Magnetic Knife Block
(A guest blog by Mr. Megan ~ Kyle Ramey)
We have amazingly good friends. Mike and Christen, for example, have been giving me a different Shun kitchen knife for each birthday and/or other such event for a few years now, to the point that I have now amassed 6 of these hand-made japanese objects of kitchen porn. They are beautiful beyond words. They are balanced, solid, and substantial. They mean business. They come sharpened with a frighteningly good edge, and when ours eventually dull I use only japanese water stones (1000# and 6000# grit) to carefully put a fresh, wickedly effective edge on them again. The large santoku will go through an acorn squash with just a firm suggestion of a push. I probably like these knives a little more than is strictly healthy, but I blame an upbringing steeped in the use and care of quality tools, now squeezed into the mold of urban garage-less condo living… these are now the best tools I get to use on a regular basis. In my house, tomatoes are not crushed as they are sliced, they are surgically divided.
Until now, I’ve kept them in their original boxes in a kitchen drawer. For everyday cutting jobs we have a nice set of Henckels, but for the really good cooking prep sessions I always go for The Good Stuff. So we’ve certainly used them, but I always knew I wanted them to be out where I can see them (and lust after them). The problem is that the magnetic knife holders I can find anywhere around here are all an exposed steel rail bar magnet, which will scratch your knife blade if you’re not perfectly careful everytime. I wanted to do better. These knives DESERVE better. So I hatched a plan to secure a good piece of suitable wood, get some magnets, drill them in from the back side of the wood to right below the front surface, and then have nothing but wood on the face of my holder.
A quick email to my good friend Terry Bigelow, who runs Heritage Drum Works (he makes drum kits the hard way, using solid hardwood staves instead of ply) for advice and help went a long way. Terry first sent me a link to a website for rare earth magnets, then asked for my address and mailed me (!) a perfect piece of mahogany. As I may have mentioned, we have amazing friends. The roll of 50 magnets was about . If I had found and bought the wood myself, I think it would be around -, depending on what I’d found.
The Materials:
So here is the as-yet unmolested piece of mahogany, the smallest of the Shun knives, the roll of 50 1/4 inch rare earth magnets, some layout tools and some coffee.
These are very, very strong. I was optimistic that I’d be able to get them close enough to the surface of the wood for them to grab the knives while still not being seen.
Testing the depth:
I decided to do a test first, to see how much wood-like material could be between the magnets and the knives with them still working. So I used a big book, putting 2 magnets in the pages, covering them up, and seeing if the knife would still stick.
It sticks, but not as well as I’d like, and there are only bout 15 pages between the magnets and the knife. That’s not good news… with no drill press it’s gonna be awfully hard to drill riiiiight up under the surface 30 or 40 or 50 times and not screw up once. Enter: doubt.
It sticks, but barely. But I decided to try a few of them out in the wood anyway, just in case. Enter: Denial.
Redneck drill stop depth gauge… masking tape. This is as deep as I dared go. At this depth I could feel the wood at the tip of the bit moving as the bit turned and compressed the fibers ahead of it. Danger, Will Robinson. So if it didn’t work at this depth, then it wouldn’t work this way at all. Enter: Desperation.
So I tried one. It had almost no grab on the knife whatsoever. I tried a second one, going as deep as I could go without poking through, and again… no grab. I was not going to be able to pull this off the way I’d been dreaming of. I opened a beer and pondered my options. Enter: Depression. As you can see by the magnet on the right, I decided to try to drill one just below flush with the surface. It held very, very well, and the knife couldn’t touch it. So this would be Plan B. Drill them into the face, and make it look as good as possible.
So here’s what I decided on. I laid out the knives the way I wanted to display them (not the actual order pictured here), then traced the blades on the surface of the wood lightly. Within each outline, I spaced magnets going up from bottom-to-top the same way, with the spaces getting wider as they go up. I wanted it to look somewhat uniform.
With all the holes marked up, I put in a brad-point 1/4″ drill bit for cleaner edges and set about carefully drilling each hole. I had to eyeball it. My neck is killing me today from standing at the counter and looking down for 3 hours. If I drilled a little too deep, I’d add some sawdust back in, and each magnet got 2 drops of super glue as it went in. Only one pair of these matches, the rest are all shaped for the actual knife they hold. All were recessed about 1 millimeter below the surface of the wood… no scratchy!
Here we see all of the magnets in, and it’s ready for a quick final sanding and coat of mineral oil (food safe).
After sanding and mineral oil, ready to mount on the wall. Love the ribbon grain of mahogany! Excellent choice, Terry.
The finished product. I hope I did them justice. Cheers Mikey!
