Andrew Hutchinson has taken knife sharpening to the next level.
Long gone are the days of the scruffy tinker wandering around your neighbourhood with pedal-driven stone, or the bell-ringing van driving around slowly that you never knew when or where it would be.
Six years ago Rockwood-area resident Hutchinson started Sharp My Knife, a mobile, by-appointment, on-site sharpening business.
"I've reinvented the business really. This is the modern day, modernized version," Hutchinson said.
"Your choices used to be really limited: try and find someone wandering your neighbourhood or drop it off somewhere and hope they knew what they were doing."
How he goes about his business ranges from visits to restaurants to sharpen their tools of the trade, showing up at a sharpening parties (think Tupperware party, only edgier), regular stops at various farmers' markets or one-off visits to a business.
You make an appointment. There is a minimum charge. He shows up and does the work in the back of a large converted van.
The minimum charge is between $60 and $80 depending on location and knife sharpening is done $1 per inch of blade.
He also does swords, garden implements and just about anything else with a blade.
"I started this off for the residential market, because that's where the void was, but now I'd say my business is probably 50 per cent commercial," Hutchinson said. "I see those people every two, three or four weeks."
Those include cooking studios, small food plants, restaurants and some light industrial locations that use cutting implements.
"It's pretty interesting, some of the calls I get. Tomorrow I'm going to Bradford where there's a vegetable farm that have all these machines for peeling carrots and stuff: a bunch of little blades."
His biggest job is a catering company that gets 120 knives done.
And the strangest thing he's ever sharpened?
"I had a guy who had a set of those hand claws, like the ones from the movie Wolverine," Hutchinson says. "That was probably the oddest."
For those in Guelph with smaller jobs, Sharp My Knife holds a knife drop on the third Saturday of each month at The Shed Marketplace on Gordon Street and Trotters butcher shop on Cork Street. Knives can be dropped off there and picked up later.
"It's a good way of doing it for people who only have a few knives," he said.
Hutchinson was an engineer in his previous career life.
Sick of the travel and with a new daughter, he decided to start his new venture as a knife sharpener. After two years of doing it part-time, he went all in and things have gone from there.
"I was in the whole oil and gas business as engineer and project manager and I just got tired of the whole corporate world and never being home. I was always on an airplane going somewhere."
Originally from Toronto, he and his wife Molly moved to a 140-year-old home just outside Rockwood two years ago.
His plan all along was to eventually franchise the business and the first franchisee in the Kitchener-Waterloo area is now in business.
More information on the business, and booking contact, can be done through www.sharpmyknife.com. He's also on Twitter at @sharpmyknife.
