Furi Chopper/Cleaver 200.00mm(7.87")
Kitchen Knife Review

Furi knives are the creation of the Australian company Furitechnics. Well, u is spelled with an umlaut if you wanna be precise. Well, apparently they're doing pretty good, besides Australia, they have offices in US, UK and I don't know where else, never really researched that specifically. I knew about Furi knives, since I am a knife collector and interested in the kitchen knives as well, I learn about a lot of knife companies, and Furi was one of them. They are pretty widespread, partly thanks to Rachel Ray, since she endorses them and even has her own line, I'll talk about that later. Anyway, I knew about them enough to stay away from their knives. They do have really low reputation amongst knife cognoscenti, and that reputation is well deserved too. In short, no way in hell I'd buy Furi knife for myself, or even recommend it to anyone asking me about kitchen knives recommendation. However, since quite a few people around me know I collect and sharpen the knives, I do get various specimens for sharpening and testing. That's how I ended up with the Furi Chopper/Cleaver, which based on its construction was just a complicated name for a Chinese cleaver, or Chukabocho in Japanese. So, that was a good opportunity to see the Furi knife for myself.

General

Blade

Steel

Finest German stainless steel always has been the good old X50CrMoV15 steel, also known as 1.4116. Furi also gives another clue in their FX line steel description - CrMoV. No disrespect to German steelmakers, but today, that steel is nothing finest, or best, it's hardly a mediocre cutlery steel. There are dozens of better stainless steels and if you are a little curious check the interactive knife steel composition chart, just look up alloys with similar Chromium content and higher Carbon content. That doesn't automatically makes a steel better, although whatever I have in that chart are knife steels, so it'll be a pretty good overall picture. is it a bad steel? No, it's ok. Well tested and trusted. It's just neither best nor anything new and on top of that, the way Furi heat treats is far form perfect. As far as finest Japanese steels go, what is widely used in Japanese knives is VG-10, but I suspect Furi would be very vocal about that if they did. More likely it is Japanese analog of the X50CrMoV15, probably AUS6 or AUS8 at best. Well, here's AUS6 vs. AUS8 vs. 440A steel composition comparison, not missing Vanadium in 440A.

Sharpening

Since the bevels were already ground, and I already knew the blade was soft, I've picked 5µm microabrasive film. Now, 5µm might seem a bit too rough, but after stropping on the grinder the edge felt dull, not shaving at all. So, I've spent few minutes on 5µm SiC film. After the edge was shaving sharp, I've dropped to 05µm abrasive film and them to 0.3µm Aluminum Oxide film. Then stropping. All that went fast, but in general it was very disappointing, the edge, about 40° thick would for burr on the 0.5µm chromium oxide loaded belt... Never seen that before, and I already had very low expectations on its performance in any cutting tests.

Handle

Coppertail - Another aspect that Furi promotes their designs with is the coppertail feature in the handle. In simple words, that bent butt has a solid copper plug. Now, Furi explanation for that is as following: ...for easy rebalancing, i.e. as the blade wears and becomes lighter over time, copper is filed from the tails to rebalance the knife. Basically, what Furi says is that as you sharpen the edge away, you can file off the copper plug, which is obviously soft and rebalance the knife. Technically this is correct, but practically? It's one of the most useless features ever promoted. 90% of the folks out there never even bother to sharpen their knife, I've met quite a few people who seriously consider throwing away old knives and buying the new ones instead of sharpening them. Second aspect, or dubious part about that is human factor. You will have to remove considerable amount of metal from the edge to feel any change in balance. Third, the balance is very personal thing, and there is no perfect balance. Some people prefer forward, some in the middle, some knives have to be forward balanced, etc. I've had rehandled knives adding extra 50g or even 70g to the knife weight, didn't really feel that much different. That copper plug isn't all that big to make such a difference. So, given all that I am having very hard time imagining a person so fussy about balance change caused by repeated sharpenning to start filing off the handle :) Perfectionists like that, will not be buying Furi kitchen knife to begin with. Although, at the rate those knives are dulling, I guess if you try to maintain your Furi knife shaving sharp, you'll grind away half of the blade real quick ;)

Usage

Anyway, I had this 40° angle on the knife, shaving sharp, well obviously it was nowhere near as sharp as the high quality steel can get, because it is a softer metal. First up, mincing the Italian parsley. Few minutes of work, didn't chop axe style, but used normal rolling/rocking motion, left hand on the blade spine. Since the edge is curved it is easy. No significant change. Then was the broccoli. Trimmed the green top and proceeded with mincing the stem. Sliced the stem into 1-2mm slices using rocking motion. And at that point, the part of the edge in contact with the board was already rolled, obviously no shaving anymore. This is less than 15 minutes into cutting. I could see the rolled edge on the light and using 5x magnifying glass it was even more pronounced. I just finished mincing those slices using rocking motion and that promptly killed shaving sharp leftovers of the edge. Like I said, I didn't have to try hard or long to dull it. For the record, I was using, high quality, end grain custom cutting board all the time, so the board can not be blamed for quick dulling. I've cleaned up the board, washed the knife, spent another 15 minutes putting another shaving sharp edge on it and packed it, to give it back to the owner. Next day the knife was returned, with my comments to stay away from any other Furi knife in the future and I wouldn't sharpen that knife ever again, there was nothing interesting in it for me.

Conclusions