Calculator › Knives › Chef's knife
Kitchen knives are thin. An 8 in gyuto or French chef's knife wants a spine of 0.090–0.100 in at the heel (3/32 in stock is the standard, 1/8 in is the absolute maximum and only with a strong distal taper), tapering to well under 1/16 in at the tip. Most makers do these by stock removal from flat stock so the blade starts flat and thin.
Width is the issue, not thickness: a 1 7/8 in heel needs 2 in stock, which is sold as flat bar in carbon steels and as sheet in stainless. Buying a 2 × 3/32 × 36 in bar and cutting two blades from it is the cheapest way in.
Stock removal: the bar is cut to blade + tang + clean-up, so the tang section and forged thickness below only change the finished-weight estimate. Switch to Forged and they change the stock length too.
Tang dimensions are estimated from the tang style until you change them. Measuring yours is worth doing — a forged blank's length depends on the tang's cross-section, not on what the tang is called.
Stock removal: fill factors only change the finished-weight estimate here. They set the stock length when the method is Forged. Grinding loss has no effect at all in stock removal — the bar is cut straight to the profile, nothing is drawn out.
The fraction of the blade's and tang's bounding box that is actually steel once the bevels are ground. Distal taper is factored in separately now (see "Distal taper" below, under What this assumed) and isn't editable here yet — these two fill factors are the ones worth replacing with your own measurements: weigh a finished blade, then adjust until the finished weight below matches the scale.
Steel is only part of the cost. Add abrasives, handle, heat treat and your time, and see the price that actually pays you.
Copy link to this calculationThis is the knife that does eight or nine tenths of the work on a board: dicing onions, slicing, mincing aromatics, portioning boneless meat, breaking down produce. It is not for bone. A thin kitchen blade taken to a chicken carcass or a frozen block chips, and the chef's knife is not a substitute for a cleaver however often you read that it is.
The French and German profiles are the same idea solved two ways. German knives carry a deep continuous belly from about mid-blade forward, built for a rocking chop with the tip anchored on the board. French knives are flatter back from the heel and rise to a finer point, which suits push-cutting and drawing the knife through. Neither is correct; they match different hands. The Japanese gyuto (牛刀, cow blade) is a Meiji-era adaptation of the French pattern, made after the Meiji government permitted and actively promoted meat-eating in 1871–72 and Western cooking arrived. It is a Japanese reading of a European knife, usually harder and thinner than either Western original.
What buyers actually want from a handmade one is geometry a factory will not risk: thin behind the edge, real distal taper, and a heel around 2 in so their knuckles clear the board (America's Test Kitchen's tested threshold, below which their testers' fingers hit the board). On steel, Larrin Thomas is blunt about the priority: "thin, acute edges are king. It makes an even bigger difference than the steel or heat treatment." His cutting data has a cheap, low-wear-resistance AUS-6 at 12.5° per side cutting just as long as S110V at over 20°. The other thing to get right is food release: a flat polished face suctions to potato slices, which is why convexity, an S-grind or a hammered finish is worth the extra work on a tall blade.
Forging a chef's knife from thicker bar (1 1/4 × 1/4 in is popular) is a real skill: you draw the width out rather than the length. The calculator's forged mode assumes you start at roughly the finished width; if you forge width from narrow bar, work from volume and expect a lot of hammering.
| Petty / utility, 5–6 in blade | 1 1/2 × 3/32 in |
|---|---|
| Gyuto, 8 in blade | 2 × 3/32 in |
| Big gyuto, 10 in blade | 2 1/4 × 1/8 in (or 3/32 with taper) |
Widths assume blade height + 1/8 in rounded up to stock; thickness is the finished spine rounded up. Change the inputs above for your own pattern.
3/32 in (about 2.4 mm) at the spine over the heel, tapering to under 1/16 in near the tip. Thinner slices better; thicker only helps on a cleaver.
AEB-L or MagnaCut for stainless, 52100 or 1084 for carbon. All take a thin edge; carbon needs to be dried after use.
Bar sizes for ten common knife patterns, weight per inch for every standard flat bar, and quick heat-treat numbers for the usual carbon steels. Print it, tape it to the grinder.