For this video I wanted to demonstrate using the chest pull knife stroke, one of my favourite knife strokes. You might want to refresh yourself by taking a look at this post on knife safety first.
‘Don’t cut towards yourself’ is a maxim that is ingrained into us when using a knife. However, there are a couple of exceptions to this and the chest pull is one of them. Although I should clarify a little; whilst the knife does travel towards your body, your hand is still behind the blade.
When you’re using the chest pull knife stroke you need to place the piece of wood into your breastbone and then hold it with your non-dominant hand at the very end. Hold the knife in a forehand grip but with the edge uppermost. Make sure that the knife tip is pointing away from you.
However, my preference is to use the re-enforced chest pull, a slight variation on the chest pull. This time you wrap the fingers of your non-dominant hand around your dominant hand. The movement comes from pushing with the fingers of your non-dominant hand. This is a fantastic knife stroke and gives you a huge amount of control.
You can see photos from our carving courses, where we teach using the chest pull knife stroke, and all of our other courses, on our Facebook page.
