all right so out of the gate i'm gonna just say it is out of the box sharpness is the most overrated
aspect of buying a knife so i know that's going to upset a lot of people but before you guys
you know leave me hate comments hear me out if you guys go through my comments section of any of my
videos you'll find two questions that will always pop up the first being what is the best knife and
the second question is what is the sharpest knife so even though for me sharpness is important which
i'll get to why it's important and very specific scenarios it's not for me the most important
aspect of buying a knife the most important aspect is ergonomics and fit and finish the knife maker
the heat treatment of the knife and the grind and then sharpness is at the very end and the reason
i have these factors in this order is because it goes essentially from the least changeable
to the most changeable the ergonomics of a knife is virtually unchangeable when you buy it versus
a sharpness or knife you can basically sharpen it to whatever sharpness you want so that's why
i have them in that order now i understand that everything i'm saying in this video is
very subjective things like ergonomics because my hands are not the largest hands in the world
i don't have very you know beefy hands my hands are bony and relatively small so a person with
larger meaty hands may feel very differently about a knife such as the cramer now whenever i feature
that knife in the video a lot of folks will reach out and express very similar feelings about that
knife they feel the edge is great they feel the profile is very nice but the handle is just a bit
too bulbous it's a bit too round for folks with smaller bony hands and so even though that knife
overall is a very good package folks with smaller hands won't find that knife very comfortable
because because it is so wide of a handle and then on the opposite spectrum i find the octagonal and
d-shaped handles for me are much more comfortable to use because of their size generally speaking
knives with octagonal handles and d-shaped handles they tend to be on the thinner more
narrow end and so inevitably someone with my sort of hand shape will tend to gravitate
towards those handles instead and so you have to understand that ergonomics is very subjective
if you are a lion cook and you work in a restaurant you're holding a knife for 10 12
14 hours a day you know so you've got to have a knife that is very comfortable ergonomics is
virtually unchangeable it's not something you can grind away or sand down and like fit and finish
ergonomics of a knife if it's uncomfortable out of the box it's going to be uncomfortable for the
long term so for me it's a deal breaker if a knife is not comfortable out of the box the second most
important factor for me when it comes to buying a knife is fit and finish you can do a lot to
the finish of a knife now things like rivets and the tightness of how the blade sits in the handle
that's a bit more complicated and requires a bit more time but most of us won't really have to deal
with that it really comes down to things like the fine finish to the choil the spine and the handle
all those areas you can sand down fairly easily with some 400 600 grit sandpaper and you can
finish it off with some 1 000 2000 grit sandpaper and you can have a knife that looks pretty much
like new again and for me fit and finish is quite important because areas such as the
spine and choil i touch a lot because i sharpen all of my eyes by hand if you don't sharpen your
nose by hand you still are going to be using that knife and so it may not affect you as much
because i am putting a bit more pressure on those areas when sharpening and so for someone from
my perspective it's actually interesting to see that a lot of folks will tend to rank sharpness
out of the box higher than fit and finish now when i say knife makers there's a pretty big difference
between an artisan and a knife factory so you know you have your larger brands such as your yak cells
your m custard zenmais your miyabi's those are the larger factories in japan
and they have knives ranging from let's say seventy five dollars eighty dollars all the
way up to four or five hundred dollars so they have a very wide range of prices for eight inch
chef knives you go to an artisan maker your yamuri takas your tsuji motos yukurosaki unriyu
tanaka they will have maybe three or four steals at the most typically 2-3 steals to choose from
and all their 8 inch you know chef knives whether it's origami super white number 2 blue number 2
vg10 they all will be in a very similar price range they may be 5 or 10 difference between
the different steels but they're all relatively close and the fit and finish between them are
all generally very close as well but the more important thing is to know the difference that
when you buy a knife from an artisan you're going to have a very similar experience user experience
between the different steels and the different price points of an artisan versus a larger
factory which can produce a knife for as low as like i said 50 to 80 dollars to as high as 500
and so you just have to understand that the differences in quality of knives will vary greater
when it comes to a larger factory now between heat treatment and grind i find that heat treatment is
more important but harder to detect for example when you buy a knife there is no way for you
to actually know how high that heat treatment is and to know how reliable that treatment is
until you actually buy the knife and use it and so when you're buying a knife that let's say it has
a huge win of 61 62 rockwell generally speaking i find that knives in that range will have at least
one to two months of edge retention before i feel like it needs to be sharpened when you buy enough
that has a heat treatment of 55 to 57 i generally find that it has one or two weeks before the knife
needs to be touched up on the quest stone as a side note i get this comment a lot is that
people ask me are all heat treatment the same are all knives that are heat treated for 61 are all
going to be performing the same the answer is no i have purchased many knives on amazon
that have advertised the hatred of 62 to 63 and i've purchased many knives from japan that have
a heat treatment of 60-61 and i will say that 9 times out of 10 the knives that are made in japan
have a better edge retention than the knives made in china even though they technically
or advertising their knives with a higher heat treatment and so you kind of have to take that
with a grain of salt as maybe just the knives that i'm using now the knife's grind is really
what makes up its overall geometry so the knife grind is when you hold the knife up with the heel
facing you with the handle facing you not the opposite way okay so you hold the handle up and
look at the knife and from there you can tell if it's an asymmetrical grind a scandi grind a
hollow grind a flat grind from my experience the overall grind of a knife is a better determining
factor in terms of the knife's overall performance than the absolute sharpness out of the box or the
edge performance by itself so even though the knife's grind is an important factor
the grind can also be changed so that's why to me it's not a deal breaker if a grind is not perfect
for me it's kind of like it's sharpness it's not a deal breaker you can always make your knives
sharper by sharpening it and you can also change a nice overall profile by changing the grind
whether you want a flat grind or a hollow grind to make it thinner at the cutting edge
there are many things you can do to change the overall cutting characteristics of a knife
in case you don't realize this whether you buy a 30 knife 100 knife or a 300 knife or even a 3 000
knife if you use it you will have to sharpen it at some point so a lot of folks will reach out
and say hey i just purchased a 200 shoe it's dull um aren't all japanese knives supposed
to stay sharp forever or i'll get a comment from someone who is a victorinox user they'll say hey
my 30 dollar victorinox i've been using it for 10 years i've never had to sharpen it
uh yeah so i literally get people from both ends of the spectrum saying that
their knives should never need sharpening now i will say it's not something that you should
write off because there are times such as when you're buying a yanagiba or a single bubble knife
sharpening those knives require a bit more time they're actually technically easier to sharpen
but they require more time to sharpen if you have a knife that's not very sharp and so i
will say you know there are certain times when you buy a knife such as a 200 300 yanagaba you
want it to be sharp and stay sharp longer however that is a very small portion of the population
and people who are buying those knives generally speaking know how to sharpen their knives anyways
or are willing to learn fairly quickly but for the most of us when you're buying a knife
don't be so offended if it doesn't come out of the box absolutely as sharp as you've seen it
on a video on youtube so one of the comments i get from a lot of folks and i'm just going to
assume that they are new to knife sharpening or new to japanese knives they'll say hey
i just bought this knife that you recommended it's not cutting paper the way you cut on your videos
what's wrong with the knife and i do respond to a lot of those questions i generally just ask a
question have you used it in the kitchen how does it feel on an ingredient and you know shockingly
a lot of them write back and say i haven't used it in the kitchen yet i want to do the paper cut test
like the way you do on your videos when i do my paper cut tests in my videos it's to show the
cleanliness of an edge after i sharpen it that's testing edge sharpness not cutting performance
on real ingredients two very simple things and i always try to make that distinction in my videos
you know it's really for entertainment for myself and for you guys to see how crisp of an edge i can
get off the whetstone but we're not cutting real ingredients and so a lot of folks take my cut test
of paper and kind of re-replicate it in their in their personal lives and sometimes they get
disappointed cutting paper should never be your first test when buying a new knife
and for those who are curious i'll leave a link in the video's description or to a card right over
here that will lead you to the top five knives i've used up to date so back to the original
statement do you agree or disagree with me that edge sharpness out of the box is overrated and
of course do you agree or disagree with any of the points i've brought up in this video
and if you disagree it's all good we can all agree to disagree just let me know what your thoughts
are if i had to boil everything down to one or two points of simplifying knife purchases so with all
the factors being equal or setting them all aside if you have a knife that is comfortable to hold
and has a good heat treatment that is the formula for the perfect knife for yourself all right oh
okay it could have been here
all right we got a small piece
oh yay
we did it all right there you go john
it's done i'm guessing most knives out of the box can probably do that can't say for sure but
i'm guessing most knives could so that was only strapping for you know 20 30 seconds on a regular
um this is a raw equine strap but any strap will do but yeah all it does is cleans your
knife up and makes it a little bit crisper on the cutting edge and yeah you know i can do that
okay whoa there you go oh the head i decapitated little boy
that's not nice just another silly cut test on youtube anyone can do it you