Light Slicer Butcher Knife, 6.5"

This is a great knife. If you are looking for a traditional cleaver that can chop through bones, this is not it. This knife is considered a vegetable cleaver. It is designed to quickly chop through vegetables and meat, but not bone. The thinner blade allows it to chop very easily, but doesn't give it the sturdiness needed to chop through bone. It was never designed to chop through bone. Instead it was designed to cut very easily. As the first rater mentioned, this knife won't be as pretty as a Shun knife. The knife came with a few light scratch marks on the blade. I wouldn't say that they in any way affect the quality of the knife as far as how it cuts, how long it lasts or anything like that. The maker just didn't polish it up or when they were making them, they likely threw a bunch of them into a bin. And the wood handle isn't perfectly matched up through grounding with the steel like you'd see on a Shun, Wusthof or Henckels. However there's no gaps where liquid could get in between the blade and the handle or where the handle might work loose. I have a Shun cleaver. And if I was going to summarize this knife. I'd say that functionally this knife is designed better than the Shun, but they just didn't do the fine little finishing details that Shun does to make it look as pretty. Here are some of the things I really like about this knife: 1. I love the design of the handle. It fits to your hand very well with the oval shape. The handle is wider than the Shun handle and just feels more comfortable and easier to grip. 2. This knife is very light. The light weight of the knife allows you to do very quick chopping. It doesn't have quite the weight behind it that the Shun has. I'd call that an advantage or a disadvantage compared to the Shun depending on what you like. It allows you to chop faster, but you also have less weight on the knife to help chop through. I tend to like the lighter weight a little better. Because really if you're getting a Chinese vegetable cleaver it is about increasing the speed over a Western chef's knife by chopping instead of slicing. 3. The blade is thinner than the Shun's. People may think this is a bad thing, but it is a good thing. If you use your knife to pick up chopped vegetables off the cutting board, you are supposed to use the back or spine of the knife instead of the cutting edge to pick the vegetables up. You do this to avoid dulling the knife blade and also to help avoid cutting yourself. The thinner the knife blade is, the easier it is to pick up vegetables this way. However I'd like to see some manufacturer pay a little more attention to the back or spine of the knife blade. Almost no manufacturers take the time to round the spine. The only one I've seen do it is the Kramer line of Henckels. And those are very expensive. I'd like to see a manufacturer do an angled ovular round so the spine wouldn't cut you but at the same time would allow for easier pick up of the vegetables using the spine. 4. I love the extra width to the blade. This makes it excellent for scooping up vegetables. Most cleavers are 3 inches wide and this one is 4. Or if you want an exact width measurement 4 1/16". 5. I like the extra length of the knife. This knife is stated as an 8 inch blade. That isn't totally true. The cutting portion of the blade is really only 7 11/16" or just slightly under 7 3/4". From the tip of the blade to the handle though it measures 8 1/4". So depending on how you measure the length of the blade, you could say that it is or isn't an 8 inch blade. I found that the 7" cutting blades on other vegetable cleavers have a cutting length slightly longer than 7" of about 7 1/4". I thought I needed an 8 inch blade because I'm used to an 8 inch chef's knife. But I think you'll find that the cutting length of a 7 inch vegetable cleaver ends up being about the same as an 8 inch chef's knife because that last 1 inch of the tip of the chef's knife really doesn't get used due to how a chef's knife blade curves compared to a vegetable cleaver. 6. I also found that this knife doesn't do too bad of a job if you want to do the slicing motion you'd do with a chef's knife. The tip slides pretty well instead of getting caught on the board. And while it slides well, the tip still cuts very well. 7. This knife is very sharp. This knife has 67 layers to it. I think a number of the Shuns only have about 30 some layers to them. Normally the more layers to a Damascus steel blade, the higher the quality of blade it is. 8. Finally, I know this sounds kind of stupid, but I like the box it comes in. Be careful opening the box. I almost ripped the box open and ruined the packaging. Zhen thought out their packaging much better than Shun or Wusthof for their cleaver. Although they might want to print on it, "Open by lifting here." When you have a knife this big, storage can be a pain. I mean most knife blocks aren't made for cleavers. Zhen created a package for this knife that has a tab with a magnetic strip in it. You lift that tab up and the fold down lid opens easily up. They also have a well formed cut-out that the knife fits into. And there's even a see through plastic window so you can see the blade. So the packaging can work great for storage of the knife as long as you don't rip the packaging apart like I almost did. Because it is really hard to notice that tab. If you have trouble finding the tab, just turn the box over to the bottom side and look for the length side with the seam. Then reach around to the end of the box and lift the tab. My point is that Zhen designed the packaging well so that the packaging can be used over and over again for storage instead of just for a one time use specifically for the purpose of shipping it to you.