cKc knives made this knife, among a few others to look at the use of a steel for cutlery, and kept the identity concealed as a means of blinding the results from preconceptions. This idea is fundamental in the physical sciences and while it sounds a little silly to some, there are many biases when tend to influence how we evaluate data even if we really want to be honest and unbiased, on a subconscious level this is very difficult to impossible without some manner of blinding to prevent it.
A few specifications :
The knife is shown in the image on the right compared to another knife from cKc, the Victorious. It is made from the full stock thickness of the steel (0.235") which is just under a quarter of an inch thick. This makes it quite heavy, even for a small-medium fixed blade as it weighs 200 grams. This weight also comes from the fact that while the knife has a close to full height grind, it has almost no distal taper and thus retains a lot of mass.
Now as a point of clarification, the knife isn't ground in this way because it represents the ideal way to grind the knife from a performance point of view. In particular the very thick cross section is a bit of a departure from cKc of the usual style of grind used which is much thinner and more of a distal taper. This knife was made mainly to get a blade out for evaluation though as with any aspect of a knife, it does have its utility/purpose.
Before the knife was sent out for a passaround it was zero-ground to remove the secondary bevel and it was sent with a H1 from Fallkniven which has a very similar blade shape and uses a well known and common high carbide stainless steel in VG-10 as a point of comparison.
From OldSpice :
Before sharpening with just the apex, the utility blade averaged around 80grams to cut the sewing thread which breaks at just over 1lb of loading. The H1 was very near at 76g, and madnums skinner which was sharpened but used to cut steak on a ceramic plate was 56g. I would say the difference between the utility blade and H1 at this point is purely noise and the skinner had an advantage of already being sharpned.
After sharpening them on my 3 micron DMT plate, all to nicely shaving, the results were. CKC 39g, H1 48g, and madnums skinner at 26g.
From C Amber :
Had a few minutes so decided to do one of the things I most use a knife for with the Utility Blade...a one stick fire, or whatever you want to call it. This one actually used two logs / sticks.
In general the blade worked very well. The handle is very comfortable with all the mass it has and the nicely rounded corners. A hammer grip which I use for making shavings is very comfortable, which I was not expecting with the pronounced finger choil, but my finger doesn't even really rest in it when working with that forward hammer grip. The butt of the handle is very fat and so nice to strike, as I like to do tip first splitting. Similarly, the rounded spine made it much more comfortable to strike with a fist or palm when splitting small stuff. As an aside, this is also my first time really using a wood handle. I like it. Not as grippy as micarta, but comfortable
The edge is very nice as well. With the thicker stock, it split well, but the thin ground edge gave a lot of control when splitting thinner wood...the blade wouldn't run out the side as I'm used before the split was complete. It also was very easy to start in the end of the wood. Making shavings was also very easy...easier than with a scandi. The scandi is easy to make thin ones with, but with the full height grind and low edge angle here I could easily dig in and scoop out nice thick ones too without breaking them out of the wood.
The edge was as sharp as Mark sent it after I finished the work. Still easily slices newsprint in all directions and will do a push cut on a 45.
So in short, this blade was very easy to sharpen, which is not to be surprising since it has a thin edge, but I've sharpened other thin edges before in Elmax, M4, and even VG10, and they didn't sharpen this quickly. At this point the blade will shave fine underarm hair, slice newsprint cross grain easily, but no push cut, which I can't ever really get to anyway.
From Apophis :
So it cut all that cardboard, plus all of the aforementioned, plus some more chopping of bamboo skewers (wanted to do some one chop cuts). About half of that pile was my super stout tactical cardboard and the other half was amazon boxes. I took a comparison pic of the cardboard thickness if needed. The blade still easily sliced paper, but would snag a lttle in a couple of spots if I went slow. It wouldn't even start to catch hair on my arm anymore. I imagine it would have continued cutting far more cardboard, but frankly I was just tired of cutting.
I did some comparitive slicing on the remaining zucchini. I sliced half rounds with the CKC, Kanetsugu, and Henckels. Surprisingly, I felt that the "beat to hell, never properly sharpened in 4 years," Gyuto held a clear advantage and took the least effort to cut with. The CKC continued to impress for such a stout blade and only fell behind because I could feel some resistance from wedging. The Henckels I was so proud of and felt I had sharpened so well did fine in terms of accomplishing the task, but seemed to take the most effort to cut with. The stock is similar in thickness to the Gyuto.
It is eye-opening to me that the geometry of one knife was dominating over the sharpness of the other in a manner that was so readily evident even after the first few slices.
From chad234 :
Given the thickness of the spine, this knife works better than excpected in the kitchen, primarily due to to the distal taper. The forward half of the knife cuts like a different knife than the back half. By using the knife in a pinch grip on the blade, you can maintain good control and not have a significant leverage disadvantage. While not ideal for extended use, for making a meal it works just fine, and you have a large scope of work possible with the knife.
The distal taper seems minor in photos, but it is enough to make a real difference.
The ergonomics are really good on this knife, for folks with large hands at least. Between the thick spine and thick scales, it fills the hand. The thumb scallop as the handle transitions into the blade makes a forward grip very nice. The fully rounded spine is among the best I have used.
While very different in blade shape, the CKC utility quite reminds me of the Grohmann flat ground survival model) in the kitchen:
No issues with rusting. Don't know if the steel used in this knife has been revealed, but I'd guess it is similiar to whatever stainless steel is used in the Grohamnn as well, at least by how it feels on my ceramic steel. (Which I concede is a wholly unreliable method)
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| Written: 17/01/2015 | Updated: | Copyright (c) 2015 : Cliff Stamp |