Dust to Dust and Jello to Jello: the Journey of a Very Strange Knife

How do you feel about Jello? It’s alright tasting, but it’s much more about how jiggly it gets. Nobody — probably — would eat Jello if it was a hard candy. It would quickly become restricted to the bowl of strawberry candies that Grandma always seems to have. How do you feel about knives? We’re on Hackaday. Most everybody here has at least a couple in their toolbox. Some of them have more than a couple, including the whetstones to sharpen them. It’s safe to say they probably like the concept. Now, what if you could combine the two? Two favorites are always better than one. A Jello knife, while seemingly impossible, would be rather impressive, and [kiwami japan] does just that, as well as so much more.

He starts with a couple dozen adorable Jello snacks (Jellos?), and from the wiggliest of foundations, he builds a masterpiece. The first order of business is to eat a couple of the stragglers while he decides what to do with the rest. A bit of blue food coloring, some more gelatin, and the help of several cow shaped bowls and pitchers later, [kiwami japan] has melted the survivors down and gotten a flat sheet. Once sufficiently cooled, it makes a nice knife-shaped Jello blank.

From there, it only looks easy. If you want to understand how much work [kiwami japan] puts into a Jello knife, you can look at our previous article on making a steel knife. There’s a ridiculous amount of sanding, filing, and grinding involved, and [kiwami japan] does all this with a brittle piece of air-dried Jello. Once he has shown off the obligatory paper cutting trick, he re-melts the Jello and re-seals it back into the original packaging, eating a couple more while he’s at it.

Now this is neat enough on its own, but his Jello knife isn’t even the second sharpest non-metallic knife he’s made. That honor belongs to his pasta knife, which he also went on to eat with a nice home-made cheese sauce. Not feeling up for pasta? Then you may want to try his chocolate knife. Prefer to keep your food on the knife instead of in it? Look up his carbon fiber knife, the sharpest he has ever made. Only have cardboard lying around? Make a knife out of it. Aluminum foil? Plastic Wrap? Water? Basically, if you’ve seen the material before, [kiwami japan] has tried and succeeded to build a weapon with it. Why he does this remains a mystery, but it certainly is cool.

Thanks, [Keith], for sending this our way!