I finally got a knife past my alpha tester (my wife). The last kitchen knife was deemed too thick for general work but has found a home as a chicken & root vegetable disassembler, a job it does very well. The new knives are much thinner, if you can call a millimeter "much".
Making these knives has been a real learning experience. The scale of too wide vs too thin is very very small to someone used to making combat and field blades. I also had to switch steels to do it. The problem with basic carbon steel is you have less than a second to get it from the forge to the quench tank before you start forming soft steel instead of hard steel. I just didn't think I could get a blade less than a millimeter thick over a majority of the surface from the forge and into the quench in less than a second because they start cooling the milli-second they hit the air. Thicker blades hold their temperature much better in the transition from forge to quench.
So these knives are made from O-1 tool steel. O-1 is designed for cutting and edge retention, and it has a 10 second plus (I can't remember exactly) window to get to the quench. Compared to plain steel that is a lifetime. The only bad part about O-1 is that you really need an electric heat treat oven or salt tanks to heat it because it needs to hold at 1500 degrees for 10 to 30 minutes in order for it to harden properly. You just can't do that in a fire.
So enough technical babble. This first knife is a 6" chefs knife with a handle of brass and caramelized stabilized maple. The blade is 1.3mm thick in the visual center of the blade, and .25mm just before the sharpening starts. The previous knife that was too think was 2.1mm in the middle, and .5mm just before the sharpening. This one now has a permanent home in my kitchen.
This knife is pretty much exactly the same except for the handle. In this case it's stabilized standing-dead apple wood. Since this one made it past my alpha tester, it's going on to my beta tester who is a professional chef - fingers crossed.
This is an O-1 paring knife that failed with my wife because I made it for my hands, and hers are smaller. The blade is to wide by about 1/4 inch for her to use it comfortably. The handle wood in this case is stabilized spalted pussy willow.
No really, pussy willow. Turns out pussy willow wood is very light, very hard, and has some spectacular grain and color patterns. The only reason I know is I have been trimming 3 pussy willows in my yard for 14 years now to be trees. They look like 2 story tall broccoli plants. The October blizzard a few years back knocked one down, so I had to cut it up. That's how I discovered the wood.
