A utility knife is any type of knife used for general manual work purposes. Such knives were originally fixed-blade knives with durable cutting edges suitable for rough work such as cutting cordage, cutting/scraping hides, butchering animals, cleaning fish scales, reshaping timber, and other tasks. Craft knives are small utility knives used as precision-oriented tools for finer, more delicate tasks such as carving and papercutting.
A knife is a tool or weapon with a cutting edge or blade, usually attached to a handle or hilt. One of the earliest tools used by humanity, knives appeared at least 2.5 million years ago, as evidenced by the Oldowan tools. Originally made of wood, bone, and stone, over the centuries, in step with improvements in both metallurgy and manufacturing, knife blades have been made from copper, bronze, iron, steel, ceramic, and titanium. Most modern knives have either fixed or folding blades; blade patterns and styles vary by maker and country of origin.
Hay is grass, legumes, or other herbaceous plants that have been cut and dried to be stored for use as animal fodder, either for large grazing animals raised as livestock, such as cattle, horses, goats, and sheep, or for smaller domesticated animals such as rabbits and guinea pigs. Pigs can eat hay, but do not digest it as efficiently as herbivores do.
A blade is the portion of a tool, weapon, or machine with an edge that is designed to puncture, chop, slice or scrape surfaces or materials. Blades are typically made from materials that are harder than those they are to be used on. Historically, humans have made blades from flaking stones such as flint or obsidian, and from various metal such as copper, bronze, and iron. Modern blades are often made of steel or ceramic. Blades are one of humanity's oldest tools, and continue to be used for combat, food preparation, and other purposes.
A Japanese kitchen knife is a type of a knife used for food preparation. These knives come in many different varieties and are often made using traditional Japanese blacksmithing techniques. They can be made from stainless steel, or hagane, which is the same kind of steel used to make Japanese swords. Most knives are referred to as hōchō or the variation -bōchō in compound words but can have other names including -kiri. There are four general categories used to distinguish the Japanese knife designs: handle, blade grind, steel, and construction.
Yanagi-ba-bōchō, yanagi ba, or yanagi, is a long and thin knife used in the Japanese cuisine. It is the typical example of the sashimi bōchō used to slice fish for sashimi and nigiri sushi.
A blade's grind is its cross-sectional shape in a plane normal to the edge. Grind differs from blade profile, which is the blade's cross-sectional shape in the plane containing the blade's edge and the centre contour of the blade's back. The grind of a blade should not be confused with the bevel forming the sharpened edge; it more usually describes the overall cross-section of the blade, not inclusive of the beveled cutting edge which is typically of a different, less acute angle as the bevel ground onto the blade to give it a cross-sectional shape. For example, the famous Buck 110 hunting knife has a "hollow ground" blade, with concave blade faces, but the cutting edge itself is a simple, flat-ground bevel of lesser angle. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to put a "hollow grind" onto the actual cutting edge of the blade itself, which is a very narrow and small bevel.
A baler or hay baler is a piece of farm machinery used to compress a cut and raked crop into compact bales that are easy to handle, transport, and store. Often, bales are configured to dry and preserve some intrinsic value of the plants bundled. Different types of balers are commonly used, each producing a different type of bale – rectangular or cylindrical, of various sizes, bound with twine, strapping, netting, or wire.
A forage harvester – also known as a silage harvester, forager or chopper – is a farm implement that harvests forage plants to make silage. Silage is grass, corn or hay, which has been chopped into small pieces, and compacted together in a storage silo, silage bunker, or in silage bags. It is then fermented to provide feed for livestock. Haylage is a similar process to silage but using grass which has dried.
Bread knives are used for cutting bread and are one of many kitchen knives used by cooks. The serrated blades of bread knives are able to cut soft bread without crushing it.
A microtome is a cutting tool used to produce extremely thin slices of material known as sections, with the process being termed microsectioning. Important in science, microtomes are used in microscopy for the preparation of samples for observation under transmitted light or electron radiation.
A kitchen knife is any knife that is intended to be used in food preparation. While much of this work can be accomplished with a few general-purpose knives – notably a large chef's knife, a tough cleaver, a small paring knife and some sort of serrated blade – there are also many specialized knives that are designed for specific tasks. Kitchen knives can be made from several different materials.
The Santoku bōchō or Bunka bōchō (文化包丁) is a general-purpose kitchen knife originating in Japan. Its blade is typically between 13 and 20 cm long, and has a flat edge and a sheepsfoot blade that curves down an angle approaching 60 degrees at the point. The term Santoku may refer to the wide variety of ingredients that the knife can handle: meat, fish and vegetables, or to the tasks it can perform: slicing, chopping and dicing, either interpretation indicating a multi-use, general-purpose kitchen knife. The Santoku's blade and handle are designed to work in harmony by matching the blade's width and weight to the weight of the tang and the handle.
A serrated blade is one with a toothlike rather than a plain edge, and is used on saws and on some knives and scissors. It is also known as a dentated, sawtooth, or toothed blade. Most such blades are scalloped, having edges cut with curved notches, common on wood saws and bread knives.
Sharpening is the process of creating or refining the edge joining two non-coplanar faces into a converging apex, thereby creating an edge of appropriate shape on a tool or implement designed for cutting. Sharpening is done by removing material on an implement with an abrasive substance harder than the material of the implement, followed sometimes by processes to polish/hone the sharp surface to increase smoothness.
Knife sharpening is the process of making a knife or similar tool sharp by grinding against a hard, rough surface, typically a stone, or a flexible surface with hard particles, such as sandpaper. Additionally, a leather razor strop, or strop, is often used to straighten and polish an edge.
A honing steel, sometimes referred to as a sharpening steel, whet steel, sharpening stick, sharpening rod, butcher's steel, and chef's steel, is a rod of steel, ceramic or diamond-coated steel used to restore keenness to dulled blade edges. They are flat, oval, or round in cross-section and up to 30 centimetres (1 ft) long. The steel and ceramic honing steels may have longitudinal ridges, whereas the diamond-coated steels are smooth but embedded with abrasive diamond particles.
Book trimming is the stage of the book production process in which the page edges of a book are trimmed so that all pages will stack with perfect edge alignment within the finished book jacket.
A diamond knife is a very sharp knife in which the edge is made from diamond, invented by Humberto Fernández-Morán in 1955. Diamond knives are used for medical and scientific applications where an extremely sharp and long-lasting edge is essential. The knives are very expensive to purchase, depending on the quality and size of the knife; in addition the knives must be professionally sharpened as the edge dulls.
A fillet knife is a kitchen knife used for filleting. It gives good control and aids in filleting. It is a very flexible member of the boning knife family that is used to filet and prepare fish. Fillet knife blades are typically 15 to 28 cm long. This allows them to move easily along the backbone and under the skin of meat.
