Utility Knife Blades
Ceramic Utility Knife Blades (Rounded Tip)
Ceramic Utility Knife Blades (Pointed Tip)
Which Slice® Blades Are the Best Utility Knife Blades for my Application?
The best utility knife blades for your application will depend partly on your priorities and partly on the material you’re cutting. Because safety is a primary concern for most of our customers, our tools ship with a rounded-tip blade installed. Pointed tips are not required to pierce most materials and rounded tips guard against accidental puncture wounds. Some materials, however, make it difficult to initiate the cut with a rounded-tip blade. In this case, the best utility knife replacement blades will be the 10528 pointed-tip blades.
It’s worth noting that, while these blades do fit in our scrapers, the tip shape is unlikely to make a practical difference, since the user is scraping with the entire blade edge and not initiating cuts.
How Long Does a Slice Utility Knife Blade Last?
Utility knife blade replacement won’t be required for a long time when you use Slice; our blades outlast standard metal blades (by an average of 11.2 times longer). We use extremely hard zirconium oxide and a sturdy blade design to ensure exceptionally long wear resistance.
What About Blade Disposal?
If you’re wondering how to dispose of utility knife blades from Slice, there are two things to keep in mind: sharps boxes and recycling. While most people don’t have them at home, safety regulations typically require businesses that use blades to provide sharps disposal boxes in order to minimize handling injuries. A finger-friendly® Slice utility knife blade has an edge that’s much safer to touch than overly sharp metal or ceramic blades. In fact, some companies have chosen to forego cut-resistant gloves after switching to Slice. When it comes to our rounded-tip blades, they pose such a small risk of handling injury that a sharps disposal box is not required. For our pointed-tip blades, the decision is up to the company, as a pointed tip does have an increased risk of puncturing handlers.
As for recycling, Slice blades are made from zirconium oxide, which is 100 percent recyclable. If you find that there are no recycling facilities in your area, feel free to mail us your used blades to our global headquarters in San Jose, California, and we’ll recycle them for you.
Should I Use a Slice Box Cutter or Utility Knife?
This will depend on the cutting depth you need. Our utility knife blade dimensions allow for a deeper cut than our box cutter blades. The benefit of a shorter blade is that you reduce the risk of injury and damage to a package’s contents. If your material is thicker, or the shape of the box cutter is impractical for your applications, though, it makes sense to try our utility knives.
Other than cutting depth and handle shape, our box cutters also differ from our utility knives in that they have space to store a spare blade in the handle. There is no equivalent utility knife blade holder, so if this feature is important to you, that’s something to consider.
How Safe Is a Slice Utility Knife Blade?
We’re confident enough to say that if you need an effective tool and safety is your top priority, we offer the best utility knife blades to balance those needs. Over half the Fortune 1000 use Slice to successfully reduce injuries and lower costs. Our blades have a number of safety features, but the main safety adaptation is the design of our proprietary finger-friendly edge. This edge has a double grind intended to shorten the cutting zone and widen the cutting angle. In this way, it starts at a safe sharpness. And because of the material we use and our unique design, the blade stays at that sharpness up to 11 times longer than metal blades, reducing overall handling. No other company uses this kind of safety edge, which cuts effectively but is much safer to touch.
In addition, our blades are non-sparking, non-magnetic, non-conductive, chemically inert, safe up to 1600 degrees Celsius, and never rust.
Which Slice Tools Use the 10526 and 10528 Blades?
The following tools ship with the 10526 rounded-tip utility knife blade, but are also compatible with the optional 10528 pointed-tip blade:
- 10550 Manual Utility Knife
- 10554 Auto-Retractable Utility Knife
- 10558 Smart-Retracting Utility Knife
- 10591 Manual Utility Scraper
- 10593 Auto-Retractable Utility Scraper
Is it Difficult to Change the Blades in Slice Tools?
In short, no. We’re committed to no-tool blade change design in all our tools. Our scrapers extend to a blade-change position when you press down on the ‘lock’ tab. For our utility knives, users remove the door at the back by rotating the slot to an unlocked position, extending the blade, then sliding the blade lock knob into the central unlocked position. In this way, the utility knife blades can be re-oriented for left-handed users, flipped for a fresh edge, or replaced easily.