market, 19600 W. 130th St., Strongsville, from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. (Next on Nov. 15). He’ll be at the North Union Farmers Market in the Van Aken District in Shaker Heights on Saturdays beginning Jan. 4. In the growing season, he’s at farmers markets in Chagrin Falls and Medina. To arrange on-site sharpening events, text him at 216-262-3168.

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