Baby's First Cleaver

I’ve always been the knife guy. You know that one person you turn to at Christmas when you need to open a package? Or the 10 year old that inexplicably has a machete at the family picnic? That’s me.

I probably emerged from the womb as a knife guy. I mean, as a kid, you have this sort of idealized image of a man’s man, who can go out in the woods with his hunting knife and build a log cabin before noon, spear a rabbit at 50 paces for lunch, and then carve a full chess set before bed. You hear about Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone, and holy shit, what about samurai and two-handed great swords, and the crusades, and throwing stars! Before you know it, you’re a 15 year old with a full on collection of mall ninja gear and a maybe couple of genuinely nice blades here and there.

Then you go to engineering school and you start following the EDC subreddit and now you’re struggling to hold your pants up while you lug around a Benchmade, a Sebenza, two Leathermans, and that flashlight you need for some reason.

And when you get to be a real adult, you discover that, for once, it is completely socially acceptable, even enviable, to have nice kitchen knives. Maybe you never got that samurai sword you wanted, but by god no one will stop you if you want a hand forged Matsubara Aogami Nashiji Kiri Cleaver in 190mm. Or like, a whole wall of them…but who’s counting 😅

So anyway, I say all this to make one simple point. When my sister had her first baby, there was only one thought on everyone’s mind…When would Carson be giving that innocent child his first knife.

Right fucking now, that’s when.

The first step is obviously to find a menacing, baby-sized cleaver. Why a cleaver? Well, I should mention that cooking with Chinese Vegetable Cleavers, Cai Daos, was kinda my thing for a little while. A Cai Dao is basically the Chinese version of an 8 in chef knife…except it’s a badass cleaver.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Gee Wiz! I sure wish I could use a cleaver for literally every kitchen task!” Well, I’ve got good news for you.

Anyway, I started looking for tiny baby-sized knives within a month of finding out my sister was pregnant. It may surprise you to learn that there is not an abundance of high quality infant cleavers on the market. It took literally a year, and a god awful number of purchases from novelty stores, alibaba, and amazon before finally settling on the set you see here, sitting atop what I am sure you will now recognize as a Chan Chi Kee KF1302 Cai Dao in 219mm.

However, clearly it is not enough to just give the baby a cleaver. It needs to be sharpened, honed to the perfect…sorry, I mean put on a cute stand for display. So, we hop into tinkercad for a quick 3d model. The idea is simple: thin base with funny text and a small center post with a magnet so you can take off the cleaver for cooking.

Text is sometimes a problem with these models, but after slicing, the text looks like it will come out fine.

anemic post

miserable text

Spoiler, the text came out awful. Thanks for nothing, PrusaSlicer. And the center staff is so anemic it barely supports itself. (P.S. click on the pictures if you wanna see them in all their glory)

There’s a 1 minute video at the bottom of the page that actually shows the iterations I made, but basically I enlarged the center staff and then did a lot of work on the text. I thought I could simply increase the size of the font, but that just looked ugly. Ultimately, I hand drew half the letters with polygons so they would print better, and then carved out each one with a japanese craft knife under a microscope before finally painting.

naked

clothed

so.

cute.

Here’s some pictures of me with the perfect human baby and some woman I’ve never seen before.

Are they strictly relevant to this post? No. But I like these pictures, so you get to look at them.

aaand here it is! Look at how excited he is about his new weap…toy!

It should be noted that my claim to status of ‘knife guy’ is not unwarranted. Completely unplanned, my sister also conspired to get me a knife, engraved with “Only the best Uncles get promoted to Godfather!” And no, I absolutely did not make a huge deal out of being named the Godfather 😅 (post coming soon).

And as promised, here is that one minute video that walks through the various designs I made and their pitfalls. Please watch it; I recorded like 5 versions before I got one this concise 😭