Hello world so I bought some hand-crafted 
traditionally made Japanese Knives
and I kind of messed a couple of them
 so I want to tell you about that story and umm
I wanted to tell you because I think the 
world of knives is a bit intimidating
and there's a lot to learn and I'm
 a total newbie to all of this
So I thought bringing you along that 
journey of learning that I've had
might help someone else who's new to 
knives and especially Japanese Knives I think
I will make mistakes so I apologize for 
them I try to learn as much as possible
so if I make mistakes I'm very sorry about that
and this will be kind of a more of a raw
 unedited video or less edited video so
this is the condition of the knife literally
 two weeks after I gave it to my sister-in-law
How did it get to that point so quickly?
to get to that I going to have to rewind a bit
 my wife and I were set to go to Echizen
where among a few traditional crafts
 they do they hand-craft knives
as my sister-in-law was going to watch
 our kids while we were away we thought
"one of those knives will be a great gift"
 especially since she cooks a lot
she was in fact very nervous about owning 
an expensive knife and told us not to buy her one
umm but when we went to the knife factory
Ryusen Hamono and met with the CEO the 
knife master we asked him the question of
Can an everyday cook buy and use one of these things? 
and this is what he had to say
I understand that customers are nervous
 to use these thin, beautiful knives.
But we make tools to cut food
 so that you can eat and live,
So please feel free and don't
 be scared of using one.
We have our clients who have been 
using our knives for 20 to 30 years.
Some mothers even pass their knives
 on to their daughters
So with all that in mind my wife
 and I excitedly spend a couple hours
 testing out all these knives you see
 on this cutting board and ended up
picking a sentoku knife that we
 felt was best for our needs.
Now I don't know enough about knives
 to know if this is a laser or not
but what I do know is when you have it and you
 go to slice it's umm it's really cuts nicely so
Here we go
It's also very lightweight so we liked it 
sharp, lightweight, What's not to like?
and it was actually the cheapest
 out of all the knives
the cheapest being about 150USD so we decided
 to buy one not only for us but for my sister-in-law
and only a week later we both 
had issues the knives were rusting
ah for my case it was my daughter she was 
you know cutting up something at night
she left it in a pool of water the next 
day "oh my goodness it's rusting"
but I looked online and I remembered
 a video that Jun had about
the rusty knife and fixing it so I looked at that
 and there was I reddit post attached to it
where somebody told about all the equipment 
they bought so I got rust erasers and
I got stropping stuff and we got some
 cream and I was able to
kind of get all the rust out there's a few little
 kind of like parkmarks left but I think it's
almost almost like new but yeah 
I did mess it up and recover it but
it was my sister-in-laws knife that was in a lot 
worse of a coniditon and I'll let her explain
As I always use a stainless knife,
after washing it, I put it in the dish rack.
So I did the same thing with this,
and then I found it rusty,
then we decided to sharpen it,
using an easy one.
My husband used this to sharpen it.
And then it chipped.
So we had a fight...
We thought what should we do, 
and then came to Greg.
Because what we didn't know and
 it's a learning curve is that
you know such a hard delicate blade umm you 
can't sharpen with one of these things or with a
honing steel you need to use wet 
stones which I now have
but the problem was that he chipped the knife 
as well as rusted it so it was way beyond my
pay grade to even try to fix
but the words of the CEO of Ryusen 
Hamono kind of sprang into my mind
If something happens to your knife,
we are here to fix it for you, as our products
 need to maintain its quality
About the maintenance, you don't
always need to send it to us.
We teach you tips so that
 you can do it by yourself
We are happy to give you advice
 so it's not difficult at all.
So I shipped it to Ryusen Hamono and not 
one week later it came back
The fixed knife!
and so we got it back right here so this is the fixed 
knife now so this is her first time seeing it
so let her open it up and see
Can I say one more thing, sorry.
Because the blade is really thin,
I thought using this would break it,
so I said don't use it, but
my husband said it's OK.
Apparently after one pass through it chipped.
On top of that he didn't even tell me,
so it made me mad.
It got all jagged just after it was gifted to us.
Because it got jagged, I was fuming.
OK, I'm done.
- OK, so it's fixed.
-Alright.
- Open it please.
- Thank you.
Three
Two
One
Open!
Wah! Amazing!
Wow, it's real.
It's like brand new!
- [Mother in background] Did they fix it for you?
- [Daughter] Yeah, fantastic.
The chip was here, but it's all fixed!
Yeah, now I feel a different pressure.
I really have to take care of it.
I will treasure it.
Ah, amazing!
This, this.
Supre excellent sharpness!
Stress... it's stress free.
Sugoi!
It's like cutting with a slicer, wow!
Look!
No stress.
It's light as well.
So how do you take care of it now?
- I'll teach you know.
- Hai!
- It's easy, it's easy, look.
- Yes
- Like this
- Yes.
It's OK now.
- Right?
- Yeah.
This was the important step 
to to prevent rusting.
I now understand, thank you so much.
- OK.
- I won't let my husband touch this.
- Alright.
- I'm done!
Yes, all done!
The Steel
So why did a moderately expensive knife 
like this rust? Well it's the steel so
on the end of the spectrum you have carbon which
 can get really sharp and hard but can rust easily
and then on the other hand you have something like
 this which is considered a stainless steel where
they have a low amount of carbon but a high
 amount of chromium which makes it stainless
and so this knife is called a umm
 the metals called HAP-40
and it's kind of like a semi
 stainless and between so you
can leave it in water for probably
 an hour and you'll be fine
but if you leave it for a few 
hours yeah it's going to rust
probably the biggest difference between Japanese 
knives and western knives is the steel
and the hardness so they're harder then western
 knives this is a Japanese knife this is a western knife
and umm they're more brittle but like 
how can you be hard yet more brittle?
like I kind of couldn't wrap my head 
around it but then I thought about this so
this is a cheap cheap ladle and I'm
 just going to bang it like this
Right so you can just bend it
 back right so this is a tough
piece of metal because you can stress it 
a lot and it won't break but it will bend
right whereas if I take this knife no
 I'm not going to even try that
this I mean if you did that I think it will
 break eventually or at least chip
pieces of so it's hard but it's not tough right 
you can if you stress it enough it will break
and so that's the difference so this type of knife
 I can abuse it a lot more because it's a softer
steel and it won't break yeah
I hope you can read that
So this is a 180mm cenelli knife it's made 
in Italy but it's called a Japanese Knife
I guess it's Japanese style and the makeup
 of the steel is X50 CR MO 14
kind of sounds cryptic but the X50 its stands
 for X stands for carbon in this case
and it's 0.5% carbon whereas the CR stands
 for chromium and it's 14% chromium
So carbon makes something hard 
chromium makes something soft
but the reason you have so much chromium in there
 is because you want the stainless capabilities
so yeah I could leave this in water overnight
 and just throw it into the dish pit here
and it will be fine so it can take a lot of abuse
but the hardness takes a hit so on the
 Rockwell hardness scale it's a 54 to 56
now there's actually a lot elements you can add 
 a knife besides chromium and carbon to make it
do different things so vanadium is one of them so
 with a wusthof knife what is it it's a X50 Cr MoV 15
is what you'll see written on a wusthof knife I'm
 probably mispronouncing that sorry Germans umm
but it will get it harder so it's a 58 
on the rockwell hardness scale
that's cool and this is a HAP-40 knife and 
it has a lot more of those hard components in it
umm so carbon is at like 1.3% or
 1.4% something around that
it's not that much more but it makes a difference it's 
also a powdered steel it's like a high speed stool
stool, high speed tool steel
and umm you can get it way harder it's like a 
64 to 66 according to the manufacturer
but depending on how you treat it, 
it can get even harder then that
so the point of a powdered high speed
 tool steel I believe I'm saying it right
is that umm you can get it harder yet
 retain some of the toughness but still
even as you know tough as that steel is 
it's not going to be as tough as this
There are so many different steels I could talk
 about but the last one I will is this Japanese steel
which is called VG10 and it's supposed
 to be hard as well as stainless
and umm so it's very popular with 
Japanese people and it is a 60
on the Rockwell hardness scale
now another thing about this knife is
 that it has what called damascus
cladding it's not like a damascus knife
all the way through or something like that I
 believe that technology has been lost to the ages
but damascus cladding you can see this pattern 
here it means you have soft and hard stainless steel
that are like so many layers I believe this
 ones 33 layers if I'm correct and
that makes that pattern when you make 
the knife so it's kind of cool looking
as far as I can tell western knives are lot 
more standardized and mass produced
now it could just be that I don't know much about knives but 
Japanese knives seem to have a lot more variety to them
the types of steels that are used and the
 different types of knives so this is called a
sentoku this is called a nagiri
and there's gyuto and there's just a ton of
 different styles of Japanese knives
as well as handles you can see
 this ones octaga~ octagonal
I'll try that again this one is octagonal and
 this ones kind of octagonal but not quite
it's a really nice handle though beautiful
and as I said before the thing about
 Japanese knives is because they're harder
they can require different 
sharpening techniques
and one of the most recommended ones is wet stones
Cutting boards
Now because I got hard Japanese knives this 
meant that I had to look into cutting boards
because while people want their knives hard
umm you actually want the 
opposite with your cutting board
you don't want a hard cutting 
board otherwise it'll dull
your hard knife so plastic cutting boards like
all these ones that I had were not great
umm or I mean you can use them of course
 but they will dull your knife faster
I should mention though that there are soft 
plastic and there are hybrids that you can get but
I'm going to just talk about wood and 
so this is a wood I got from Kochi
and it is a hinoki or cypress and so there 
are so many different types of woods there's
Maple there's teek there is cypress 
hinoki and this is called Kiri yeah
and so yeah this cutting board is from
 Kochi which I actually visited last year
and it's made from a single piece of wood
 so I believe it'll be less hard to break
then a lamented engrain or edge grain board
although this is a soft wood so it might not
 last as long for other reasons umm
but so the thing about hinoki 
which is cypress is that it's a
aromatic wood so in Japanese saunas you'll 
have this and it's a nice smelling wood oh
there's my cats being fed and versus a hard wood
 like maple this board is actually quite light
but even lighter is this wood it's a hinoki
and it's not hinoki sorry it's kiri and 
this wood over here it is super light
umm and I think it has bigger pores 
so I don't believe it'll last as long
but it was quite popular in the stores when
 I went around the knife shops in Kappabashi
a famous area for buying kitchen equipment in 
Tokyo it was really cheap too relatively
so it was about 15USD
So the thing I learned about wood cutting 
boards is that they can be more sanitary
then plastic cutting boards
And umm for example with maple the grains
 there are really fine in hard wood
and so what it will do it will kind of like suck 
down the bacteria and trap it in there
and kill it now with this type of wood it is
a soft wood and so the grains are bigger and so
 it's kind of like a different action that happens
so when I did the research about this one 
it's kind of a special type of cypress
I think this stuff grown in Aomori and 
apparently this one in Kochi as well
they have anti-bacterial properties
so they're supposed to be good as
 well umm now the thing with
plastic cutting boards is initially
 their really easy to sanitize
and so people think ok that's really good but then
if you look at this board I've had it for a while and it's
 ok I'm going to bring closer because it's super shiny
so yeah look at that I don't 
think that's sanitary anymore
and the thing is because you get these deep
 grooves and the stuff just gets stuck in there
and doesn't come out so it's a bit different then a wood
 cutting board so I should just really throw this away
and this cutting board is very hard so I don't
 think it's really great for your knives
since 90% of what we'll cut is 
going to be fruits and vegetables
we're going to mainly use our wood
 cutting boards and for the meats and fish
just because my wife likes to be 
really really heavy on the bleach
we're going to use the plastic cutting boards
 for that, that's like 10% of the time
and the thing is you can't use bleach on wood
it will break down the wood and 
destroy it and it's not good so
just another tip for you don't
 use bleach on your wood
and wash them off and dry them right after using
Sharpening
So once I had the cutting board thing solved
the other worry I had was getting
 and keeping the knives sharp
and so what actually happened is a long journey
of sharpening and this started over a year ago
and the first stone I got was this one I think
 it's a king I think it's a 1000 or 6000 grit
so 1000 is the rougher harder side
 and 6000 is the smoother side
and so what everybody recommended
 was to get a cheaper stone
and to practice with cheaper knives so this
 knife is from IKEA it's a 10 dollar knife
this knife is umm actually from a chef kitchen
 store but it's like a 40 dollar knife
so good knives to practice on and so when
 I was sharpening I was doing them
you know manually I was looking at like hours 
and hours of videos about sharpening
and the key about sharpening is that you
 want to have a consistent angle
and a lot of knives nowadays have a 15 degree angle
but whether you put it like 20 or 10 or 15 or 
17 or 16 I think most people say
umm from what I read is that it's most important to 
get it at a consistent angle so you have to like
keep it at whatever angle you choose umm
 so I got this and for a year I practiced and
I got the knives sharp but I didn't think they were
that I didn't know that I wasn't 
doing that great of a job
umm because after I got this thing this is like a
 angle guide that you clip on to your knife
and so what this helps you do is keep it at 
a consistent angle the whole way through
right it's a really this is like 6
 dollars this thing and umm
the thing about this it changed the 
game completely once I used this
I was like ohh wow this is how sharp I can 
get knives if I have a consistent angle
so this really helped me although some people think
 it's kind of like a crutch like training wheels and so
your never going to learn how to do it properly
 but honestly it's helped me so much
if you have like trouble doing it
on your own or finding out the right angle and I
 tried different tricks like putting pennies under
or something like this height 
and I just couldn't do it right
umm this thing can really help when your learning
and because I got better knives I decided to
 invest in better stones so I have 3 shopton
ceramic wet stones so this
 ones like a 320 grit like this
and then this ones 1500 so 
medium and this one is 5000
and I really like the feel of 
these stones a lot better
but once you add up the price
 of these stones and then
this to hold the stones which is 
really helpful because I found
this thing kept on moving around so 
this one keeps it really steady
and then I have a leather stropping
 block with the compound
umm and I think I kind of not doing a good 
job with this stropping block either
anyways that's all like 175USD
umm so it's more expensive 
then my new favorite knife
umm but I think these are something like 
especially since I don't use them often
that you can keep for decades and keep
whether it's your cheap knives or your more expensive
 knives sharp so I think it's definitely worth investment
I've actually found myself
 enjoying sharpening knives
and so I'm actually trying to 
sharpen the knives of friends
not their good knives but just their cheaper ones
I'm not comfortable trying to practice 
on people's nice knives yet
Let's cut stuff!
So you might of heard that a bad sharp 
knife is better then a good dull knife
and I'd agree but what even better
 is a good sharp knife so umm
what you do is you can take paper like this,
 this is kind of like thin magazine paper and
I've sharpened all these knives good 
enough that they can cut the paper
Yay everyone likes this at least in 
videos they're always cutting paper
and ahh I hope I don't embarrass 
myself ah and doesn't cut but yep
that cuts well ok
see told you I was going to embarrass myself a few
don't hit the right angle or something sometimes 
it's looks like the knives not sharp but
yeah it's sharp and then lastly this knife here
right they can all cut paper 
they're all sharp in that way
but I found the real differences when you start
 cutting things and this is what I've wanted to do
ever since I had started filming ok 
so first of all  I'm to start off with
a tomato that's a favorite thing to cut
I haven't practiced this before so I don't know
 how well these will cut this tomato
but let's try and see so that's actually really good
It was super smooth to cut with this 
knife this is 10 dollar IKEA knife
ok 40 dollar knife
Hmm
Yep also really good I think it got caught on the 
bottom a little bit I didn't press down hard enough
Ok and then is the kind of laser knife and yep
really easy
and then this is actually a 300 dollar knife 
but we got it on discount because
it has these scratches right here 
and you probably can't even tell
umm we got it for like half price
 because of that so that was cool
Yep
cuts nice as well so everything cuts tomatoes 
good so honestly if I was just cutting a tomato
I'd say wow these are all pretty good knives 
ok so now I magically have an apple and
Ok that's.....
I have to put more pressure down on the apple which 
is not a big deal but the you know the cuts are ok
Now if I take the laser knife
It's just so smooth I don't know oh
 wait the apple got in my way
It's just so smooth let's try this knife out here
This is easier then the IKEA knife
Yep
that's nice so one of the vegetables where I 
noticed the biggest difference was the carrot
and so when I cut with this knife
I feel like once you get to the middle
it's like just not
I don't know as smooth it's not bad but
like when I look at it I can just see kind of
 a rough texture now with this knife
it's glides through so smoothly I don't 
have to put much pressure on it
and then it's just so smooth
so the last thing I'll show is a cucumber
if I'm not putting much pressure it's not cutting
which I mean I can just put pressure 
on and cut it and I can do the
it will cut fine so there's not a big deal but
 it's just such a difference because
when I take a knife like this now and I just like I'm
I'm not putting pressure on it and it's just 
cutting right through it's incredible
and that kind of brings the fun into
cutting stuff like I really enjoy cutting things 
now because it's just so easy and smooth
and so if I only did the test with the tomato
I wouldn't have known the difference but once 
you start a variety of things your like ok wow
there is a big difference between the knives
one thing I never had anybody tell me is like how do 
you avoid these things from rolling off everywhere
I've never figured that out see there you go
Final thoughts and tests
ok from everything I've learned so far I think these 
are the two things I can say about Japanese knives
versus western knives so with the
 Japanese knives they are harder
and so they can retain their edge longer
 and they can be sharper for longer
nice sharp knives ok the
 second thing is that they are
thinner so the grind or the geometry
 it's a lot more thinner of a knife
in comparison to a western knife on 
average so you can also cut easier
through things so I think that's the experience I 
had with different vegetables I was cutting
was that the thinness really helped it cut through
 and that's why I think even though
 this was sharp enough to cut paper
and cut tomatoes it kind of struggled with 
things like carrots and with the apples
um this just the geometry of this is so much
 thinner and it performed better and it' hard as well
so something that seemed a little bit crazy to me 
was that I could actually taste the sharpness ok so
I have all these slices and let me just show you
So I can taste the sharpness
I don't know what me eating it actually shows 
you but it's like slippery and it's umm
I don't know it just feels good to eat and 
apparently because you have such a sharp cut
that it'll break a lot less of the cells in 
something like a carrot or an onion
and so it will retain the moisture a lot better so 
apparently if you cut an onion with a sharp knife
it's not going to make you cry so I wanted to 
test this I've never tried this before let me try
So far I'm so good so that's one batch of onions
Ahh that's what I should of done flipped it
Ok so you know what I can feel the onions 
in my eyes and umm I don't know about that
maybe because I chopped so 
much of it that it's I can feel it so
I don't know about that, that's what I've learned
but maybe it's not as severe as if I had
 a duller knife cutting it I don't know
so here's my final thing about knives
I love this HAP-40 knife it's super thin kind 
of like a laser and it's just so fun to cut with
umm this V610 this nagiri knife
I really like it as well such a beautiful knife and
 I hope to get a lot of long years out of it
just not as fun as this one
and I'm still keeping these knives
 and so these two over here
but like for this one if I'm going to cut bones 
or cut like really hard things like squash
umm I don't want to risk these knives
so I can just use one of these knives and be safe
 and then I have my stones where I can
fix it if anything goes wrong but they are tougher
 knives so they can take a lot more abuse
Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring 
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this is my current skill level \
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since kindergarten I've never gotten
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at least I'm a better photographer then I am a drawer 
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So I really do hope learned just 
a little bit from this video
again I'm a total noob so don't 
ask me questions umm but yeah
Thanks for watching! See you next time, bye!
 What's your favorite knife?
