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). Even so, the blank is nearly 8 in once the tang is counted, so an 18 in bar gives two and a 36 in bar four, 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 more than half the total length: as much steel goes into the handle as into the blade. Full tang gives a heavier, better balanced paring knife; a hidden tang with a turned wooden handle is quicker and uses less steel.
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 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. That is why so many parers drop the bolster and heel entirely, as the stamped Victorinox type does; forged Western parers like the Wüsthof Classic keep a full bolster, and Wüsthof sells a demi-bolster version precisely because that heel gets in the way. Used flat on a board it is a bad little chef's knife.
That in-hand life sets the geometry. America's Test Kitchen's testing lands on spines under 1.5 mm (about 0.060 in), thin enough to flex over the curve of an apple; 2 mm already feels stout by comparison. Three to three and a half inches gave their testers the most control. Three shapes are in general circulation: the classic triangular one, closest to a small chef's knife and the most at home on a board; the spear point, narrow and symmetrical, which ATK found "shone brightest with off-the-board tasks"; and the sheep's foot, straight-edged and blunt-tipped. ATK had no distinct preference among the three. The bird's beak is a fourth, specialist shape, curved for turning mushrooms and potatoes. Past about 120 mm (4.7 in), you have made a petty.
Be honest with yourself about the market: ATK's winner is a $23 Mercer and its best buy an $8 Victorinox, and a handmade paring knife 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 a stamped production blade.
Little of the bar is wasted (short blanks pack a length of 1 × 1/16 in about as tightly as anything on this site), though roughly a third of each blank goes to the grinder as the bevels come in. Either way the 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.