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Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

seattleultrasonics.com

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Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#471

Post by rkomorn »

thom wrote: post #470
RHSeeger wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I'm setting myself up for being picked up, but... I use an older knife that I've never sharpened outside of "occasionally" running it back and forth against a tough fabric. It cuts literally everything just fine; cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. Nothing about my use of it _seems_ unsafe; but I expect that's partially because I don't cut very fast. Cooking, when I'm involved, tends to be "social time", where…

We moved house recently and I bought some new knives for the kitchen. My wife is now constantly cutting herself because she has no intuition for how sharp a knife should be. I can’t really imagine what the safety argument is against dull knives.

Maybe there's some bell curve of knife skills proficiency where the better you are with knives, the safer they are when sharp, but generally:

Dull knives are more likely to slip on whatever you're cutting (and cut you instead).

They're also more likely to need more force when cutting which means less control.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#472

Post by loloquwowndueo »

victorhooi wrote: post #398
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok congrats!

Hmm, that seems a bit snarky =(. I don't think the parent was bragging about the salary thing - a lot of the other comments here are mentioning the price (which to be fair, is definitely in the expensive gadgets/toys bucket...) so he/she (s/g) is saying - he's just a home cook, he's got semi-decent knife skills, and he's in a position that he can afford this. And let's be honest, tech geeks are basically the target d…

I’m sincerely congratulating parent for their purchase. Geez one can’t genuinely just be happy for someone else without a third party hallucinating way too much out of a two-word sentence.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#473

Post by procaryote »

trhway wrote: post #139
procaryote wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A shaped charge is sadly the opposite of sharp so it would be a one time use blade that would be dull before and after That one use would be anything but dull though

You can have it sharp with shaped charges array sitting a bit deeper and sideways, and new edge breaking out as side effect of shaped charges exploding, rinse and repeat, about 5 times for a regularly sized sword. Even more interesting alternative is to have some quick blade switching machinery to switch on-the-fly between the actual blade edge and the shaped charge array and to add some feeding machinery of shaped c…

I guess the easy mode would be to make one edge shaped charges and one edge... edge

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#474

Post by sethammons »

jorvi wrote: post #247
knifemaster wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was getting the impression that you are "selling" the fact that the performance of this knife is based on false advertising, and using personal anecodes and some anonymous people as a supporting argument. That's basically the only issue. Aside from that, in my opinion dicing an onion is a much more simple task for a knife than taking a very thin slice of a tomato. And in both cases it is likely more about the techn…

Well, I can't speak to "false advertising", but the thin slice he did with the tomato and the grape you can just achieve with a well-sharpened knife. Both sides of a whetstone and then a strop will get you there. As for the sticking, this is solved by vertical fluting already. Ultrasonic vibration is a complicated solution for a problem that has already been solved by the simple solution of just sharpening your knive…

> As for the sticking, this is solved by vertical fluting already.

This is absolutely NOT "solved." I have such knifes and potatoes stick nearly as bad. To the point I have wondered if they make it worse.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#475

Post by bmacho »

lisper wrote: post #160

"Please sign in to confirm you're not a bot. This helps protect our community." Um, no.

The website is just https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/cXjbSVt9XNM video embedded + a button to buy. (But it still tracks the referrer in the URL so it tells google that you went HN frontpage -> Ultrasonic Chef's Knife. It seems HN has put back referrer in the links :|)

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#476

Post by sethammons »

kristjansson wrote: post #371
sublinear wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free idea: put this tech in a mandoline slicer. Even the best tend to struggle with consistency and can only go so thin due to all the friction. An ultrasonic mandoline that can overcome all that would probably fly off the shelves and better match the original industrial intent.

On one hand I would buy that instantly. On the other hand, it’s already missing small pieces thanks to my current mandolin. Not sure I want to make my scariest utensil scarier.

I took a few mm off my pinky with one without noticing until I saw blood in my prep dish. They are to be respected.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#477

Post by omega3 »

The tomato test is disingenuous - no one slices a tomato by pressing the knife straight down - you slice it to break the thick skin and follow with a slicing motion. The rest of the graph basically shows no difference between the force used for ultrasonic one and standard knife used inefficiently?

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#479

Post by helsinki »

jfim wrote: post #207
tptacek wrote: post #96

Elsewhere on the thread I pointed out that I'd noticed the video doesn't show anybody doing actual prep; making an easy but deliberate thin slice of a tomato is one thing, quickly dicing an onion or a bell pepper is a very different thing. To that observation I'd add (h/t my Slack friends) this interesting site Seattle Ultrasonics stood up: https://seattleultrasonics.com/pages/knife-database One thing I notice here i…

I can see why one would use a serrated knife to cut bread, but what knife would one use to cut cheese other than a chef's knife?

A cheese knife.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#480

Post by rkomorn »

omega3 wrote: post #477

The tomato test is disingenuous - no one slices a tomato by pressing the knife straight down - you slice it to break the thick skin and follow with a slicing motion. The rest of the graph basically shows no difference between the force used for ultrasonic one and standard knife used inefficiently?

And yet, when people like to show off how sharp their knife is, dropping a tomato on it (blade-up obviously) and watching the tomato split in two is one of the favorite tests.

Probably (and precisely) because you can only achieve this with a knife that cuts very well.

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