Aluminum foil. Great for packaging food and for protecting your brain from being scanned by the government. Also great for repurposing into kitchenware. Youtuber Kiwami Japan looked at his roll of aluminum foil as not really a finished product but rather as a source of raw material. Doing something rather remarkable, he turned the foil back into a 4mm thick sheet of aluminum… and then carved a rather sharp and useful kitchen knife out of it.

What Kiwami does requires astronomical amounts of patience and passion and it’s no surprise that half the video runs at high speed. He first takes the roll, hammering it into a flat sheet before popping out the cardboard tube that’s inside. Then, using a stove flame, a pair of nose-pliers and a hammer, he further hammers away at the sheet, removing any air between the layers, and turns it into a flat piece of aluminum (which he taps against to show you it makes a clinking sound). The aluminum sheet is then cut into the shape of a knife, filed to perfection, and then sharpened against a whetstone. Kiwami then proceeds to add a wooden handle to it, finally finishing the product to make it a completely functional kitchen knife with a remarkably sharp blade that slices easily through cucumber. I guess it helps that the knife is food-grade because it came from food-grade aluminum foil.

Yes, you could just as easily go to the market and pick up a pretty good knife. You’d spend a dollar or two extra, and you’d get something more resilient and finished; but doing what Kiwami did displays immense amount of skill, patience, and drive… and he got a pretty nifty looking knife out of it that he can claim as a product of his own perseverance… something he has a lot of, judging from the fact that he’s made a knife out of raw pasta too.

Not a fan of knives? Japanese people are breaking the internet by polishing crumpled balls of aluminum foil into mirror-finished spheres. Check it out!

Designer: Kiwami Japan