JCK Kagayaki Cleaver

[Cadillac J]

Am I the first person to ever pick one of these up? I made a post a while back on the other forum about regrinding the profile to flatten it out a bit, so here are the results of this. Let me just tell you that it took forever to do by hand on my DMT XXC/XC…it took 3 separate occasions and I decided to give up and just use it as is, but found that I really like it like this.

I always thought I would be a cleaver guy, but realized that I like thinner more nimble knives instead. However, the Kagayaki still appealed to me because I didn’t like the tall blade so much of my Suien, and kind of wanted a go-between of a nakiri and cleaver without losing blade length.

Here is the before profile that I thought was too rounded for my tastes.


Also a before size comparison to the regular-sized Suien VC.


Now here is after about 2-3 hours of grinding at a really obtuse angle and even at times 90 degrees to the stone. The picture isn’t that great, but there is now a larger flat spot in the middle and it makes for much better cuts now.


I was planning on selling Kagayaki before, but now I think I will hold onto it. The carbon steel doesn’t seem as pure as the Suien, but it also doesn’t seem as reactive as SK4…not sure what it is, but I would assume it would be better than CCK steel. It takes a great edge though and I’ve been enjoying playing around with it now that the profile suits me better.



Just figured I would post this as no one has seemed to ever mention the JCK Kagayaki before in case anyone was interested in one.

[Eamon Burke]

What did you do to keep the blade from heating up during all that grinding?

And I feel you--the center-oriented belly on cleavers drives me batty sometimes. But it does help to cut sushi rolls, so I'm sure there are other reasons for the belly.

[Cadillac J]

I had water on the DMT plates just as I would any other stone, but even without I don't think hand pressure/speed would be able to heat it up enough.

This process made me really want to get a belt grinder of some sort for work like this.

[bprescot]

I actually have the KG-30 that I picked up a good while ago. It's a nice cleaver, but I haven't done the work that you did to really try to bring out the performance. In truth, I'm a little ticked I didn't wait a week until Koki had posted it's thinner cousin, the KG-25. As it stands, this guy is a fairly hefty cleaver and feels even heavier due to the relatively short height. I tend to use it for heavier duty tasks, and my CCK or Suein (Thanks J!) for straight veg prep. Still, for $80, which I think was the introductory price, it was a great deal.