Cutlery Manufacturing: Sheffield Wheels to ABB Robots

Cutlery manufacturing looks simple from the dinner table. A fork is one piece of steel and a knife is two or three, yet getting there takes blanking, rolling, stamping, grinding, polishing and packing, and for centuries most of that was done by hand next to a spinning stone. This post follows knives, forks and spoons from the cutlers of Sheffield to today's stamping presses and laser measured robot sharpening. Then it looks at where ABB robots could take over the grinding, polishing and packing work that still wears people out.

A stainless steel knife and fork set laid out on green cloth. Photo: Franz van Duns / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How Sheffield cutlers ground knives by water power

Sheffield was known for knives as early as the fourteenth century, and in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale one of the characters carries a Sheffield knife. By 1600 the town was the main centre of cutlery making in England outside London. In 1624 an Act of Parliament incorporated the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire to oversee the trade. Fast rivers such as the Sheaf, the Don and the Loxley drove the water wheels that turned the grindstones. At Shepherd Wheel on the Porter Brook, now a museum, an 18 foot overshot water wheel still drives the stones in two grinding hulls.

Grindstones in the workshop at Shepherd Wheel, the water powered grinding works on the Porter Brook in Sheffield. Photo: Margaret Anne Clarke / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Until the eighteenth century a master craftsman usually made a knife from start to finish. As the trade grew, the work split into forging, grinding and finishing, and self-employed craftsmen called little mesters rented space in factories to do one step each. Grinding killed people. Writing in 1844, Friedrich Engels reported that the average life of a dry grinder was hardly 35 years and that a wet grinder rarely lived past 45, because the men breathed stone and steel dust all day. Stan Shaw, described as one of the last little mesters, died in 2021.

Stan Shaw, one of the last little mesters, on the right in his workshop at Kelham Island Museum. Photo: Monika / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The material changed in 1913, when Harry Brearley, then running the Brown Firth Laboratories, produced the first true stainless steel in an electric furnace in Sheffield. He tested it with vinegar and lemon juice and got promising results, which is roughly what a table knife has to put up with. Ernest Stuart of R.F. Mosley's, a cutlery maker at Portland Works, suggested the name stainless steel. A blade that did not rust changed what a table knife could be. The grinding itself stayed at the wheel and by hand well into the twentieth century; Shepherd Wheel only stopped in 1930.

Portland Works on Randall Street, Sheffield, home of R.F. Mosley's cutlery business. Photo: Warofdreams / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Cutlery manufacturing today: presses, lasers and robots

A modern fork or spoon starts as a blank punched out of stainless sheet in one piece. Zwilling describes how the blanks are deburred and cross-rolled to thin the bowl area, then stamped cold between a positive and a negative mould at up to 650 tonnes. Stamping leaves a burr around the rim, and that has to be ground off before the grinding and polishing stages. Sheffield still makes cutlery. In August 2026 Inkerman, a Sheffield maker founded in 1855, announced it will move to a new purpose-built factory in the city, so that its old site can become an access road for the Parkwood Springs regeneration.

A work bench inside Portland Works, Sheffield, in 2016. Photo: Neil Theasby / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Robots have gone furthest with knives. Wüsthof, founded in Solingen in 1814, uses a process it calls Precision Edge Technology, or PEtec, on its forged knives. A laser measures each knife just before grinding, software calculates the best sharpening angle for that blade, and a precision robot sharpens it on a whetstone before a buff wheel puts on the final edge. What the robot brings is repeatability, since every blade gets the angle its own shape needs. Even so, Wüsthof's own catalogue says the final buffing on some ranges is still done by hand.

Wüsthof kitchen knives on a magnetic rack at home. Photo: Phil! Gold / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

We found no published ABB cutlery installation, so ABB's role here is a possibility based on what its robots already do elsewhere. ABB Force Control lets a robot hold a constant contact force against a grinding or polishing wheel and follow the real shape of the part, which suits blades and spoon bowls that vary slightly from piece to piece. At Ancofer, Teqram's EasyGrinder cell uses an ABB IRB 6700 to pick steel parts from pallets, grind them and stack them again. Our post on robotic grinding and deburring covers cells like these in detail.

The EasyGrinder robot at Ancofer picks steel parts from pallets, grinds them and stacks them again. Photo: ABB

Where cutlery manufacturing robots go next

For factories, the next step is joining up the separate machines. A robot can take stamped blanks from the press, hold them against grinding and polishing wheels, and hand finished pieces on to packing, where IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots pick small items off moving belts and place them into trays or boxes. In a small shop, a compact arm such as the new IRB 1200 could tend the presses and grinders. Grinding paths for parts like these are usually planned and tested first in RobotStudio, so nobody has to learn on real steel.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

Polishing is the hardest job to hand over. A spoon bowl or a curved knife bolster needs many passes on different buffs, and each wheel wears as it runs, so the robot has to keep adjusting. Force control helps, but programming a mirror finish still takes a skilled operator who knows what a good one looks like. Our post on faucet polishing robots shows how the same problem is handled on brass taps. The dust that killed Sheffield's grinders is still a good reason to move people away from the wheel.

The new generation ABB IRB 1200, a compact six axis arm for fast small part work. Photo: ABB

Home cooks will mostly notice cutlery manufacturing robots as steadier quality and blades sharpened to a measured angle. Robots are unlikely to turn up in the kitchen drawer themselves. For makers, the open questions are cost and skills. A grinding and polishing cell is a large investment for a family firm making short runs of many patterns, and it needs people who can program it and look after the wheels. Firms like Inkerman, moving into a new building, are in a position to plan for such cells from the start.

Cutlery designed by Zaha Hadid for WMF in 2007. Photo: Pittigrilli / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com