First thoughts - balance. Right out of the saya, in a pinch grip, this knife feels different from anything I have ever held. The weight of it, and the balance of it - just awesome. It just feels... better than my cheaper knives. Sorry for the novice description, but I don't know how else to describe it. When held in a pinch grip, I felt that the knife was perfectly weighted and balanced for me to do some substantial cutting, under control.
Visually, the knife looks good. Jon cleaned up the highly polished finish and left it a bit less shiny polished looking (which I appreciated.) After visually inspecting the blade, the most stand-out quality to me was the distal taper. This knife gets stupid thin at the tip. I also was visually intrigued seeing the clad line (I believe that is that it is) above the edge. I believe this is where the core SG2(?) meets the pm(?) stainless? Still trying to understand how that works, what the different steels mean, and how to wrap my mind around how this is accomplished. I tried to inspect the angles of the bevel, and I clearly have some learning to do there. Struggled to really identify anything unique about it other than how brilliantly clean it looked (thanks Jon!) I need to look closer to try to understand the edge geometry so I can attempt to replicate it when I get around to sharpening.
I didn't have much time to actually cut with it but did work my way through a thick carrot. The knife is stupid sharp. My wife was afraid to hold it. She'll come around one of these days! I was impressed with how uniformly the knife wanted to cut from the heel to the tip. I noticed how balanced the knife was cutting a carrot when I found that the knife cut as easily towards the tip as it does towards the heel. I am used to cutting closer to the heel since most of my other knives seem to get increasingly dull towards the front (or were never sharpened correctly towards the tip) and require much more exertion on my part. Also none of my knives are as thin as this.
I expect that this weekend will generate quite a bit more chopping - I am thrilled to really give this a true test drive. Initial impressions - awesome!
Also, a thank you to Chuck - due to delays in shipping he included a bar of soap from JKI which should help me get the gunk off my hands after sharpening. Very good process and Chuck was great to deal with - great first purchase experience!
Will report back again after some more work. In the meantime, I continue to enjoy learning about this hobby! My wife already rolls her eyes when I start talking knives. I must be doing something right!
