When your car breaks down, you don't go out and buy a new one, right? And when your lawn is overgrown you don't up and move to a new house, of course not. So, when your kitchen cutting tools start to dull, why would you toss them out when you could just use a good knife sharpener? Knife sharpeners come in a few different forms with a wide variety of price ranges. Read on for some advice on how to pick the best sharpener for your budget to get your cutting implements in tip-top shape.

To sharpen a blade is, on its face, a very basic process that's been used for thousands of years. To sharpen a knife, all you need to do is grind the knife against a stone or other rough surface. So you may be wondering, why not just go grab a stone from your yard and grind away? Unfortunately, it's not that simple, and in fact if you were to do something like that, you'd likely do more harm than good.

While it's important for a sharpening stone to have a rough surface (measured according to its "grit"), large bumps in natural stone could damage your knife, it's important to only use stones manufactured for that purpose.

While it's possible to grind a knife by hand against a whetstone, for the most consistent edges, you may want to consider more complex setups. For instance, the crock sticks setup, wherein two sticks brace sharpening stones in place to keep the angle consistent. This is important in order to achieve the exact level of sharpness you want for your blade. Other similar methods use an adaptable clamp configuration to hold the stones in place and maintain the angle.

It's important to find the right angle when you sharpen your blades. Each blade is designed with certain sharpness in mind - if you sharpen it at a different angle, you may ultimately make the blade too sharp or too dull for its primary function. Furthermore, if you sharpen a knife at too sharp of an angle, you risk making the blade much more likely to bend or break.

If you're going to buy expensive, high-quality chef's knives, such as those from J.A. Henckels or Wusthof, you're going to want to keep those blades sharp for as long as you possibly can. When a single set of knives can approach $2,000, you should spare no expense to keep those blades in working order using a high quality knife sharpener.

There are two primary options to choose from: manual and electric knife sharpeners. Manual sharpeners use sharpening stones by hand as mentioned previously, while electric knife sharpeners do most of the work for you - you simply need to keep the blade straight as you pull it through the mechanism. For someone looking for manual knife sharpeners, the Spyderco Triangle Sharpmaker is one of the top designs. A third of the cost of the Chef's Choice 120, this set comes with 4 whetstones of various grits.

Either method can produce a nice, sharp edge, but electric knife sharpeners provide a lot of convenience and ease of use while being significantly more expensive.