There’s a home in south Wichita where the puns fly as quickly as the steel shavings.
“Time flies when you’re having fun — or if you’re a frog, time’s fun when you’re having flies,” Patrick Madden said.
Patrick Madden is the co-owner and founder of M&M Sharpening. It’s one of the rare locally-owned businesses in the city where you can get your knives, lawn mowers, clippers and chainsaws sharpened and mended.
Patrick Madden and his father, Mark, handle pretty much anything that cuts, slices or chops.
The business thrives off of skills Mark Madden learned as a child, during visits to his grandfather’s home.
“By the age of 7 I was learning how to sharpen chisels,” said Mark Madden. “I was learning how to sharpen his knives, because every knife in his house was a razor blade, because he was an old German craftsman and everything had to be done perfectly and by hand.”
Mark Madden’s grandfather taught him a German technique for blade sharpening. The blade being sharpened is wrapped in cloth and handled only from the cloth covered parts. Then a sharpening stone is run along the end.
“Very rarely are you going to hurt yourself the way he trained me — I did hurt myself doing it the wrong way later, away from his discussions,” Mark Madden said, chuckling.
Mark Madden learned even older metalworking techniques as a young man. During his college years, he joined renaissance fairs in North Carolina as a blacksmith. He started by pulling a bellow to heat fires during demonstrations, then learned sharpening, forging and how to work on a wet wheel.
Mark Madden and his wife, BJ, moved to Wichita in the early 1990s. When they had children, Mark taught them, too. Patrick Madden, in particular, took a liking to knife sharpening.
He was a Boy Scout, and in 2010, while working toward his entrepreneurship badge, he pitched a knife sharpening business.
“At that point, Dad and I looked at each other and we’re like, ‘All we’ve got to do is file this paperwork we’ve already filed out,’” Patrick Madden said. “Sixteen years later, we’re still here.”
Both Patrick and Mark Madden have day jobs. Mark Madden is an instrument repairman at Palen Music, and Patrick Madden is the head custodian at Robert Martin Elementary in Andover. But sharpening is the passion, Patrick Madden said.
The Maddens have outfitted almost every corner of Mark’s basement — and a shed in the backyard — with tools for the business. The shop has a clipper sharpener, scissor sharpener, and a trio of belt sanders which Patrick calls their “bread and butter.”
There’s also a drawer full of band-aids in the work table, stamped with the M&M Sharpening name and their motto: "Never a dull moment."
The Maddens, and their trademark humor, have become a staple of local farmers’ markets and trade conventions. They initially started advertising their work in flyers at Tractor Supply, Casey's, and on their church bulletin board. They offer their first customer, “Ed,” free knife sharpening whenever they see him and have developed a loyal following of customers.
“The best thing we love to say in this business is there are so few of us that we don't have competition, we have friends,” Mark Madden said. He said he and Patrick aren’t afraid to share their business, referring customers with specialty needs — like for sharpened beauty shears — to one knife sharpener in town or west-side Wichitans to the Maddens’ friends at Precision Sharpening.
“They’re the specialists, we’re the generalists,” Mark Madden said.
And they’re good at what they do. Mark Madden said that when he and his son hit their flow at the local farmers’ market, they can sometimes sharpen as many as 40 kitchen knives in an hour.
Kitchen knives are still their most common repair or sharpening request, but like the objects they handle, their customers are a range of types — from farmers to landscapers, home ec teachers to home chefs.
“We’re in a throwaway society, especially in your generation,” Mark Madden said. “You don’t think about it, you throw it away.”
We had a customer who was going to throw away — listen to this — a $4,000 set of knives, because she didn’t know they could be sharpened,” he said. “We did the whole set for $55, and she was going to throw them in the trash can.”
Mark and Patrick Madden say they see a lot of poorly made blades these days, bought from quick-ship online realtors. But they take all kinds of blades — and the occasional swords — and take pride in helping maintain what they call generational knives.
“Sharpening is a dying art. There's no one who does what we do,” Mark Madden said. “You can find somebody who can do maybe knives…they sell machines on the internet, but they don't do as good a job as we do in person, in my opinion, because we take it from one step to the end. That's why I'm trying to pass this art on.”
