Lets discuss the knives used in traditional slaughterhouses

[not2sharp]

We all have our favorite knives and knife patterns and that great, but if we want to learn about how the various blade shapes evolved we may learn something from studying the pre-automated slaughterhouses. Meat processing has been with us throughout history and the industarialized 19th and early 20th century slaughterhouses applied science to the use of various knives in the diassembly of large animals. The production line would have used everything from massive axe-like beef splitters, to skinning knives, various butchering knives (some the size of machetes), to finer finishing knives. I thought it would be interesting to look at which kinds of knives would have been used by the numerous departments on the production line to see what the industry had then defined as the best knife for each type of task.

The old slaughter house were anything but attractive. The stench, noise, and brutal working conditions (as in Sinclair's The Jungle) would have been horrific. But, they were modern industrialized factories designed to efficiently produce products and unfortunately we seldom see articles on how this process actually worked.

Link: Article - on early 20th century slaughterhouses
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/slaughterhouse.php

n2s

 

[CWL]

Big knives, dark & wet work environment and the constant pressure to hurry-up. I wonder how many slaughterhouse workers retired with all of their fingers.

add: Yeah, I read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle back in HS.

 

[Maniacal Pete]

Pass. :barf:

 

[not2sharp]

Pass. :barf:

That is true to a degree. But my intent here is not to clutter the thread with tales of gore, but rather to collect an aspect of knife usage that shows a different perspective than the usual review - which almost aways limited to chopping wood. In short this is the story of knives used for cutting from an industry which would have gone through barrel loads of knives daily. Chances are that they used what worked and that they discovered and used the optimum tool for whatever type of cutting they were doing.

n2s

 

[X_shooter]

I can recall as a child a family member that ran a popular butcher shop. It was fascinating seeing something going from being petted by us kids to wrapped in butcher paper in a short time. The animal was confined in a chute, pole axed in the head with essentially a long handled splitting type axe. It was then hoisted, gutted and skinned. A very large long handled about four feet long half handle and half cleaver blade split it into workable chunks. The next tool was what we referred to as a pirates sword because it had a long curved blade chopped those parts into cuts. The next was a knife about eight inches long that processed to various individual cuts of meat. Saws were often used that looked like giant hacksaws and of course the jumbo band saw in later years really sped things up.

I can still imagine the rows of dozens of knifes on long magnetic strips on the wall of the processing room. The biggest actual knife exceeded two feet and the smallest maybe six inches. Nothing went to waste. Big knives were eventually worn to little spikes from decades of sharpening. He had a stone wheel, many steels, one always worn on the belt for touch up. This was over forty years ago so my child mind may have missed a few details. The best part was "the pond". All of the floor drains piped to a pond thickly crusted over with scum. Us kids would throw rocks until we broke through the top layer and it STUNK so bad!

Story if I digressed a bit. You triggered a memory that I thought was long gone.

 

[havoc1969]

here's my foster brothers, one of the "bigger blades"
34 inches oal, 16 inch blade... dated 12/12/1949

 

[Street Samurai1978]

I witnessed a Jewish kosher butchering, can't get much more traditional than that. They used a large straight blade, sans any type of point, to cut the throat. I think they used a special set of butchering tools too, though the memory is a bit hazy.

 

[dano]

here's my foster brothers, one of the "bigger blades"
34 inches oal, 16 inch blade... dated 12/12/1949

I had an Uncle who worked in a meat processing plant, and remember a cleaver very similar to the picture. The blade was really thick and it was very heavy. He was missing a few fingers, and was a bit odd.