# Deba and Ajikiri



## AidenCC (Nov 6, 2021)

For whatever reason the deba is likely my favorite Japanese kitchen knife, so I’ve attempted to make a number of them, not quite satisfied with how they’ve turned out. These two are no exception to that, but I think they represent a big step in the right direction for me. The deba is 160 mm long and the ajikiri is 110 mm or so.
















The blades are 1018 and white #1, with a hollow ura, slight convexity (hamaguri?) added the the bevel, and a micro bevel by the heel. The handles are basswood (American linden) and nickel silver. I’ve seen a lot of places that wa handles are supposedly “disposable” and with how much faster/cheaper these are than handles with horn ferrules, I feel like it captures that spirit better for me personally. Basswood also gets nice “whiskers” when wet and unfinished in my experience. 

For me, deba are the hardest Japanese knife to forge, primarilly due to the combination of width and thickness with respect to the dimensions that Hitachi steel is available in outside of Japan. The Ajikiri is dimensionally spot on to my original design, but the deba is too thin at the spine and too narrow. Both of these required adding thickness behind the edge to hit my target blade weight. Before the full sharpening I broke down a bunch of fish with the deba and it cut well for the fillets and was also able to easily split all the heads for grilling/stock.

Thank you all for looking! I would be happy to hear any design critique, and especially from anyone else who has made deba (though it seems that is not so common outside of Japan).


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## MowgFace (Nov 6, 2021)

Those look great! Forged or ground ura?


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## AidenCC (Nov 6, 2021)

Thank you! The deba ura was strictly ground, the one on the ajikiri was cold forged in before heat treat and cleaned up after.


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