Watanabe 270 Gyuto WIP

I bought a Watanabe 270mm blue gyuto about 6 weeks or so ago. As usual, I went through the rounds checking out each detail, cut a few things and made a few mental notes about it's characteristics. Highly reactive cladding.. yeah it will take a bit of getting used to. I noticed a bit of wedging here and there also (slightly annoying). It was also a lot heavier than I was expecting (not a huge deal.. assumed I would get used to it). What really bugged me though was that stubby tip! I used it for a while, not completely satisfied and took the knife to my xxc dmt plates. I hope Mr Watanabe never finds out about what I decided to do with this knife once I got started.

It started out with me thinning as normal on my beston but it just wasn't cutting it so I moved onto my dying dmt plates rather quickly. After a few hours, I got over the whole thing. I did a pretty dodgy job, very uneven but it was in essence "good enough". I had to work soon anyway so I called it a day and started using it. It definitely cut a lot better overall after that, but I still wasn't a fan of the low, stubby tip. These are the photos from about four weeks ago after using it at work for maybe a day or two:







Maybe two weeks ago or so I thought to address this with my trusty, practically dead dmt. I wasn't sure the best way to approach it, so I literally ran my knife edge on the dmt to wear it down, as well as a little along the spine towards the tip to make it a bit pointier. This took maybe three hours or so? A very rough guess. By doing this though, I had destroyed my edge completely (as expected) and had this ridiculously thick chunk of metal to thin down to form an edge, plus I would need to thin the whole blade again (mostly at the tip as I had changed the geometry pretty significantly).

I thought my dmt would have enough guts to perform this task easily. It was failing big time by now. There were visible scratches, but nothing like when it first arrived all those months ago. The bevel I was forming was like a scratchy mirror- not at all like I was expecting. In my usual stubborn way, I kept trying anyway with this stone as well as my other course stones but it was just too much work. There was a lot of steel to remove, I was developing hollows rather quickly in my stones from poor stone management and I still needed to get ready for work that day. After a couple of hours of trying all my different stones, flattening them and reverting to my dead dmt plate again, I just put a very obtuse angle on it so I could at least attempt to cut something with it at work that day. I decided to order an atoma plate so I could finish the job later and restore a bit of sanity in my life.

Since then, I've basically ignored the knife whilst waiting for my Atoma plates to arrive. I'm going away tomorrow for a week but I guess I'd kind of like some feedback on the overall shape of the knife and whether I should change or improve on anything. Once the Atoma arrives, I will try to thin it out ovenly again, patch up all the scratch marks and (attempt to) make it sexy again. I'll post some pictures of how it looks now in a couple minutes. They are gonna be phone pics, but should hopefully give you an idea of it.

This is the same knife, though I've cleaned off the patina. I also got myself a new chopping board in recent weeks. There is a pretty noticable difference between pictures.

I think I'm happy with the overall shape.. it certainly has a lot more curvature as a result of the higher, pointier tip. I can rock, glide and push all quite easily. Any tips would be appreciated though

the stock geometry of wat 270 is pretty sweet, sure the tip was cumbersome but this knife is meant as a bulk prep work horse. i moved on from it due to it being too big for most things, but i surely miss that knife. i think you would have been better off selling it and getting something else unless you are happy with the results. from the pic it appears you could do some reprofiling on the middle of the blade to remove some curve unless that suits your cutting style.

when you go to sharpen again, try setting a very large bevel and don't be afraid to go with a very acute angle, that steel can handle it.

hindsight is a beautiful thing and if I had my time again I might have sold it. I guess I really wanted to use this knife as I liked the fact it is a bit mightier but I wanted to be able to use it for anything else that came to mind. It's lost a lot of weight which makes it slightly less blade heavy than before and maybe a little less mightier but at 292g it's certainly no "laser". The profile itself doesn't 100% suit me, but I think overall it feels a bit more comfortable than when it arrived. There is a lot of curvature, especially compared to my other knives but I guess that's something I will gauge over time once I actually get it as sharp as I had it before I go about re-profiling it again. Maybe it will grow on me.

I actually bought this knife with the expectation I could give it a seriously acute bevel so good to hear feedback there. I do everything freehand but basically aiming to set a bevel from about 1/3 up the blade and if it starts to falter, give it a micro to stabilise it. Does that sound about right?