# Devin Thomas 240 mm custom clad pm steel gyuto



## tk59

I&#8217;ve never been so uptight about receiving a knife. I have a tendency to prepare for the worst and I&#8217;ve been disappointed quite a bit, of late. Also, I&#8217;ve been on Devin&#8217;s custom list for about 8 months without a call and I was getting antsy. So, when the prototypes showed up one night, I had to inquire about them. It really wasn&#8217;t much of an exchange. Essentially, I wanted to know if the knife would impress me and he said he&#8217;d make one for me sometime down the line. I didn&#8217;t realize it might not be a long wait at all. A few weeks later, I started bugging Rick about reviewing his knife. A day or two after that, I got a pm from Devin letting me know that my knife was ready. He did not ask me for any specs, handle options, etc. ZERO. He didn&#8217;t send a pic, either. I supposed this was his way of letting me know that he knew what a good knife was and he picked up enough about me that he was confident he could meet my expectations. (The point is, this may or may not be a custom knife depending on your definition.) If I recall correctly, I paid for it and a little while later, he posted a pic. On a Thursday, Devin advised me to cancel my classes on Friday, in preparation for the arrival of my knife.

The knife I received was:
Blade length heel to tip 250 mm
Spine thickness (heel) 2.67 mm
Spine thickness (midblade) 2.07 mm
Spine thickness 1&#8221; from tip 0.81 mm
Average thickness 4 mm behind edge 0.48 mm
HRC 61+

The knife&#8217;s appearance is understated which is very much my preferred style. The edge Devin put on it felt ~1k and very toothy. I decided to refine it further so I could more directly compare its performance to that of my other blades. I took it to a Gesshin 5k, a few strokes on an 8k SS and stropped a little with 0.25 micron diamond on leather (Dave&#8217;s). The knife was easily push-cutting tomatoes at that point.
The cutting performance is some hybrid of the best cutters I&#8217;ve experienced. It makes most cuts with absolute ease. The tip work is fantastic except for doing very fine work on small, hard objects (ie lateral cuts when superfine-dicing ginger). The tip is fairly flexible but it hasn&#8217;t bothered me. Food release is decent but not outstanding. The grind is very consistent. There are a few minor overgrinds but nothing that comes close to going through the cladding. There is a very slight right-handed bend or possibly an overgrind near the tip that you can see from the distal taper pic but it actually works well for me. Probably the only other thing I&#8217;d change about it is the rounding of the corner at the heel. I like crisp, clean-looking corners and points. As with other cladded blades, scratches show up pretty easily and often.

The most impressive thing about this knife might be how nicely it holds an &#8220;acceptable&#8221; edge. Everyone has a point where they really want to sharpen their knife again to get that new-edge feel. Like all the others I&#8217;ve tested, this knife lost its tomato push-cutting sharpness pretty quickly but for once, I actually have used an edge pretty much exclusively (with a lot of poly board contact, I might add) for 3+ weeks without feeling like it needed sharpening. I have stropped it a handful of times on both 0.25 micron diamond and 0.5 micron Cr2O3 to see if I could detect much of a difference. I also realigned the edge on a glass-rod a couple of times when the edge rolled in a couple of very small (~1 mm) sections. So far, I have observed no chipping or deformation behind the edge in spite of the low angle (&#8220;by ear&#8221; the bevels seem to be ground under 15 deg per side. There are other great steels but I am liking this flavor quite a bit and (I probably shouldn't say this but&#8230 probably more than the AEB-L on my DTITK. I can&#8217;t wait to really sharpen this knife for the first time.

Overall, I'm not sure I can say that this is the best knife I've ever used. I can say that it did and continues to impress me quite a lot (esp for a stainless knife) and if the house was burning down and I could only grab one knife, it would be in the running to come out with me if I didn&#8217;t perish in the flames thinking about the decision. Thank you, Devin. :thumbsup:

These are some pics with my 270 DTITK gyuto in AEB-L (between 2nd and 3rd batch) for comparison.


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## DevinT

Thanks Tinh,

You're a tough customer so I'm glad that you like it.

Hoss


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## tk59

I'm afraid I didn't adequately convey how pleased I am with this knife or how surprised I am that you sent something like this without any specs from me, whatsoever. You had me on pins and needles! I really love this knife so far.


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## tk59

Someone just asked me how large these overgrinds are and how big the bend is so I thought I'd elaborate. They are pretty much insignificant. The bend is about an inch from the tip and you can only tell if you point the tip straight at your eye. It's prob a degree or two. I can't even feel the overgrinds with my fingers except for one and frankly, I'm not sure I'd feel it, if I didn't know it was there. To put things in perspective, I find minor grind flaws like these in almost every blade, even Konosuke, Ashi, etc. On a scale of 1-10, I'd rate the grind on this knife some where around 9 with 10 being perfect, 5 being average and 1 being POS poor. The bevel on the edge is pretty even and is little more than a hair wide (I used 20x magnification to check out the eveness.)


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## El Pescador

After reading this I can't wait to get my sujihiki from Hoss!


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## tk59

I can now say a couple of things for certain. It won't push cut tomatoes anymore after normal stropping. It's still very sharp. Basil chiffonade stays pretty nice and green, for example. That's a record for me in terms of using a knife before getting to the point where I am wanting to sharpen it. I haven't been particularly nice to the blade doing a fair amount of poly and bamboo board work. I'm really impressed with this blade and I easily prefer it over any other stainless knife I've used including other pm steel. This blade and my 240 Carter SFGZ are now officially sharing the top spot in my line-up.


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## tk59

I finally sharpened this guy side by side with my DTITK in AEB-L. I got from burr to blazing sharp in 5 min on both of them. If I didn't know better, I'd think they were carbon steel based on how easily they took a very keen edge. I couldn't decide which was really easier to sharpen. Neither showed any burr to speak of after a few strokes on the Gesshin 5k. (I started on the G1k.) I'm gonna go back the ITK to reacquaint myself with the steel.


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## Marko Tsourkan

Great news, thanks tk.


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## Derryn

Im planning to get a custom knife. How much did it cost you and what was the waiting time?


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## kalaeb

Derryn said:


> Im planning to get a custom knife. How much did it cost you and what was the waiting time?



It really depends on what you are looking for in terms ofcost. Send Devin a PM and I am sure he can answer those questions better than any of us. His handle is devint.


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## wsfarrell

+1 for a rigorous review. There have been some powder puff reviews going around lately.

Question for Mr. Thomas: What are the functions of the cladding on this blade?


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