This is a practical answer to a practical question. If you’d like to understand the thinking and philosophy behind it, that’s what [Our Philosophy] is for.
Every knife we make is made for a specific person, not for a shelf, or a distributor’s warehouse. We know who every single blade is going to, and that changes how you make things.
It also means we have to be able to look that person in the eye – or at least in the inbox – and tell them honestly that what we’ve made is as good as we know how to make it. That’s a reasonable constraint to put on yourself and one we’d recommend to anyone.
All of which is very well and good, and we’re aware it sounds like the sort of thing every craft business says. So here is the less cuddly version: we make genuinely excellent knives, and we can demonstrate that with numbers:
Our blades are 0.3mm thick at 1mm from the cutting edge. We achieve this through a concave blade profile – the flat of the blade is slightly hollow-ground, a geometry that is, as far as we’re aware, unique in kitchen knife-making. It also removes 25-30% of the blade’s weight, which is a useful side effect rather than the point.
We use Swedish Sandvik (Alleima) 14c28n for 90-95% of our custom blades. It is a martensitic stainless steel developed specifically for the knife industry – fine-grained, highly consistent, very corrosion-resistant, and capable of reaching 60 HRC with the right heat treatment. It mills cleanly and predictably, which matters when the geometry you’re trying to hold is tight.
For customers after the finest possible edge above all other considerations, we also work with RWL34 – a powdered metallurgical steel made by Damasteel in Sweden. The powder metallurgy process produces a finer, more uniform carbide distribution than conventional steel-making, giving a marginally keener edge at the cost of slightly reduced toughness. Available on request.
For some sets and collections we use Takefu’s 67-layer San Mai – a Japanese laminated steel with a VG10 core, running at the same 60 HRC profile as our standard steel. Exceptionally corrosion-resistant and our most visually distinctive blade material.
We can work with a wide range of other stainless steels if you have a specific preference. Get in touch.
The Rockwell scale is exponential, not linear. A single point of difference is more significant than it looks. At 56 HRC – common in mass-produced knives – the blade is easy to sharpen but rolls quickly, needs frequent attention, and will never hold a truly fine edge. At 62 HRC and above, favoured by many Japanese makers, you get an exceptional initial edge that is brittle, prone to chipping, and difficult to sharpen without specialist equipment.
60 HRC sits at neither extreme. The edge is excellent, holds well, responds to a honing steel, and can be resharpened at home. It is not easy to achieve consistently – most standard knife steels won’t reach it regardless of heat treatment – but it is the right target.
The blade is heated to 1,080 degrees C, then clamped and quenched in under 120 seconds. It then goes to -75 degrees C in a cryogenic step – not standard practice in knife-making. The cryo treatment removes retained austenite from the steel structure and adds 1-2 HRC to the final hardness. The blade is then tempered to set the final hardness precisely.
The result is tested independently by CATRA
Modern Damascus – a forge-weld of two different steels, etched to show the pattern – offers no practical performance advantage over a single high-quality steel. In careless hands, micro-fissures from imperfect welding actively weaken the blade. A piece of good stainless Damascus sufficient for an 8-inch chef’s knife costs around £200 in raw material alone. If you’re not paying well over £800 for your Damascus knife, you are probably not getting Damascus steel.
Forging: A fine tradition, but it limits you to non-stainless steels, introduces variables that are hard to control consistently, and is not compatible with the blade geometry we’re trying to achieve.
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