Chef's knife

With your latest concepts I would highly recommend that you mock those up. The different looks you created will be entirely dependent on layer thickness and how those layers are sculpted. It will directly influence how they feel in your hand.

Sculpting layered urethane foam is a lot faster and cheaper than final materials.

Also, if it is custom, why not have it specific for your dominant hand? Kills symmetry, but that could make the overall design more interesting.

I agree with iab. It seems, in your concepts that you are just styling a knife.

Cool idea. Or HIS and HERS matching custom fit knifes. Only thing to consider is multiple hand positions and how that would affect a custom fit.

R

Is there any play with materials if you’re thinking of layering? Something a bit different from the norm?

I really like the direction of the two latter sketches, they feel less like global etc, but still feel like they could have a unifying, recognisable style.

None of your sketches show any narrowing of the handle or the blade where it transitions to the handle. This “neck” area needs to narrow for an ergonomic grip. See how the Global knives narrow in the transition. This sort of shape lets the user pinch the blade with the thumb and forefinger and wrap the middle finger in the narrow area, for total control over the blade.

See this:

(Whereas the instructor explains several grips, the grip where the blade is pinched between the thumb and curled forefinger is, in my opinion, the one that gives the best control. Most videos on YouTube explaining how to grip a knife show this method.)

I would suggest a couple of changes besides introducing a neck zone: The back of the blade can be uncomfortable on the hand in the pinched grip. Round the back of the spine of the blade, especially around the transition area. Secondly, I highly recommend having the blade only beveled on one side of the blade; for right handers, the blade is best when beveled only on the right side (when gripped for use, tip pointing away, edge down), because this leaves the side in contact with the food without a bevel forcing the edge out… The benefit of this is most clearly seen when trying to make thin slices of hard foods, such as potatoes, daikon, carrots, squash, etc. On blades that are ground on both sides (double-beveled), at the actual point of cutting, the inside grind pushes the blade outward, causing it to slice little wedges rather than perfectly uniform slices. This problem goes away if the inside surface is vertical and unbeveled.

See this single-beveled blade for reference.

In most Japanese knives that are beveled only on the outside, the inner, unbeveled side will also be slightly concave, to keep it from sticking to the thing that is being cut. The concavity creates an air space between the blade and the material being cut.

These are the type of knives the brand I’m collaborating with makes. They don’t have bevels.

Cool stuff! It seems like the company is nautically spirited, maybe some sort of functional hole toward the very back of the grip since this portion of the knife isn’t used by Chefs anyway from what I understand. This way you could hang the knife up on a hook in your “galley” so the waves of the stormy seas don’t knock it off the table. Boaters love to tie stuff to stuff so maybe this hole could also be used to tie on a string to it doesn’t go overboard, a little story might add a lot! :wink:

I thought about through holes but I don’t want anything that can accumulate gunk and all our knives are on a magnetic strip :slight_smile:

drafting some stuff…

I’m starting to like the proportions of the handle layers, and also the detailing in the grey handle layers that I think I saw on Instagram. It reminds me of the intricate details of a damascus blade. What materials are you thinking of for the handle layers?

Thanks Andy. I forgot to post the latest. Here is where I’m at with it at the moment.

We are planning on a combination of micarta and g10 for the layers

Nice looking concept Yo. I love the Santoku style knives myself. Is it possible to heat brand the handle material?

Just the one pin?

Any mock-ups to see how it feels in your hand?

Speaking with the maker, he thinks we can do just one pin. Haven’t had (made) time to do mockups yet… laziness. I need to do it.

Yo Micheal, how are you?! (was it you I ran into at the core77 conference on the bus?)

I love this project, and Chef’s knives in general.
Seems like you’re in that stage of detailing out the surfaces of the handle.
The grip of a chef’'s knife has always informed the final beveling of handles I’ve worked on, it’s a tough balance of simple, beautiful and functional.

Chef’s knives are supposed to be held partially by the heel of the blade stock like the picture.
Most folks at home don’t do this, and I’ve always wondered why because it allows for much more control.
I’ve hoped that someone could come up with a handle that could help map the home-chopper to adopt this best-practice grip position.

As someone who’s spent some serious time working on kitchen tools, It’s very hard to beat a good Chef’s knife - a serious must have.
You’ll have to let us know when this project sees some production: Would love to own one.

jg

Love the layers.

Would be great to see that layered effect but with timber and steel…

A few of my knify faves.

http://cutbrooklyn.com/

I think you may be mis-understanding some knife terms. Your knife absolutely does have bevels if it is sharpened. In knife terminology, “bevel” doesn’t indicate the large visible slope that one might call a geometrical bevel; “bevel” indicates the surface that has been ground at an angle to the vertical plane of the blade. In the case of the Japanese single-beveled knife, the blade is thick, so you can see the gigantic bevel. In the case of a western style knife, the blade tapers to the edge from the spine, and the actual edge itself is sharpened on both sides, so if you hold a magnifying glass up to the edge, you’ll see that there are two bevels on it, though they are small. It is possible to make a thin, wedge-style blade where the inner face is truly vertical, so it would be single-beveled, but would not look like the Japanese style blade where the bevel is visible because the slope of the main surface goes all the way to the spine, and the actual fine edge grinding is small, but only on one side.

The fact that a western style blade is a wedge and is sharpened on both sides of that wedge makes it double-beveled. If you use such a knife to make thin slices, you will see the effect I was telling you about: instead of making thin vertical cuts, the bevel on the inside will push the blade out, and you will make wedges rather than truly vertical cuts.

For the sake of understanding the ergonomics and functional characteristics of the difference, may I recommend an experiment for you? Get a characteristic western knife or a double-beveled Japanese knife and a single beveled Japanese knife. (You should be able to obtain cheap single and double beveled knives at Daiso (they have them for $5-$8). Be sure to check the packaging for the little graphic indicating double or single bevel grinding. You can see from this one that this Santoku style knife is indicated as being double-beveled:

The ones that are single-beveled will have a little icon or picture indicating that they are single beveled.

Get a potato, a carrot, and a daikon, and try to slice potato chips and similarly sized slices from each of these. You will feel the difference, and then you can design your knife accordingly, knowing how the different bevels cut. What you will notice is that whereas the blades that are single beveled will slice potato chips off of a potato with even thickness, the double-beveled blades will not; the cut line will veer outwards and you will get wedges rather than slices.

See this page for a more thorough discussion on facets/bevels:

Have you seen these sharpeners before?

These sharpeners have multiple slots because each one grinds at a slightly different angle, resulting in a compound bevel.

Almost all western knives are sharpened this way, in one variation or another. The idea behind this approach is that the blade body itself, while originally made from a sheet of steel, is ground with a taper, but the actual cutting edge itself is at a slightly wider angle to resist going dull, but still cuts because in spite of the blunter angle, the metal is so thin (due to the tapering) that it cuts well anyway. Consider the fact that people can get paper cuts though the edge of paper isn’t sharpened. An unsharpened razor blade is thin enough to give you the same kind of cut if pulled along your skin. Thinness is enough to make something cut; the thinner the edge, the less acute the angle needs to be. But the angle still influences which directions the resistance forces push against the blade when cutting, so if you made your blade taper only from one side, and did a multi-bevel (micro-bevel, rather, if you want to keep the beveling small), you could get the look of the western style knife, but the thin slicing performance of the single-beveled Japanese knives.

The multi-bevel approach is also done to lessen the amount of metal that must be removed to obtain an edge. Sharpening another bevel at a steeper angle means less metal must be removed, whereas polishing the entire face of an already existing bevel at a finer grit is a lot more work. This kind of more labor-intensive polish is the way that Japanese swords are polished, mostly for aesthetic reasons. Some folks also want this kind of aesthetic for their kitchen knives:

(…but strictly speaking, using a one-angled bevel whose entire face is polished with each finer grit doesn’t do anything for the blade’s performance.)

The knives you’re designing might not look like they have a bevel, but here’s what’s actually going on in the geometry when they’re being sharpened:

Notice that in the graphic above showing the cross-section of the blade being sharpened, the blade body itself in this case is a wedge, and a small bevel is being applied to the edge via sharpening. (It is inevitable that if you grind metal away from the edge, a bevel will form.) If the blade body were a slab (like the Japanese single-beveled blades) rather than a wedge, that bevel wouldn’t be small; it would be large and visible, as was the case in the Japanese knife I showed you that had a large, visible single bevel.

Last entry on bevels / facets / wedges and tapers (at least until you respond), I promise.

I took the drafted picture of your knife’s handle, and drew in a couple of blade geometries to illustrate what it is that I’m suggesting. I’m suggesting that you use a single-beveled wedge shape for your blade, and that the actual sharpening (all the other bevels that may be added in the course of sharpening) are on the right side only. This way, the blade can make thin vertical slices without the problem of the inner bevel pushing the blade outwards.

Admittedly, this will make the blade non-ambidextrous; you would need a version for right-handers and one for left-handers, but for chopping and thin slicing, I think the difference is observable. A right-hander cutting a slice off of a firm item (potato for example, or even a billet of firm ham) using the blade with the cross-section on the right will get a perfect slice; cutting a slice off of a firm item using the blade with the cross-section on the left will give you little wedges as the cutting edge slips outward. You’ll know what I mean when you’ve tried this a few times with blades of each kind of cross-section.

Thanks. But I’m just designing the handle, not the blade.