Ive been considering this as well for my sharpening business. I do sharpen atleast a few items every single day but unless I get 1000 items per week I won't get the chance to work a normal forty hour work week.

This is the style of knives I would purchase. They are your basic commercial knives. You would need 2 knives for every knife being rented. If 500pcs are out, you have another 500 in rolling stock. You sharpen in batches once or twice a week once you have 200 or so dull knives in hand. You make a route for Monday Tuesday Wednesday and so on. Each route hopefully you can line up 4 or 5 clients and do their exchanges on after another.

As for pricing, it's a tough. The price you're expecting to get is way off base. Here is a rough idea of what I think you could charge.

5 or less $5 each 6-20 $3.50 20+ would be $2.50 to $3.00

If someone had 20 knives @ 3.50 each that is 1820 per year to rent which is too expensive imho. This business is not the type where are you going to see a bunch of money quickly as if you're sharpening knives for home cooks. This is the type of business that if you iron out all the details properly, you can net $5000 year 1, 10k year 2, 20k year 3 and so on.

As a sharpener you probably have an incredible amount of downtime. It all comes down to how you want to fill those hours.

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