About Prototypes

In the last few years, a number of knives have joined my collection in a kind of liminal state, sliding into home plate unused or before running the bases more than a few times. Normally, there is a little spark of anxiety when I make the decision to “get high on my own supply,” and keep something, but these knives found their way into storage a little differently. It's not that these knives are unloved; they are loved. I just don’t feel like they should be at rest yet; someone should be using them.

For a little background, I should explain my reluctant collecting style. The ones I first saved after beginning to sell knives were the unsellable ones. Back then, times were too tight to hold onto anything valuable, so the only things that seemed to hang around were the bummers. Knives that I got as part of package deals at the flea market—an entire box for X dollars—or, worse still, ones bought when I should have gone home and still had an extra few bucks in my pocket. Sometimes, the ones I ended up with were projects that were too ambitious or were historically interesting but unusable for one reason or another. After a few years of these building up, a moment of clarity and zeal converged, and I got rid of them. Some I gave away, and a few even went into the recycling.

Long after I stopped buying regrettable knives, it took me a long time to actually keep good ones. The first I did this with were knives made in 19th-century San Francisco by Will & Finck and Michael Price. These never fetched what I thought they were actually worth, and after feeling like I gave them away when I sold them for a similar price as more straightforward to find, less historically important knives, they stayed with me. A few of these 19th-century S.F. knives got traded with Don Ritch in the East Bay for knives I could better sell, but many stayed with me and formed the nucleus of my personal collection. 

So, the knives I’ve been saving and feel a little guilty about not letting run free are some prototypes from the last few years: especially a few dozen of the first runs of the Invictus butcher knife that is made for us by K Sabatier in Thiers and designed by butcher extraordinaire Dylan Carasco. While there are some of the first trial steel Greenfield gyutos made by Eli Sideris and finish ground by yours truly that I would like to save for future reference, I would love for a few of those to be out in the world. You can read from Dylan and Eli directly about these projects shortly, they are able to convey the genesis of these projects perfectly, and it's great to have it from their perspectives. 

I have to say, I am super proud of these knives and working together with these guys has been a great learning opportunity for me, both into the nuts and bolts of knifemaking with the Greenfield and an even better view into the requirements of this classic knife and pushing its time honored design to meet a broader working style not just suited for French butchery. I have had somewhat small contributions to these projects in the form of providing a blade geometry plan and finish grinding thickness to the Greenfield and helping to tweak the tip geometry of the Invictus during testing, but otherwise, a ton of credit goes to Eli and Dylan on these projects. Also, lots of appreciation to Philippe at K Sabatier for helping us to come up with production during the designing phase of the Invictus and to our industrial process partners for helping us to find solutions for the Greenfield production. 

In the summer of 2023, to pick a steel for the Greenfield Gyuto, we selected ten different steels—stainless, carbon, and so-called semi-stainless tool steels—and did a couple of heat treatments for each. At first, we were taking notes on what these steels cost, what they were like to grind, and what they were like to hand-sharpen on stones. Knives were first tested with a 4000 grit finish and then with an 8000 grit finish to compare cutting feel and edge life on onions, celery, and carrots, as well as crusty sourdough on a length-grain hardwood board to help speed up the wear to the edge without being outright abusive about it. Notes were taken on what edge felt best to use, and a final session was done with a bunch of members of our crew also cutting mirepoix and sourdough. After a given time, the edges were examined for deformation, and this was noted as well.

There's a lot more to cut out there than these four ingredients, but each of those ingredients are good indicators of performance in different ways. Everyone testing them cuts these ingredients often, and carrots, onions, celery, and bread were going to be around year-round. The straight-up carbon steels that can be hand forged and heat-treated with simple equipment were lovable, but we decided to save these steels for forging.

The Invictus was born from a drawing that Dylan shared with me about his ideas for improving one of his favorite knives, the sagnier French boning knife. Knowing he had a love of old French knives and was a super talented butcher I tried to share new finds with him and picking his brain on the nuances of these knives always taught me more about what I was looking at with them. This project elaborated on a conversation that had been happening at the sales counter with lots of butchers about the merits of Japanese vs Western butchery knives and helped to elaborate more on the quintessentially French butchery knife styles that I found both as vintage and antique knives and still in production. 

I’m going to leave you with Dylan and Eli’s words on these projects. 
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Dylan Carasco re the Invictus:

The Invictus was born from the adoration of French boning knives. A centuries-old design that has stood the test of time. My first couple of sketches of the Invictus initially had the same blade shape, but with two different handles. The handle is equally as important as the blade— one can’t exist without the other, and I think in commodity butchery knives, the handle is often overlooked. And so the first two prototypes were made and immediately put to the test. It became clear very quickly to me which handle worked best, and I exclusively used that knife all day, five days a week, for about a year. I did everything I could to wear this knife out, find any weak points, and work out the kinks. I sent some Invictus to a select handful of my friends and colleagues— butchers of distinction all over the world with a variety of job requirements, skill level, techniques, and more. I asked for honest feedback— tell me what you like about it, but more importantly, tell me what you don’t. Tell me what could make it better. I received no notes, other than emphatic praise.
After choosing which handle shape to move forward with on the prototype, the only change made was increasing the blade’s thickness .8mm. The knife remains unchanged from that point forward. It is an enormous pride and an honor to have created this knife with Bernal Cutlery.

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Elias Sideris re the Greenfield Gyuto

1885 - 

The Greenfield Gyuto is an imagining of a knife that never existed but could have: something produced in the clamoring cutlery factories of industrial New England for export to a newly-opening Japan in the 1880s. 

A blade like this would have been, in that time, forged to thickness and taper on water- or steam-powered helve hammers, the profile blanked on mechanical punch-presses with painstakingly crafted and precise shearing dies, and the makers mark stamped in with a detailed hand-carved punch. Then they'd have been hardened and tempered by eye and experience, as some of the more traditional Japanese blades still are today. Finally they'd be ground bright and thin on large, fast stone wheels. 

The handle is a firm nod to New England knives of the era, particularly to exit the factories of J. Russell Co. of Greenfield, Massachusetts. They'd import boatloads of exotic hardwoods and mill them at the knife factory from trees into flat pieces, then profile and drill them into the final shapes (the specific machines and tooling used for this industrial-scale cutlery handle production are largely lost to history). The scales would generally be riveted on without glue. The style of bolster represented in our knife is modeled after historical examples, which often would have been cast into a mold clamped directly to the blade and handle with some low melting temperature alloy similar to pewter, so as not to burn the wood.

Factories of the time and place would have also housed a box-making and label-printing shop, where suitable packaging for their own products would be designed and constructed from heavy cardstock, and affixed with adhesive labels often featuring an engraving of the factory itself. 

 2025 - 

We've attempted to develop a manufacturing process without the benefit of our own extended factory or a large workforce of skilled labor. The distinct components of the Greenfield Gyuto (blade, scales and bolsters) were each modeled in CAD, enabling them to be produced with various CNC processes. 

Rather than being forged and stamped to their dimensions, our blades are first cut from sheet steel to near-finished profile with a waterjet cutter, and then industrially heat treated in a large batch. This is not quite the forge-to-brine process of old since both the carbon and stainless steels we use are air-hardening steels, but they are still processed in a facility that feels like 1940s American industry. They are heated in a vacuum chamber to prevent decarburization, quenched in still air and further hardened in a liquid nitrogen bath (a process called cryogenic hardening), before conventional tempering in an electric kiln. 

After that, we hand-straighten every single one between a hammer and an anvil, triple-checking the straightness by eye (along a knife's length, a trained eye can easily detect deviations within 10 or even 5 thousandths of an inch). Then the tapers and bevels are created on a 5-axis CNC grinding machine in one pass on each side, with a very subtle convex geometry terminating at about 0.01" thick along the edge. Finally, the blade is hand-ground to finish on our house-built kaiten toishi, and thinned carefully along the edge, before receiving a laser-engraved brand mark. 

The wooden handle scales are made from Padauk, which is similar in aesthetic to the now-endangered exotic rosewoods and ebony used in the 19th century, but widely available. They are shaped on a 3-axis CNC router to near-finished dimensions. The bolsters, instead of being cast, are machined from stainless steel to mate with the scales in assembly. The seven brass pins for each handle are cut on a hand-shear to length. Every pin, scale, and bolster is deburred with abrasive belts and files to ensure they assemble accurately. The assembly is done entirely by hand, squeezing the handle parts onto the pins through the blade in a vise jig after liberally applying marine-grade epoxy to all surfaces (which has some give as the natural wood will inevitably swell and shrink due to changes in humidity). 

Once the epoxy is fully set, the handles are hand-shaped and finished in a variety of belt grinder operations to their final form. All sharp metal edges and corners are buffed down, and the handles are given a final hand-sanding before being sealed with a beeswax-based oil mixture. They are then sharpened entirely by hand with Japanese whetstones finishing with a natural Iyo Meito stone which provides a fine but still toothy edge that melds Japanese and Western approaches to edge finish together. At last, each knife is placed in our own custom-designed boxes featuring house-designed labels specifically meant to invoke the 19th-century design if it were meant to find its way on a boat to Japan.