Deals ✔️ Bernal Cutlery K Sabatier Jeune 9.75″ Chef Knife Carbon Steel 1960’s 🌟

1960’s K Sabatier Jeune 9.75″ carbon steel chef knife in excellent used condition with classic post WW2 hand forged after drop forged integral bolster/ferrule with tapered tang and rosewood handle. 

Blade is very full but had started to get a little thick behind the edge with sharpening, it is not nice and thin behind the edge for smooth precise cutting, the light K Sabatier Jeune markings on the blade were lost in the process but the handle still  bears the trademarked K Sabatier Jeune bunch of grapes. 

K Sabatier Jeune which were made only in the 1960’s as an offshoot of the old K Sabatier family business in Thiers. The story I got from the family is that there were two brothers that ran the business at the end of the 1950’s, they both had families of their own and the brother with more kids thought he should get more of the revenue because of this. The older brother disagreed so the younger (jeune = younger) broke away to start his own enterprise which ran for about 10 years.

This knife has been re-ground and thinned behind the edge on a large 3 foot diameter Japanese water stone wheel (kaiten mizu toishi) and then resurfaced with a medium fine finish, our take on an old style grinding and finishing technique. While the particular wheel used to refurbish this knife is typically used in Japanese knife making it is very similar to the old grinding wheels used to shape European and American hand ground cutlery. A convex face to a blade greatly increases a knife’s performance as there is less sticking as there is on a flat face and the blade does not get thick behind the edge nearly as fast as with a flat faced blade. Being that we are often working with old blades that need re-shaping and might have been rusted expect some minor imperfections, we try to give a fresh start to our re-ground blades with an eye towards their original grind style and keeping as much metal is needed on a blade when ever possible. Check out Bernal Cutlery co founder Josh Donald’s book Sharp to see these wheels in use and more about their history in Europe and Japan. 

Not stainless, expect a patina to form with use