We got our first official feedback of the Maestro Wu 8″ Bombshell Steel Fillet knife! Videos are at the bottom of this post.
This knife came along as a result of speaking to more and more fishermen lately. I’ve always known that the fillet knife is the most important knife to these guys – much like a skinning knife is the most important to a hunter, and a chef’s knife to a chef. In my conversations, people have always asked if Maestro Wu made a fillet knife, and I finally went ahead and drew something up. Here are the results:
There are some defining features to this knife – the first and most noticeable is the finger guard. It’s incorporated into the blade for 2 reasons. The first is obviously to protect the finger from sliding up onto/into the edge of the knife. As we all know, cleaning fish can be slippery task. Secondly, the “fin” actually acts as a stabilizer for the blade, giving it some more rigidity, while still allowing it to remain flexible.
The next feature is that the blade is also only about 1mm thick along it’s whole length. There’s about 3mm of thickness going into the handle, but it quickly tapers so the entire cutting edge will remain easier to sharpen and maintain over time.
Lastly, the Japanese “D” handle, which is made from willow wood, gives a lot of surface area to hold onto firmly, yet it keeps the knife light so that you have ultimate control over your fish cleaning.
After sharpening the knife up to 5K on the Shapton Pro stones, I sent the prototype to Brett, a friend of mine who is an avid sport fisherman. He and his friend Rick (who did the videos below) compete and win a lot of the fishing competitions in their area. These videos are the knife’s first use after the day’s catch.
This first video demonstrates the knife’s capabilities wonderfully. You can see that some of the initial cutting is still forced (@ 0:23), which is more a habit of using his old knives, IMO. But if you watch closely, you can see how quickly he adapts his cutting technique to let the knife do the work, especially on the back side of the fish Notice how easily the knife slices into the tail on both sides!
