Ask anyone who owns a traditional ceramic sharpening steel, and chances are they’ll handle it with extra care. Many ceramic rods have a reputation for breaking if they’re dropped or accidentally knocked against a hard surface. Because of that, people often hesitate to let anyone else use them.

When we designed the Jende Ceramic Sharpening Steel, our goal was to address that concern.

The Jende Ceramic Sharpening Steel incorporates anti-break features throughout the handle, ceramic rod, and tip to help reduce the risk of damage during normal use. While ceramic remains a material that requires reasonable care, these design features provide additional protection against the bumps and drops that can happen in both home and commercial kitchens.

We’ve already demonstrated the durability of our ceramic steels through our well-known “bam bam bam” impact demonstration. We later expanded our testing with an official drop test to see how the steel performed under accidental drops. The results showed that the Jende Ceramic Sharpening Steel is designed to withstand the kinds of incidents that commonly occur during everyday use.

That said, it’s important to be realistic.

We do not claim that the Jende Ceramic Sharpening Steel is unbreakable. Like any ceramic sharpening rod, it can still break if subjected to enough force. The anti-break design is intended to improve durability during normal handling—not to make the product indestructible.

To better understand its limits, we continued our testing beyond everyday conditions to determine what it would actually take to break one. Eventually, after repeated testing well beyond normal use, one of our ceramic steels finally reached its limit.

In the spirit of the experiment, we gave that test steel a name—Brian—after the person responsible for pushing it to failure.

While Brian may not have survived the test, the results helped us better understand the product’s durability and reinforced our commitment to developing sharpening tools designed for real-world use.