JCK Kagayaki Cleaver

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Cadillac J

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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.
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Also a before size comparison to the regular-sized Suien VC.
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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.
2eci5uf.jpg


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.
359jzt2.jpg

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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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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