Herder breakfast knife blue pierced

Robert Herder in Solingen has been manufacturing this knife with the rounded tip since 1872, the year the firm was founded. It’s a table knife, with a blade that is sharp enough so that it can also be used to cut fruit for breakfast.

Windmühlen knives from Robert Herder in Solingen are remarkable not only for the knife steel (at least 0.75% carbon content and a hardness of at least 56 HRC for the carbon steels), but above all for the craftsman's finishing, which spares none of the traditional grinding efforts: Windmühlen knives are ground extremely thin. This results in their amazing cutting ability, which is an experience in use. The most elaborate type of grinding is the whale grind, a special type of thin grinding in which the blade is ground tapered towards the back of the knife.

Pließten is the name given in Solingen to the smoothing of the grinding grooves remaining on the blade, i.e. the fine grinding. The most complex stage of this technique is blue finishing. In this process, the steel is ground finer step by step. That a blade is blugepließtet, you can tell by the fact that it reflects in the light slightly bluish.

The elastic blades of the blue-plated knives from Herder are ground in the Solingen thin grinding as well as in the whale grinding. Thanks to the very high hardness of 60 Rockwell (HRC) they keep their sharpness much longer.

Because of the high hardness - and because they are ground so exceedingly thin - the blades should not be turned or even canted, as this may lead to chipping on the material when cutting.