Abstract: A knife sharpener (1) having a flexible grinding system includes a grinding wheel (2) and means for rotating the wheel, and has a fixed guide surface (14) for roughly positioning a knife for sharpening. A movable member (21) is disposed adjacent to the grinding member (17) of the grinding wheel, with the movable biased by a spring (26) in a direction towards the wheel. In operation, when a knife is moved into contact with the grinding wheel, the movable member is displaced inwardly to reduce the contact pressure such that only the knife edge contacts the wheel. Thus, rather than recontouring the knife edge, the knife edge is most closely returned to its original contour. Using such a flexible grinding system substantially maintains the original edge contour of the blade.