Knife Block

The next problem I needed to solve involved our kitchen knives.  We have a set of Calphalon Katana knives.  The knives were all purchased individually, we didn't get a set with a knife block.  While looking for a knife block I discovered, despite being great knives, they have one drawback.

If you look at the picture above you'll notice the shape of the handle blends into the blade.  There's not a clearly defined end of the handle and start of the blade.  This actually makes it difficult for these knives to cleanly fit into a traditional knife block.

Our first solution to this problem was the Kapoosh knife block.

This knife block is made up of tiny plastic "fibers" that can hold any shaped knife you have.  In the beginning this seemed to work well.  The concept solved the problem with the knives.  The biggest issue, however, was that we couldn't fit all of our knives in the block.

So I decided I wanted to try to make a custom knife block that would fit all of our knives perfectly.  My original idea was to make a traditional knife block but instead of typical flat slots for the blades to cut a more "triangular" slot so the knives would fit cleanly.  Take a look at the knife block that comes with the set of Katana knives today to see what I mean:

(Side note:  You can't buy this block on its own)

As I was trying to design this block I realized cutting those slots was going to be really challenging.  I would have to create some kind of jig and find a router bit with the proper cutting angle and what if different knives had different angles?  I ended up abandoning the idea and looking for something else.

Then I found an episode on the Wood Whisperer where Marc makes a knife block.  The key to the design was using bamboo skewers to hold the knives.  This is the same concept as the Kapoosh but using something readily available.  This was an amazing idea and exactly what I was looking for.  The episode was great and had a lot of useful info, but the plans still required tools I didn't have.  I also had my own ideas of how I wanted the knife block to look.  So I begin a new design around this bamboo skewer concept.  Here were the requirements:

1. Must hold all of our knives including the sharpener and our food scissors
2. Have a separate section for our matching steak knifes
3. Have a low profile to minimize occupied counter space

Here's the design I came up with:

It's a pretty simple design.  Some of the angles where a challenge to cut.  This was also the first project where I glued up boards to get those wide panels rather than using plywood.  I ended up using poplar and dying it similar to the TV cabinet.

Here's how it turned out:

This ended up being a birthday present for my wife.  She loved it.  We've been using it for about six months now and it's worked great.  The one slight annoyance with it is that the skewers often come out with the knife.  In the video Marc actually glues the skewers down which would solve the problem.  I didn't end up doing that because I liked the idea of being able to replace skewers easily down the road.  So I'm still trying to find a solutions where the skewers would stay in place but could be replaced if needed.