Calculator › Knives › Cleaver
Cleavers are the one knife made from sheet rather than bar. A Chinese vegetable cleaver (cai dao) is 7–8 in long, 3 1/2–4 in tall and only 1/16–3/32 in thick (makers who use them daily say 0.060–0.090 in at the spine; it is a slicer, not an axe), so it comes out of 4 in wide 3/32 in flat or a 3/32 in sheet. A meat cleaver for bone is 3/16–1/4 in and should be a different calculation.
Because the blank is a rectangle, almost none of the bar is wasted if you buy sheet close to the finished height: what the calculator loses is in the grinding, not the offcut. Mind the length, though: a 7 in blade on a 5 in handle needs a bit over 12 in with the clean-up, so a 12 in bar yields nothing. Buy a 4 × 3/32 × 24 in bar and you have one cleaver and an 11 in drop: a paring knife, with its tang, out of the end.
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 calculationThe Chinese name says it outright: 菜刀, cài dāo, vegetable knife. The bone-splitting tool is a different, thicker knife with a different name: 砍骨刀, kǎn gǔ dāo, chop-bone knife. "Chinese cleaver" is a translation error that made it into product listings and has been misleading cooks ever since: take a thin cai dao to bones and you will damage the edge. The warning is model-specific rather than universal (some medium-duty choppers are built for small, soft poultry and fish bones), so read the product page instead of assuming either way.
In a Chinese kitchen this is often the only knife: slicing, shredding, dicing, roll cutting, mincing, crushing garlic and ginger with the flat, pounding cutlets thin, and lifting prep off the board with the blade face rather than dragging the edge across it. Its height and rectangular face make it a serviceable bench scraper, and the technique is a forward chop with the blade lifted clear between strokes, not the rocking motion a Western chef's knife wants.
The thing that surprises people handling a real one is how light it is. A classic thin cai dao (the CCK KF1303 is the reference) is 210 mm long and 89 mm tall at about 250 g, with a 3 mm spine. Nimble, not brutal. Two to three millimetres at the spine is the general recommendation; medium choppers are heavier, and a genuine bone cleaver is thicker again. The failure mode for a maker is building the wrong one of those three, and after that, food release: a tall flat polished face is about the worst case for potato slices sticking, so convexity or a textured finish earns its keep.
Thin cleavers warp in heat treat more than any other pattern because of the width. Normalize carefully, quench between plates if stainless, and leave the blank 0.02 in oversize to grind flat afterward.
| Small cai dao, 6 in blade | 3 × 1/16 in |
|---|---|
| Standard cai dao, 7–8 in blade | 4 × 3/32 in |
| Bone cleaver, 7 in blade | 4 × 1/4 in |
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.
1/16–3/32 in (0.060–0.090) for a vegetable cleaver: it should slice like a chef's knife; 3/16–1/4 in and a convex edge for a bone cleaver.
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.