Possibly the world’s first knife where the soft grip wrapping and slicing edge are made of the same thing.
In just a few short months, Japanese YouTuber Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami has built up an international fanbase for his videos showing that you don’t need steel to make razor-sharp cooking knives. He first earned overseas attention by fashioning a knife out of dried fish, and recently he’s done the same using dried pasta and aluminum foil as his as his crafting materials.
Now Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami is amazing the Internet all over again by taking plastic wrap, something that’s not only non-metallic, but specifically designed to be soft and flexible, and, you guessed it, making a knife out of it.
Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami isn’t using some sort of special shiv-friendly wrap here either. It’s just a roll of ordinary polyurethane wrap that you can buy in the kitchen supply section of any grocery store.
After removing the roll from its box, Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami blasts it with air from a hot air gun that produces a temperature of 162.8 degrees Celcius (325 degrees Fahrenheit), slightly above the wrap’s listed heat resistance of 160 degrees. This hardens the wrap into a stiff but lightweight plastic, as seen at the video’s 1:07 mark.
After making a lengthwise incision with a craft knife and removing the tube’s paper core, the next step is to flatten the plastic out by bolting it to a frame, heating it with the hot air gun again, and repeating the process while progressively adding more sections to the frame.
After a bit more flattening in a vice grip, he has a smooth piece of roughly chef’s knife-length plastic, onto which he traces the outline of a knife.
Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami then places the plastic plane back into the vice grip and, taking a page from Michelangelo, cuts, grinds, and files away everything that isn’t knife, as seen here in the video.
Then it’s time for the YouTuber to whip out his extensive arsenal of whetstones. Once the blade has a keen edge, the final step is to wrap the handle, and naturally Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami opts to use plastic wrap for this too, resulting in the very strange phenomenon of the part of the knife you grip and the part of the knife that cuts being made of the same thing.
And how well does it cut? As you can see in the video here, where Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami tries it out on cucumbers, tomatoes, and a cardboard box…
…just as well as you’d expect any metallic knife to. As a matter of fact, he says it’s even sharper than his dried fish knife, though the current king of his non-metallic knife sharpness rankings is the pasta knife…though really we should say it’s the sharpest so far, since it’s only a matter of time before Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami blows our minds again with an unorthodox knife-making material.
Source, images: YouTube/圧倒的不審者の極み!
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