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A Look at Knife Rolls

By Rain Noe - January 16, 2012

in Object Culture

A friend of mine enrolled in the French Culinary Institute, using my apartment as a locker to store her gear since the school is nearby. The FCI gives students a complete set of cutlery and utensils packed into a traveling case. I eagerly pulled this case open to check it out, but found the design disappointing.

The multiple compartments are neat, and I like the choice of red interior fabric to increase visibility, but the one-size-fits-all mentality applied to the sleeves means certain objects fit snugly while others can work their way loose during travel. Still other objects have no dedicated space at all and simply clang about with other orphans in a compartment with no divisions.

I started casting about for a better-designed knife case and found many with pretty exteriors; but from a functional and interior perspective, even the rolls designed to fit all tools snugly seem to suffer from another design problem, stemming from the shapes of the knives themselves. Most of the knives have similar handles but very different blade sizes and shapes, as per their function. If you design a roll to hold knives by the blade, which obscures them, you're then looking at a series of more or less uniform handles, slowing down the selection process.

Conversely, if you design a roll to hold knives by their handles, this leaves all of the blades exposed, which makes it easy to select the one you want; however, the close quarters inside most rolls make plucking the knife out appear to be a very unergonomic situation.

There are some exceptions, like the beautiful rolls below designed by Steve Goodson, a Texas-based custom leatherworker. He opts for the handle-in approach, but leaves a good amount of space between each knife so the user can remove one without nicking their fingers on an adjacent blade.

I'm kind of surprised not to find a knife roll with blade-in storage where the sheathes are stitched with contrasting thread following the blade to make their shapes obvious and visually distinct; maybe that's impossible due to the sheer variety of blade shapes between manufacturers. I'm also surprised not to find one where the sheathes are simply made out of a clear material, like vinyl. Perhaps they exist and I simply haven't found them yet. In any case, next we'll take a look at tool rolls, where there's a little more design variety.

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Andrew Sparks

6 years ago

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Old article but feel the need to comment:
Additional issue with handle-in/blade exposed approach beside safety (when selecting the knife): having the blades exposed - or even with a cover flap, increases the chance of them banging into each other and blunting.
Blade-in problems: wear and tear/cutting of the knife roll itself.
Another aspect not addressed is the all-on-one-side (handle or blade) design looks fine when flat on the bench but results in a conical roll when rolled up. Alternating sides for the sheathes results in a more even roll.

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jinx

10 years ago

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I agree with Mark, you should know where your knives are. they are part of you, if they are not, you don't need to try n show off by having a knife roll. Remember your knife roll should be exactly that, not a toolbox. If anything your knife roll can go in the tool box.
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Mark H

12 years ago

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One assumes (yeah, I know what happens when you assume) that if the knife roll is for the exclusive use of one person, that person will have a strategy for the placement of the knives and remember exactly where they are, even if they are in with the blades obscured. It's not like you need to look in every drawer of your dresser to know where to find your socks and not your pants.

So, I've just shown my preference for blade-in, also with the handle in, it seems that it would be easier to nick the blades together.

If you really feel you can't remember which pocket had which knife, label either the pockets or the knife handles.
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peter

12 years ago

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I am an aspiring chef who is very interested in design and found this problem as well. Very annoying. I think my only solution may be to have one custom made on my next trip to south america or something
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