The anatomy of a knife

It's always useful to familiarise yourself with the various parts of a knife and what they are called.

Here we'll go through them and explain what they are for and why they are there.

The tip - Self explanatory this one. It's the pointy end of a knife blade. One of our most common jobs is sharpening and re tipping broken knife tips free of charge.

The spine - This is the top edge or back bone of the blade. The thickness depends on what type of knife it is and what its intended application is. Chopping knives and cleavers tend to have thicker spines and filleting and paring knives tend to have thinner spines.

The heel - the end of the blade closest to the handle is called the heel.

The bolster - Some knives have a bolster. Some do not. It depends on the design of the knife and if the manufacturer wanted to include one in the design. This is the part of the knife that joins the blade to the handle. It adds a little weight to the knife that some may prefer but others may not. We re-profile bolsters if the cutting edge of a knife is concave and when sharpened needs to be straightened out. This is all done free of charge.

Cutting edge - Again, another self explanatory one. The edge that does all the cutting.

Some knives have serrated edges, micro serrations, wide bevel edges and fully tapered cutting edges ( more about these in another post ) all are easily sharpened by our knife sharpening experts.

The tang - This is an interesting one. The old fashioned way of making knives in Europe was to beat a heated billet ( a block of steel ) into a knife shape then dress the handle with two pieces of wood. ( The same way a sword would be made ) The handle was fixed by rivets. The part of the knife that ran through the handle was called a tang. Some knives are full tang, which means that the tang runs through the whole handle to the butt. Some knives are three quarter or half tang. There is no good or bad amount of tang. It depends on the design of the knife. It adds weight to the handle which affects the balance.

The butt - This is the very end of the handle.

The rivet - These are pressed rivets whose function is to keep the handle together.