Nogent Style 8.8" Slicer Carbon Steel Ebony Nickle

An old one here, it is on it's 8th life but still has some juice left. This slicer originally started as a 10" I would wager and has been sharpened down a lot. the handle has worn from many decades of use and theres some dings to the ferrule, but everything is still solid and the blade has a new fresh thinning. 

Nogent style knives are characterized by their one piece wood handles, with a pin-through tang and round metal ferrule. They are thin and light with small bolsters. ‘Cuisine Massive’ was used to describe the style in Thiers, as Nogent was a rival knife making city.  

This knife has been re-ground and thinned behind the edge on a large 3 foot diameter Japanese water stone wheel (kaiten mizu toishi) and then resurfaced with a medium fine finish, our take on an old style grinding and finishing technique. While the particular wheel used to refurbish this knife is typically used in Japanese knife making it is very similar to the old grinding wheels used to shape European and American hand ground cutlery. A convex face to a blade greatly increases a knife's performance as there is less sticking as there is on a flat face and the blade does not get thick behind the edge nearly as fast as with a flat faced blade. Being that we are often working with old blades that need re-shaping and might have been rusted expect some minor imperfections, we try to give a fresh start to our re-ground blades with an eye towards their original grind style and keeping as much metal is needed on a blade when ever possible. Check out Bernal Cutlery co founder Josh Donald's book Sharp to see these wheels in use and more about their history in Europe and Japan.