I've definitely had a tip snap under a smaller range of motion than the ceramic managed to get to before giving in. Might be a little present to myself.
@@tulipopossum6001 There have been times I've eaten fast and taken big bites because I was running late. On more than a few occasions when I made scrambled eggs, I occasionlly swallowed what I assumed to be eggshell, or small bone from a fish. I don't use ceramic knives anymore for that reason.
I use a ceramic tip fruit peeler I bought for $10 and been using it for 10 years now. Its still as sharp as the day I bought it. And we peel lots of vegetables for stew. Best purchase I have ever made.
Ceramic can be surprisingly tough. Before my time CoorsTek manufactured a few hammers out of a zirconium ceramic, the same stuff those knives are made of. Interestingly, if you get the ceramic alloy right it's possible to produce a phase change that expands and stops crack propigation, thus greatly increasing the strength of the ceramic well beyond the probability of failure typically expected.
Ceramics is extremely hard material but super brittle. That's why I was so surprised it would bend so much. I take ceramics similarly to glass, high carbon steel and cemented carbide.
Snuggling contraband? Did you cuddle a knife? If so, that sounds painful and I'm not surprised TSA got involved, they obviously think you're a dangerous head case.
"It's a porcelain knife made in Germany. It doesn't show up on your airport X-ray machines here and it costs more than what you make in a month!" - Jon Diehard or something, idk
@@jz261 The infamous and fictional "Glock Seven" that led to the Undetectable Firearms Act, a ludicrous piece of legislation designed to stop something that doesn't exist. It's like passing a law banning ghosts.
I LOVE ceramic knives, but if you have an idiot in your house that tosses them in the dishwasher or tries to cut bone with them like a cleaver, you'll never get them sharp again😂😭😭
I love ceramic knives because of how clean they stay and how easy they are to clean when they do get dirty. Ceramics do have a higher surface hardness than steel. Take a hard steel. Break a ceramic bowl and use a sharp edge to scratch the steel. It will absolutely be harder. (There are a few rare exceptions). The problem is that surface hardness by itself is not a good metric for determining a material's potential to be a good knife. Hardened steel has a very small grain size and a mix of plastic and elastic properties that allow it to bend and stretch and tear into unbelievably thin razor edges. It's a matrix of refined crystals. Ceramics are essentially a matrix of vitrified sand with literally no plastic properties. Ceramics have a minimum size/thickness that can be achieved because at some point during honing you get to the thickness of the non plastic grains and the grains just get peeled out of the matrix instead of being abraded and stretched and deformed into ever finer structures like it would in steel.
Really great explanation of the difference between the two and what happens on a microsopic level whilst honing and sharpening the edge. Painted a good picture in my head 👍
@@PatrickKQ4HBD elastic deformation is what a spring has. It is bendable but resistant to bending so it wants to spring back or return to its original place. Plastic deformation is when it squishes into a new shape and stays there like wax or playdough. Steel has both in different amounts. The exact amount of plastic and elastic properties of steel can be manipulated by heat treating and by adding different alloys.
My friends dad was a scuba diver and used to have a knife made out of thick glass, i always wondered why and he said it was because it wouldn't rust, i don't know how he would sharpen it though, ( Just a little side thought ~ how about a rust -degrade test? )
Someone else explained it better but apparently getting the alloy ratio perfect is what gives it far more strength and flexibility than ceramic can achieve in pretty much other state
No. Its just that cerámics in general have way higher compressive strength over tensile. For steel its the other way around. By the way, "brittle" for cerámics mean they break rather than yield (as opposed to dúctile) also usually means It cant take as much impact, which was not tested here. @@Steamaroon
I feel like this isn't advertisement because he doesn't say anything about a specific product or that he sells them, he doesn't even say that he runs a survival tool store
I have 3 of these, and honestly they are fantastic for prepping meat. I’ve had them probably 10 years now. They are still as sharp as the day they were given to me.
@Ghhyuttgg Can't speak to your experience. I have a set that are razor sharp BUT my largest had the edge fracture on turkey bone. Learned my lesson real fast
@@Ghhyuttgg1 : Use a cutting board (Don't use them on any hard surfaces) 2: Don't use them on any bones, it'll dull or chip the blade 3: Spend the money to get a good quality one, cheap ones are like cheap kitchen knifes.. garbage.
Ceramic makes great home food prep knives, I think they’re too brittle for food service or for utility purposes but as a home kitchen knife they’re tops!
@@DarrinDarwinacious whetstones and other sharpening tools have a so called grit, which is the size of the abrasive particles and how many there are in a given area, higher grit the smaller/more particles. Lower grit remove more material, whilst higher remove less but smooths and hones much better. So when sharpening the ideal is to gradually increase the grit of your sharpening tools to hone a finer and finer edge
I'm a machinist, when cutting particularly hard metal, such as hardened steel, we will actually use cutters made of ceramic to cut through it. So, harder than steel? Probably. But that also means it's very brittle. I wouldn't want ceramic for a knife
Science nerd here who also likes a bit of ballistics. The special thing about the moes hardness scale is that it measures purely hardness. People dont realise that hardness and brittleness go hand in hand. Ceramic is listed as being a much harder material than steel but its so incredibly brittle.
It's also only SURFACE hardness, not total hardness. A hammer is softer on the inside than on the face which is why it's kind of springy and very tough.
Diamond is one of the better materials when it comes to hardness. But it does have weak points. And obviously trying to get something entirely made out of diamond like a blade is probably not going to be feasible on a mass scale.
Nothing can beat ceramic in in edge retention, it will cut and cut if u dont chip it, also it cant corrode, issue is that its very britle... but thats a law of materials, there is no perfect metal when it come to knives, i mean not yet.
There probably never will be a "perfect" material, since an alloy with something will always be able to make it harder or tougher, but making it too hard increases brittleness and making it too tough makes it softer.
Chrome vanadium is actually a pretty good knife steel holds edge and is very strong. Whatever case use to make their stainless is pretty good as well as their iron or raw steel knives.
People will gladly handicap any other stat than ever accepting blade that will snap which is honestly annoying as consistant sharpness for durability would fly in lighter duties and niche ideas, but there will always be middle aged man claiming that knife not doubling as rebar and smashing hardened wood for days will leave him vulnerable douring zombie apocalypse (family friendly 3 days camping trip) making it useless. There was a video "testing" Chris Reeve Green Beret knife, model designed for mixed usage without prolonged bushcraft activities (all better done with axe but knife gets them god knows why) where they decided to experiment with steel alloy that would take some micro damage at the edge under heavy cuts in harsher materials like while cutting plane hulls rather than only dull, which allowed it to be expected to way longer work good with ropes, cordura and other such materials, simmiliar to how serrated blade bites and jerks more. Another extra was that it was perfectly waterproof. Obviously dude tested it by only increasing shock stress over next stages and was soo dissapointed and angry that such pricey knife dared to snap on hardened construction wood and smashed at the top with a big fucking hammer. If someone tells You their all times fav knifes are bricks like esee rat then just expect that they may go full ape shit on their knifes by default and don't let them borrow Yours beside quick cuts.
I think that's very dependent on the media you're cutting. I can think of many cases where a ceramic knife would fail far sooner than a carbon steel blade
Just because it’s harder than steel doesn’t necessarily mean it is stronger than steel. The ceramic would snap or break in most situations where steel would simply bend or warp.
Professional ceramic knives do contain tiny amounts of metal in them. They're mostly used for handling reactive foods like fish, shellfish and certain types of vegetables, where the steel from a conventional knife can react with the food it's cutting.
I love all the jigs I see this guy has and used that are Practical and easy to make. If you ever need some thing fabbed out of metal and or welded I’d love to make it
As a chef in commercial kitchens ceramic knives are forbidden by health dept only for personal use. Why? Ceramic knives are designed only for soft foods no bone-in meat etc. The edge can chip and cause physical contamination of food. You cannot sharpen ceramic but must mail them back to manufacturer for them to factory sharpen. Also ceramic have little to no torque strength if tip is used to pry things like a steel knife. Boker and Kyocera are the brands to buy but a bit pricy.
I received a ceramic kitchen knife as a gift a few years back and I love it but i only take it out when Im alone working in the kitchen. It's wicked sharp and I dont want one of the boys or a guest cutting themselves AND being an ealier manufacture It's considerably more brittle than what's currently available.
The problem with ceramic knives is that their edge rather flakes of than just dulls like steel knifes. Combined with their hardness it makes them almost impossible to re-sharpen.
As I understand it, the ceramic layers in composite armor are designed to shatter. As they shatter, the force of the projectile is spread sideways from the impact, reducing the forwards force and chance of penetration. (I'm waiting for someone smart to correct me.)
I have a ceramic onie that just barely didn't fit in my dougout box by about 1/16 of an inch so i took an angle grinder to it to shave it down and about 5 mins later with sparks flying everywhere and the onie glowing red hot it didn't even grind any of it down at all. Ceramic material is crazy stuff
@@GreyKnightsVenerableumm grinders don't melt the material, heat is not the thing, but hardness. to grind something you always need something harder. and most ceramics are on top of the hardness scale coming close to diamond.
In other words, probably just easier to take the sixteenth off of the end of the handle, which is likely a much cheaper and softer material, I would assume.
I've read that bigger/reputable ceramic knife companies eg Kyocera pepper the clay with iron particulate or form the blade around a ferrous core to make them detectable. So to all you secret squirrels, either check it, "check" it or risk Rubber Glove Roulette at the TSA Casino🖕😮
If you are the type of person that will never do anything to maintain your knives, than ceramic can be a decent idea, just break the tip off it first so it doesn't happen while prepping food because it will happen and it won't take 10 years.
From what I understand, the problem anyone had with ceramic blades was never that they got dull faster than steel, it was that once they do finally get dull, they're pretty much impossible to sharpen without specialty equipment and technical know-how
The the reason ceramic edges can retain their sharp edges basically forever is because it's technically a crystal formed into an apex. As the blade is used, material will chip away from that apex, but because of the way it breaks the overall geometry of that apex itself never deforms or flattens the way a steel apex would. The geometry of the blade is always preserved and in-line, it just becomes more serrated as small amounts of material chip off.
Can't help but notice the knife was missing the tip in the edge retentikn test that took place before the "last thing I want to test" *breaks off tip* 😂
A ZrO2 ceramic knife has a hardness of roughly 72.5 HRC. Some powdered steels can get just a bit under this, Bohler S290 I have gotten to 72 but the cryo bath treatment kept causing the blade to explode. Steels up at this hardness are even more fragile than ceramic and definitely not at all usable even if you were "careful", but they can replace carbide cement and that's all that matters.
Everytime I get ready to send off a knife I see your testing processes and I go straight back to the drawing boards, dude ngl you've helped me advance/ find weakness in my blades from when I first started, and it's been making my quality just go up! One day a McGowan forge knife will be broken on that stump, and a big smile will be on my face on what to improve next!
The flexibility really is surprising… I repair and rebuild machining spindles and stainless or high carbon steel is just the norm for most parts. But every now and then certain applications require extremely hard surfaces beyond what steel provides. So in those cases we send parts out to get ceramic coated. Because ceramic really does create a harder and smoother surface finish, however it is much more brittle and prone to cracking upon shock forces so bending, regardless of what temp you have the part at, is terrible for it.
Glitch in the Matrix. Edge retention with a broken tip. To which at the end of the video, you say, now let's try the durability and then break the tip.
I bought 3 of the small HF ceramics 10, mebbe 15 yrs ago to put through my own personal torture test. I wanted to see what this ceramic was all about. One went to my fab, machine & wood shop, 1 to my desk, 1 to the top of the microwave for EZ access. 5-6 yrs in, bought some good diamond stones & put a paper thin, tomato cuttin', razor edge on them all. They cut boxes & tape, food, paper from cans, finish off the work of a can opener, rope, wire, sheet metal, hose, rubber & have great edges, still. They have done more than any steel blade or utility knife I've ever owned & I had some good steel. They recover faster w/ fewer passes on a hone & none have ever need morr than a touch up. The only advantage steel has is as an emergency screwdriver. I have 3-4 other kitchen ceramics of various sizes; none of them are expensive, cheapest of their size. They usually need 5-10 minutes on the diamond stones when new, but that's it.
The problem with ceramic blades is that they absolutely cannot be sharpened by regular means. They eill always be sharp enough, but after a few months, the original straight esge will have chipped off, making new also sharp edges, but ones that are no longer straight at all.
I like ceramic knives for car camping. They are low maintenance, always sharp, easy to clean, and pretty light weight. They are great for food prep or random campsite cutting tasks. I don’t use these like I would a “survival blade” and they are perfect for years and years. For their lane in my usage, I’d get them again and again!
I bought two cheap ceramic kitchen knives on sale about a decade ago, mostly because they lookes cool. I still use them regularly, no dulling. One did lose a tiny piece at the tip, but it affects nothing. Love those knives.
Ive been a chef for years. I bought a serrated ceramic knife a few years ago. It worked fine for years with meat and veggies on a plastic cutting board. It broke when cutting slices of crusty sourdough. Haven't trusted them since.
Ceramic tiles were used in-between studs in the walls of stash houses in Chicago. The tiles stacked up literally stopped bullets. Sure they shattered and didn't last long but it was armor you could steal in bulk and wasn't suspicious at first. It's amazing what we can utilize in our homes for crazy stuff like that.
I saw someone use polished granite slab as their cutting board with ceramic knife... asked why "cleanliness..." was the answer. And that's true. Granite will dull mild steel very quickly, but not zirconium. And you can't actually cut into the granite so the surface never gets spongy and gather all the crap within it's pores -> it's hygienic... the more you know...
So ceramic is far better at retaining edge but risks chipping and breakage unlike a typical steel knife. I can see this being incredibly useful for cooking, having a knife that doesn't need sharpening sounds great
I had some ceramic knives and I did enjoy them for a while. The trouble is that if you don't handle them properly they can chip. I did not handle mine properly. Or, not to make excuses, but I shared a kitchen with people who are sometimes rough on things. Fair enough. The main issue was that because they are so hard, I didn't have a good way to sharpen them. So they stayed pretty sharp for a while, but eventually they did get dull and were then useless. My steel knives do require sharpening, but I am able to provide that.
Most modern ceramic knives have added iron or steel dust so they are detectable by metal detectors. The only one I bought went through an x-ray security scanner and was not detected. That was 15 years ago & I threw the knife away, as I found a sharp blade chip in my food.
I work in weaving fabrics for engineering. We make a lot of carbon fiber, amongst glass, kevalar and various other fibers. We usually use razor blade type cutters for selvedges with carbon and glass fiber, but when it's really thick we use ceramic ones and boy are they sharp! They last much longer, but they're much more expensive and very brittle if they take any pressure to the side of the blade. I'd bet if you stuck the knife into a piece of wood and rotated it against the edge it'd snap very easily.
I remember watching a manufacturing doc about ceramic knives, where it said that manufacturers put some metal in there to set off detectors. I've always just assumed that was a standard, but maybe not.
The potential for ceramic knives getting through metal detectors is why the ones you buy at a store all have rounded points instead of sharp ones, to reduce their effectiveness for stabbing.
The worst thing with ceramic blades is edge chipping. Snapping the entire blade takes a bit of work, but just loosing the tip or getting small flake chipping on the very edge is much more common. On the other hand as the only difference in most of them is the handle, you just buy a bunch of cheap ones and toss them away if anything happens.
I remember seeing the edge of a ceramic knife and steel knife under a microscope after some heavy use (like a representation of what would happen after a long time of standard use.) Both knives were dull and needed sharpening, under the microscope the metal was bent, flattened, curled over etc but mostly all still there, the ceramic knife however was chipped in all different ways. The take away was a question of where did all those chips of ceramic go? On to the cutting board or into the food being sliced? Of course metal blades can chip too but due to the brittle nature of the ceramic they are more likely to chip than simply fold or flatten like the steel edge did. Just food for thought.
I have a ceramic kitchen knife, and it might be the best kitchen knife I have. It's really good and stays sharp for pretty much as long as you own it, as long as you don't go hacking on a piece of bone. That's why I have normal steel knives for the tough jobs. Ceramic knives are meant to do light jobs, and if you use them well, they basically last forever without ever having to sharpen them ever.
I can't use normal knives, because I always touch cutting edge from time to time. Sharp metal knives cuts from pressure, but sharp ceramic knives cuts from horizontal movement.
The thing about ceramic knives is they have a lot in common with glass. They are very hard so they’re brittle. They can’t really be sharpened either by most systems either. As the blade wears, it fractures microscopic chips which helps keep its edge. The makers have all cheapened out. For instance, with Kyocera, I bought a set years ago and it was so sharp, that just thinking about using it got me cut. I bought a set as a gift a few years ago and the edge was meh. It was sharp, but nothing like it used to be. At least they don’t rust.
I love my ceramic knives. Use for cutting lettuce, your lettuce doesn't turn brown. This slice through meat, like butter. But watch, you could cut off your finger, in an instant.
