Herder utility knife blue pierced

The blade is carbon steel, thin ground and blue glazed, with an elongated handle made of steamed apple tree wood, which, as are all wooden knife handles finished at Herder in Solingen, is polished and then oiled: three paring knives with different shaped blades are available.
Windmühle refers to the logo, a windmill.

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.

The traditional material for knife blades is carbon steel. This is not stainless, but with a fine-grained structure it can be hardened to a particularly high degree and made extremely sharp. The higher the carbon content, the higher the hardening capacity. These knives owe their high cutting ability to the material in addition to the finishing, and their high cutting edge retention to a material-related self-sharpening effect. Each time a cut is made through fruit or vegetables, a minimal amount of material is removed and the blade wears evenly. The knifemaker refers to this as micro-corrosion. In fact, this means that the blade becomes steadily narrower over the years - but always retains its sharp grinding angle. Blades made of carbon steel put on a dark patina over time, but this in no way negatively affects their quality, but on the contrary gives them better protection against corrosion.

Carbon steel knives do not belong in the dishwasher. Wipe the knives dry after rinsing and occasionally apply some blade oil. Discoloration may occur on the blade material. However, this is not a sign of inferior quality, but only indicates the rather high carbon content in the material. In case of flash rust, the use of the rust eraser is recommended. A resharpening can be done with the sharpening steel.