Calculator › Knives › Paring knife
Paring knives are the best use of offcuts. A 3 1/2 in blade under 1 in tall fits in 1 × 1/16 in stock — experienced makers run paring blades at 0.040–0.060 in, and 3/32 in feels clumsy — and you can get four or five from an 18 in bar, or cut them from the drops of a chef's knife blank. Almost nobody forges them: the steel is thinner than it is easy to forge without warping.
Because the knife is short, the tang is a larger share of the total than on other patterns. Full tang gives a heavier, better balanced paring knife; a hidden tang with a turned wooden handle is quicker and uses less steel.
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 calculationA paring knife is an in-hand tool, not a board tool. Peeling, hulling strawberries, coring, supreming citrus, deveining shrimp, turning vegetables, checking a potato for doneness — work done in the air with the thumb bracing the food, which is why the pattern traditionally has no heel and no choil to get in the way. Used flat on a board it is a bad little chef's knife.
That in-hand life sets the geometry. Experienced makers run these at 0.040–0.060 in at the spine, thin enough to flex over the curve of an apple; 3/32 in feels like a crowbar by comparison. Three to three and a half inches gives the most control. There are three shapes in circulation: the classic triangular one, which is the closest to a small chef's knife and the best on a board; the spear point, narrow and symmetrical, which is the best off-board peeler; and the bird's beak, curved for turning mushrooms and potatoes. Over about four inches you have made a petty, and it will feel clumsy in the hand.
Be honest with yourself about the market: the best-tested paring knives cost eight to twenty-five dollars, and a handmade one has to beat them at a job that needs almost no steel. Where it can win is a genuinely thin distally tapered blade, a handle sized to one person's hand for the sustained thumb-push of peeling, and a fine-grained steel that takes a keener edge than stamped 420.
The waste figure on a paring knife looks alarming — half the bar becomes dust — but a 1 × 1/16 in bar is only a few dollars. Batch them: profile five, grind five, heat treat five.
| Bird's beak, 2 1/2 in blade | 3/4 × 1/16 in |
|---|---|
| Standard, 3 1/2 in blade | 1 × 1/16 in |
| Long petty, 5 in blade | 1 1/4 × 3/32 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.
Yes, for stock removal: small, cheap, quick to grind, and the geometry is forgiving. Make three; the third will be good.
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.