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I bought this piece completely on a whim from cktg because I was ordering a new stone after dropping my old 5k grit stone and cracking it into many unfortunate pieces. This gyuto is Vietnamese made in an extremely unique hybridized western/japanese style. the handle is made from unknown materials or at least unknown to me and is sort of a mish mash of a western, octaganol, and d shaped handle. The steel is 5160 recycled leaf spring steel, it is a monosteel construction with KU finish. the blade shape is very similar to the old sabatier knives with a pointy triangle shaped tip with a french style belly and is advertised as a gyuto. let me start off with some of the features that many reviews I have seen have gotten caught up on. My fit and finish was far from perfect, The handle was actually constructed much better than I had anticipated however there was epoxy drip from the tang junction, the epoxy was not sanded even with the top of the handle, I had a small bump on the spine, a pock mark near the logo and my grind was a bit wavy. Out of the box sharpness was probably a 2 or 2.5. This isn't a knife that you take out of the metaphorical box (as it actually didn't come shipped in a box), clean and take it against onions. Now on to the positives. This knife was $65 USD. I had 220 and 600 grit sandpaper and other than a few scratches on my KU finish all the other fit and finish issues were basically taken care of within 10 minutes. I took out a 400 grit stone and really worked on reshaping that edge, then took it up on my other stones to 6k and stropped it and it is shaving thin. Its a bit of a rough and tumble knife it wont have that mirror polish or flawless F&F that a more expensive piece will have but realistically after half an hour of love this knife looks as nice as something like my moderately cheap yamashin santoku that was twice the price. I took it to onions carrots celery even some chicken and its edge held up and am bringing it to work today to handle all of my prep and service just to put it through the wringer. If you're someone who is looking for an interesting style of knife, a bargain, or a knife to learn how to sharpen carbon knives with or even a knife you want to refinish this is a great value for the price. If you're someone who doesn't want to worry about the gamble of what will be wrong with this knife or not someone who likes fixing imperfect things when they are brand new then its probably an easy skip. For me it was a fun project for a night and I ended up with a knife I feel like performs as well as others twice its price so I'm pretty happy with it. I would guess on mine hrc is about 61 or 62 but I haven't tested it but my heat treat seems pretty consistent all the way through. Apologies for the lengthy review but I wanted to be thorough with my analysis as this is a highly debated knife in other reviews. Thank you all for your time.
Used the 240 for dinner prep and it worked fine but I still think it can benefit from some thinning. That will be my next sharpening learning/project.
