Ceramic Blade Carbon Knife

by Daniel Martinez, eCommerce Manager

Ceramic Blade Carbon Knife

Anyone who has tried to cut high-tech lines with a stainless blade will have noticed how quickly their blades dulled. High tech lines are extremely strong and even if you can get your blade to go through it once, odds are that it will need a sharpening before you move on to the next cut. For this reason, riggers generally keep a pack of razor blades on hand to preserve their knives and toughen up the calluses on their fingertips. Ceramic blades are the answer to this issue and the Carbon Fiber Ceramic Knife does it with style.

A few of us around the yard have been using these for a while and the knife is an absolute workhorse. The ceramic blade hardly dulls at all and makes for easy cuts through spectra when working on rig jobs and cuts clean lines in tape. It’s sharp enough to make a nice cut on a piece of sail tape for a quick repair and slices right through zip ties. Its light weight makes it easy to maneuver, especially for delicate cuts or in iffy situations where the user may want to grasp the back of the blade rather than the handle.

The ceramic blade is a pure cutting blade, so should not be used to pry paint cans or carve out old 4200 or spread open cotter rings, so a second, less awesome knife should be kept on hand for those jobs.

We love it when people leave feedback for us, and to pay it forward we’d like to give some credit to our supplier and his incredible responsiveness to one of our customer’s issues.

A customer of ours contacted us after the knife he purchased started to show signs of corrosion on some of the metal fittings after a night spent in a gear bag soaked in salt water. We passed along the issue to our supplier and within hours a replacement was on its way. A few hours later we received another email that explained how the supplier tested the product to recreate the issue and how he was going to work to solve the problem. He did suggest that with saltwater use, the knife should be rinsed with fresh water, and with freshwater use an application of lubricant or protectant would prevent corrosion from starting.

Now THIS is a guy who stands by his product. Not only did he immediately get to work replacing the knife, he spent his evening replicating the issue and developing a solution!

We’ve been lucky not to run into any issues here on the fresh water of Lake Michigan and we hope to carry more products from this supplier in the near future.

Of course, once you are out there and using your new ceramic knife someday you will need to sharpen it. Sharpening ceramic blades is difficult due both to the extreme hardness of the blade and the tendency to create micro-chips along the edge. Polishing the edge to get a higher degree of sharpness if it does become uniformly “dull” can be accomplished with very, very fine silicone carbide wet/dry sandpaper. This is not a fast process but does work. Put paper on top of mouse pad or piece of cardboard to provide some compression and better control of knife angle. Now draw the blade away from the edge, (do not cut into the paper), with only a slight elevation of the back of the blade. 20 strokes on each side and then test the edge. You can use from 800 to 2,000 grit paper. Start coarse IF there is more than just polishing required.

You can purchase these knives in the Crowley’s Ship’s Store or online by clicking here.