As it goes, yes,
Ok here is my little review. I’ve had the knife just over a week, for that I apologize but I wanted to give it a good workout and the week was too crazy to get much done except use it a couple of times.
I am cooking dinner today for 6, some old friends and their little ones, they are not meat eaters so a mixed wild mushroom pie is on the menu, with spicy roast potato and veg.
So I start my workout with a full honing session. I also hone a carbon Damascus knife along side in comparison. I took both through a progression to sigma 13k then a strop on just plain leather. The D2 I have already established as a tad soft with my rather cruel edge bend test. It sharpens like a dream and the edge in the end is not dissimilar to the harder Damascus, both were tree topping arm hair very nicely.
So it’s a joy to sharpen and gets mega sharp. This has me thinking there is some reasoning behind having this steel a tad on the soft side.
So Onions and garlic to start. And I’ll talk about the grind. The quality and finish of the knife and evenness of the grind are very good. Polished spine, corners knocked off the choil. It has what looks like a 320 grit hand finish across the blade on closer inspection I can see it’s a machine finish, but a very good one none the less. The geometry is convex pretty much from spine to edge, towards the edge the fine scratch marks run toward the edge, almost as if the secondary bevel or “thinning” was done on a stone at the last step. It is very thin behind the edge…custom thin.
The tip is so slender it works very well for dicing onion. A little wedge at the heel on the push cut.
On the slice a roll of the wrist makes the slices fall off the blade….nice.
I have some baby leeks for my pie, can be a tough veg I’m sure you’ll agree, slicing works perfectly and with great control, a little wedge on the push cut at the heel.
Potato, I’ve already established this is a slicing machine, being such a slender blade I’m not comfortable speed chopping against my fingers like with a Gyuto or tall Suji. So of course it slices them perfectly, but at the heel I have to say that extra bit of convexity causing a little wedge in some tougher stuff, is potato parting magic. I wanted fine slices to lay on the bottom of my pie with some egg, and barely one tiny slice lifted with the blade…again nice.
There was more, Carrot, I used the lovely slender tip to cut the carrots lengthways.
And of course it made easy work of my basket of mushrooms, so many in fact there wasn’t muchroom left on the board, a ha, ha hahh.
Oh and I abused it further with some frozen butter.
And after all that chopping. …Well, I can’t find my loupe, but can see a few micro rolls towards the mid tip which got the most use. It will no longer shave for the front third of the blade, but the heel still pops hairs. After a quick dozen on a loaded strop, it has straightened right out again and pops hairs right to the tip once more.
In conclusion, a very fine knife, excellent finish, superb grind and clearly some thinking has gone into getting the best of the steel to make it feel and act almost exactly like a carbon steel, though soft, for my tastes now, I really enjoyed how sharp it got and how easy to sharpen. So I would say keep your fine angle on it, and use it on veg and boneless meat, give it a good strop after each use, job done.
I forgot to get a pic of the pie in all its glory, but this was all that was left
I’ll get this baby wrapped and off stateside on Monday folks. Where’s it going again?
