What size steel for a 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, waste is low if you buy sheet close to the finished height; the waste figure in the calculator assumes cutting a full-tang profile from bar. Buy a 4 × 3/32 × 12 in bar and you have one cleaver and a paring knife from the offcut.

A cai dao is a vegetable knife, not a meat cleaver

The Chinese name says it outright: 菜刀, cài dāo, vegetable knife. The bone-splitting tool is a different, thicker knife with a different name, 骨刀, gǔ dāo. "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, and every maker who sells one says so on the page.

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 scraping the board clean with a face that doubles as a bench scraper. It is tall so it can scoop and rectangular so it can scrape, 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 at 210 mm runs about 250 g with a 3 mm spine and heavy distal taper — nimble, not brutal. Two to three millimetres at the spine is the general recommendation; heavier versions exist for poultry and soft bones, and the 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 the worst possible case for potato slices sticking, so convexity or a textured finish matters more here than on any other pattern.

Stock for a cleaver

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.

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.

Steels that suit it

Questions