0

What we do. (and why)

There are a lot of kitchen knives in the world. Most of them are perfectly fine. They cut things, they last a few years, and if you lose one behind the fridge it does not keep you awake at night.

We make knives for people who have decided that fine is not quite the point. Not because they are difficult, but because they have realised that the right tool makes cooking more enjoyable, and once you know that, a knife that is merely fine stops being enough.

Savernake is the ancient royal forest on whose edge we sit. Our workshop is a converted 1854 sawmill. The name felt right from the start, and it has yet to feel wrong.

Here we explain what we actually do differently, and why. We will try not to make it a sales pitch. We will probably fail.

Geometry first

Possibly the single most important thing about a kitchen knife is not the steel, the handle, or the brand. It is the geometry of the blade immediately behind the cutting edge. To cut well, that geometry needs to be exquisitely thin: thin enough that the blade slips through food rather than wedging it apart.

Our concave blade grind achieves exactly that, and as far as we are aware it is unique in kitchen knife-making. It removes a quarter of the blade’s weight as a useful side effect. Producing it consistently requires CNC milling to tolerances borrowed from aerospace engineering. We do it because it is simply the best way we know to make a knife that cuts the way a knife should.

The steel

We use Sandvik 14C28N for 90-95% of our blades. It is a martensitic stainless steel developed specifically for the knife industry: fine-grained, highly consistent, very corrosion-resistant. We have tried a lot of alternatives over the years and keep coming back to it.

For selected sets and collections we use Takefu San Mai, a Japanese laminated steel that is our most visually distinctive blade material. If you have a specific preference or requirement, get in touch. We are genuinely happy to talk through the options.

Precision, then craft

Every knife begins with CAD, machined to tolerances measured in microns. From there it moves to the makers: shaping, thinning, assembly, finishing, sharpening, all done by hand, by eye, by people who have made several thousand knives and know what right feels like. That accumulated judgement is not something any machine replicates particularly well, and it is, if we are honest, our favourite part of the process.

The two things together, precision engineering and skilled hand finishing, are what make the knife perform the way it does. Around ten days from start to finish. Every one has a name on it before we start, which we find to be a pleasingly direct way to think about production.

60 HRC, not a range

We target 60 HRC on the Rockwell C scale and give a single value rather than a range, because a range is not very useful information. Telling a customer their knife is somewhere between 55 and 58 HRC is a bit like telling them the speed limit is somewhere between 50 and 70.

At 56 HRC, common in mass-produced knives, the edge rolls quickly and needs constant attention. At 62 HRC and above, favoured by many Japanese makers, the edge is exceptional but brittle and difficult to sharpen without specialist equipment. 60 HRC sits deliberately between those extremes: an edge that holds well, responds to a honing steel, and can be brought back to razor sharp at home with nothing more than a light pass every few sessions. Used that way, a Savernake blade stays genuinely sharp for months, often considerably longer. That is not an accident. It is what we design for.

How we harden

Heat treatment is where good steel becomes a good knife, or doesn’t. Ours runs in batches of six because the precision required is genuinely difficult to maintain at scale. The blade is heated to 1,080 degrees C, quenched in under 120 seconds, then taken to -75 degrees C. That cryogenic step is not standard practice in knife-making. It removes retained austenite from the steel structure, adds measurably to the final hardness, and is then locked in by tempering. The result is extraordinarily consistent from blade to blade.

CATRA tests our blades independently under ISO 8442.5. We rate in the top 2.5% of every knife ever submitted, Excellent for both initial sharpness and edge durability. We do not mention this with false modesty, and we do not outsource the process.

Made by us, for you.

When you contact us, you speak to the people who will make your knife. The same people who use their own knives every day and are genuinely happy to talk through whatever you have in mind. If you want something particular, a specific material, a tweak to a standard design, a knife built around how you actually cook, you are talking directly to the right people. We have yet to meet a brief we could not do something useful with.

Every knife carries a lifetime guarantee and three years of complimentary servicing and sharpening. Not because we expect things to go wrong. Because we are confident enough in what we make to stand behind it indefinitely.

If you would like to talk, we are easy to reach. If you are ready to start, the range is below.

CHOOSE YOUR BLADE