Just how durable are Böker ceramic knives?

D

Dethedrus

Joined
Jun 6, 2006
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I've spent a fair amount of time investigating on the forums as well as Googling my fingers off, and am getting a very ambivalent overall impression of ceramic knives.

While most sites selling them, as well as the manufacturers pages, claim them to be razor sharp and/or sharper than steel knives, most posts I've seen here claim that they're moderately to significantly duller than steel knives in general. Granted I don't need something capable of splitting a hair in midair, but I don't want to pay top dollar for a glorified butterknife :)

Even more worrisome, I've heard claims of them being very easy to chip (even slight accidental contact with a hard surface). Since I'll mostly be perforating uppity cardboard I'm not too worried, but what if I decide to cut the hard plastic straps that hold the servers in their cardboard prisons? Will a ceramic be at significant risk?

And to add another monkey to this barrel, how about the Ceratitan blades? Again with the mixed reviews, though most of the negative comments seemed to center around overall blade strength not edge properties.

Thanks!
 
Ceramic blades are supposed to hold up very well, when used appropriately.

If they are used for plain cutting or slicing, there's no problems. The problem is that the knife eventually get's used for something it's not supposed to be used for, and it breaks.

They're not suitable for chopping knives(in my opinion) but for slicers they're excellent.

Sharpening is the only issue I can think of, older ceramics couldn't be sharpened by the end line user, and had to be sent back to the company for sharpening. Newer ceramics are sharpenable at home I believe.

This is definitely not something I'm familiar with, but this just stuff I've heard, so take my post with a grain of salt.
 
Definitely a good start!

As a point of reference I went to a local mall cutlery shop which had a surprisingly large selection of "exotic" knives including the Gamma and Infinity, and spoke with their sharpener for a bit. He claims that a couple of his co-workers are using them and with a bit of careful usage that they've held up well.

And considering that I'm in the IT field, the likelihood that I'll be using it inappropriately is fairly small. That's why they invented screwdrivers and whatnot ;)
 
I don't have a ceramic knife (yet) but a knifenut friend use one ceramic Boker as EDC. He uses for a lot of tasks and have never had a problem with chipping issues. I asked once about how it cut and he told me "Cut's ok but it does forever" meaning he hadn't sharpened in a couple of years and it was still a great cutter.
 
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