# Yusuke rehab



## XooMG (Jun 30, 2017)

My first nice cooking knife was a Sakai Yusuke 21cm gyuto, but to skip a long and unnecessary story, the knife ended up out of the country for a rather long time.

Jon at JKI was kind enough to help ship it back to me but it was in suboptimal shape when he received it:




(no-nonsense pic from Jon)

When I got it back, I first had to reset the near edge geometry, and since the handle was already grey and stained, I just let the mud darken it. It cut fairly well but was pretty ugly. I don't mind having a knife in rough shape, so I tried to ignore it and focus on getting it to cut well.

Couple weeks ago, my partner and I were in the kitchen and I taught her how to use a gyuto with a pinch grip. She used either the Yusuke or a Takamura petty, so I decided the knife needed at least a decent working finish.

In hindsight, I should have taken some WIP photos or even just a before/after set, but oh well.

I removed the previous belt finish and established a longitudinal scratch finish, resanded the handle to remove stains and restore the ichii wood color, and reset the near edge with a somewhat irregular but natural stone finish to provide a nice maintenance pathway.

I'm giving it to my partner as her first nice (I think) knife. I'll probably use it too, since I'm rather fond of it.





Thanks for looking.


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## rick_english (Jun 30, 2017)

Nice, thanks for sharing.


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## Badgertooth (Jul 1, 2017)

Fantastic Robert, great result and nice to hear something more than the dry bare bones of WIP


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## RDalman (Jul 1, 2017)

Came out nice, I particularly like the blade finishing route you took to make easy maintenance.


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## valgard (Jul 1, 2017)

that came out pretty nice indeed


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## TheCaptain (Jul 1, 2017)

While I would have loved to see more "in progress" pictures, the stark contrast between the before and after pictures tells the whole story. Again, setting the bar far to high for the rest of us amateurs!

Very well done indeed!


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