The knife arrived in the mail this morning, very well packed, and fast shipping from Korin, I also recieved a small bottle of tsubaki oil as a gift.
Mini Review, bare in mind I've had the knife for only a few hours, but I got a chance to put it through a variety of tasks, including brunoise onion, slicing shallots, dicing potatoes, dice & julienne carrots & slicing mushrooms.
F&F
The fit and finish is ok, spine slightly eased, choil very rough, not polished at all, but it is chamfered on the right side, quite sharp on the left side. It still has the horizontal grinder marks, though they are quite even and relatively fine, I'd estimate its finished at about 320 grit, there doesn't appear to be any deeper grind marks. Handle is nicer than some other masamoto handles I've seen, pretty basic, a bit of a lip between the handle and ferrule, quite a nice piece of blonde horn with no cracks. There is about 5mm of Machi exposed, which might annoy some people, I plan on taking the handle off to polish the knife, and will try and reinstall it with no Machi showing. Overall I'm pretty happy with the F&F, its not up to shigefusa standards, but I'd put it on par with the Katos I've had, grind marks are a bit more even. It came with a nice friction fit Saya.
Grind
The knife is ground assymetrically for a right hand user, convexed on the right side from spine to edge, left side has some convexing from around 1/4 the way up the blade, and looks to have a slight hollow grind just above the convexed section. Not A huge amount of distal taper, but starts thinning down about 5cm from the tip.
Performance
The knife cuts really nicely, a good mix of food release & ease of cutting. I had no problem with wedging even on some pretty large & fresh carrots. Good food release a little bit of sticking on the left side when slicing cold potatoes, no sticking on the right side. Tip is thin enough to glide through onions on the horizontal cut without any resistance. Overall I'd rate cutting performance as excellent, on Par with most of the the best knives I've tried. Out of the box I touched the knife up on an 8k DMT, and stropped on hard felt with 1m diamond spray, edge retention wasnt great, with noticeable degrading after a small amount of time (edge grain boos board) however as the knife is ground so thin this might just be some weakened steel right at the edge, so I'll reserve judgment on retention till after I've given it a full sharpening. Reactivity is pretty minimal, it doesn't appear to have any lacquer coating, it is slowly building an even patina, and I didn't notice any reactivity on any of the food I cut.
Some Stats
Edge length 230m
Handle to tip length 240mm
Height at heel 46mm
Spine above heel 3.6mm
Spine 1/2 way 3mm
Spine 5cm from tip 2mm
Spine 2cm from tip 1mm
Weight 188 grams
And some pics
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I actually think the rough finish makes the choil shot look less impressive than it is, it does make it easier to photograph though.
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