Here is a link to one of my better posts on the forums:
https://www.kitchenknifeforums.com/...and-did-you-absolutely-hate.55352/post-843381
Now on the one hand that's simply a particularly successful example of the kind of caustic and facetious nonsense that I like to pass off as 'humour'*. But on the other hand, it's also true.
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A couple of months back I noted to my esteemed colleague @birdsfan that my professional life this year had been mercifully free of people bringing in sets of Globals to be marginally ameliorated, or 'sharpened' as you would call it for other knives. So (of course!) since then I've endured an unrelenting onslaught of the damn things, and I've noticed something else about them, which might even be most annoying of all...
Globals aren't even bad.**
They're actually not consistent enough to be able to make any kind of generalisation about. You would have thought that a large multinational, multi-million dollar company would at least have the good grace to make a product that was reliably one thing or the other. But the steel is just all over the place - it's a complete lottery. I've finished customers' knives at anything from 400 up to 5k depending on how they're reacting to stones.
IME your best bet seems to be the kinda standard 9"ish gyuto, which tend to be fairly acceptable if you can ignore the other defects to do with handle &c., and remake the bevel/edge a bit. But even then, just like a nasty-but-inexplicably-expensive box of chocolates, you can never be quite sure of what you're gonna get.
Here's a particularly egregious example of a gyuto and bunka that belonged to one unfortunate person. Whatever I did and whatever stones I put these two knives on, the same thing happened where long, massive 'burrs' would form almost instantly. I pulled them off in my hands a few times and tried again, using a different grit or angle, but no dice. The steel was very obviously faulty, I couldn't get them even remotely close to forming a normal, acceptable knife edge.
Admittedly that is an extreme example. But Global steel runs the full gamut; from that, through to low quality stainless that doesn't really form burrs, to middling quality that kinda does but is then impossible to get rid of them properly, all the way up to - on occasion - something that's fairly acceptable and takes a nice edge.
And frankly, it's f***ing infuriating.
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* Yes, I am fully aware that this post is just more of the same, but allow me my invective. And who knows; maybe one day someone searching about whether they should be buying Globals will come across this thread, and dodge a poorly-designed, terribly-executed, unjustifiably-smug, sand-filled bullet.
** Here is possibly the best put-down of all time.
https://www.kitchenknifeforums.com/...and-did-you-absolutely-hate.55352/post-843381
Now on the one hand that's simply a particularly successful example of the kind of caustic and facetious nonsense that I like to pass off as 'humour'*. But on the other hand, it's also true.
---
A couple of months back I noted to my esteemed colleague @birdsfan that my professional life this year had been mercifully free of people bringing in sets of Globals to be marginally ameliorated, or 'sharpened' as you would call it for other knives. So (of course!) since then I've endured an unrelenting onslaught of the damn things, and I've noticed something else about them, which might even be most annoying of all...
Globals aren't even bad.**
They're actually not consistent enough to be able to make any kind of generalisation about. You would have thought that a large multinational, multi-million dollar company would at least have the good grace to make a product that was reliably one thing or the other. But the steel is just all over the place - it's a complete lottery. I've finished customers' knives at anything from 400 up to 5k depending on how they're reacting to stones.
IME your best bet seems to be the kinda standard 9"ish gyuto, which tend to be fairly acceptable if you can ignore the other defects to do with handle &c., and remake the bevel/edge a bit. But even then, just like a nasty-but-inexplicably-expensive box of chocolates, you can never be quite sure of what you're gonna get.
Here's a particularly egregious example of a gyuto and bunka that belonged to one unfortunate person. Whatever I did and whatever stones I put these two knives on, the same thing happened where long, massive 'burrs' would form almost instantly. I pulled them off in my hands a few times and tried again, using a different grit or angle, but no dice. The steel was very obviously faulty, I couldn't get them even remotely close to forming a normal, acceptable knife edge.
Admittedly that is an extreme example. But Global steel runs the full gamut; from that, through to low quality stainless that doesn't really form burrs, to middling quality that kinda does but is then impossible to get rid of them properly, all the way up to - on occasion - something that's fairly acceptable and takes a nice edge.
And frankly, it's f***ing infuriating.
---
* Yes, I am fully aware that this post is just more of the same, but allow me my invective. And who knows; maybe one day someone searching about whether they should be buying Globals will come across this thread, and dodge a poorly-designed, terribly-executed, unjustifiably-smug, sand-filled bullet.
** Here is possibly the best put-down of all time.
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. It looks like the steel is just peeling off like dry paint. Dayum.
FWIW …
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