Yahiko Shirogami 180mm

Post Reply
mdl130
Posts: 145
Joined: Tue Feb 21, 2017 2:31 pm
Been thanked: 5 times

Yahiko Shirogami 180mm

Post by mdl130 »

Received the knife today. Mark and his team are amazing. I ordered this on Tuesday afternoon and still received it today.

First impression. WOW!!!

F&F: This thing is a stunner. The F&F is impeccable for a knife of this price point. It has a beautifully rounded spine and smoothed choil. The finish on the knife is really cool. It has a distinct finished by hand quality.

Handle: I love it. It's tall, thin and light. It is really smooth and fits this size knife perfectly. It's smooth all around and only has a slight step from the ferrule. That doesn't bother me. The handle isn't flashy, but I think it's perfect.

Distal taper: Another wow. This thing is thick out of the handle, but tapers out quickly to a beautifully thin tip.

Out of box sharpness: Out of the box, this knife doesn't have much of an edge. I can run three fingers along the edge pretty comfortably. This doesn't' bother me. I look forward to seeing how sharp I can get this thing. It should be really quick with how thin this is behind the edge.

I'll report back once I've sharpened the knife and cut some stuff.
User avatar
Kit Craft
Posts: 4844
Joined: Thu Jan 26, 2017 8:57 pm
Location: Pennsylvania
Been thanked: 11 times

Re: Yahiko Shirogami 180mm

Post by Kit Craft »

mdl130 wrote: Thu Dec 14, 2017 4:26 pm Received the knife today. Mark and his team are amazing. I ordered this on Tuesday afternoon and still received it today.

First impression. WOW!!!

F&F: This thing is a stunner. The F&F is impeccable for a knife of this price point. It has a beautifully rounded spine and smoothed choil. The finish on the knife is really cool. It has a distinct finished by hand quality.

Handle: I love it. It's tall, thin and light. It is really smooth and fits this size knife perfectly. It's smooth all around and only has a slight step from the ferrule. That doesn't bother me. The handle isn't flashy, but I think it's perfect.

Distal taper: Another wow. This thing is thick out of the handle, but tapers out quickly to a beautifully thin tip.

Out of box sharpness: Out of the box, this knife doesn't have much of an edge. I can run three fingers along the edge pretty comfortably. This doesn't' bother me. I look forward to seeing how sharp I can get this thing. It should be really quick with how thin this is behind the edge.

I'll report back once I've sharpened the knife and cut some stuff.
Thanks for the preview, looking forward to hearing more once you get a chance to use it.
mdl130
Posts: 145
Joined: Tue Feb 21, 2017 2:31 pm
Been thanked: 5 times

Re: Yahiko Shirogami 180mm

Post by mdl130 »

This knife is a keeper...period. Normally, when I buy a knife there is a getting to know you phase where I feel it out. It takes time to feel comfortable with the the knife in hand and really let loose on some product. Not so with this knife. I broke down some sweet potatoes and red onions last night. This knife is fast. The light handle makes the knife blade heavy, which is hard to find on some 180 gyutos. As a result, this chops beautifully. The grind on the knife allowed it to fly through the sweet potatoes with no cracking and little resistance (maybe even better than my Takamura). The red onion was a breeze.

The knife also performs admirably while rocking. The knife is pretty flat at a glance, but on close examination it has a very gentle curve throughout the whole blade. I breezed through some garlic and herbs incredibly easy with some fasts cuts.

The overall feel of the knife is light and accurate. This surprised me. I thought this would be a much stouter knife from the 3.7mm thickness on the product page. That measurement is not wrong, but this knife just thins out really quick and has a very thin agile tip. I compared this knife to my 180 Takamura and this really didn't seem that much thicker once you get to the mid point of the blade. Even though the knife is thin, like the Takamura, it is stiff with little to no flex.

I like the thin handle. Not much else to say about that.

Ease of sharpening: So I do have some mixed thoughts here. The knife came pretty dull so I sharpened it right away with a bester 1200 and rika 5000. I raised a burr incredibly quickly with the 1200, but it took a while to remove the burr. When I was done, I felt like I hadn't gotten the knife as sharp as I'd like. It might be unfair because I just did a full progression on my TF Maboroshi for the first time and was blown away by the resultant edge. Once I put the knife to the test through some onion and sweet potatoes, I didn't have as many qualms, but it didn't glide through tomatoes and pepper as well as the TF. Everyone should take this with a grain of salt as this could have been completely my doing and my hurry to test the knife. When the knife dulls, I will try again and report back.

Reactivity: Haven't had any issues so far. When I cut onions, I didn't get any oxidation on the onion. When I cut lemons and oranges, it didn't immediately react. I already have a nice patina forming after cutting some chicken.

Final thoughts: I think this is going to stay in the rotation for a while with my Takamura 180, TF Maboroshi 195mm (more robust knife) and my Tesshu White 2 225mm. I feel like I have a great range right now of fully stainless, stainless clad and full carbon knifes. Thanks for reading. Let me know if I missed anything.
caerolle
Posts: 1664
Joined: Sun Apr 16, 2017 7:57 pm
Has thanked: 33 times
Been thanked: 28 times

Re: Yahiko Shirogami 180mm

Post by caerolle »

In my personal experience, nothing gets as sharp for me as my TFs. So, perhaps you are just up against an very high standard for comparison? :)
Post Reply