DBx Knives began with sweet potatoes.

Not industrial food processing. Not a professional kitchen. Two sweet potatoes a day — a dietary staple — prepared with standard chef knives over time.

With no pre-existing hand conditions and a diet designed to maximize daily recovery, accumulating hand damage still developed. The engineering reason was straightforward once identified: standard knife handles concentrate grip force on the index finger and thumb at pressures averaging 99 PSI — far exceeding the biomechanically safe threshold of 1.0 to 2.5 PSI.

The question that followed was equally straightforward: if this damage threshold can be reached preparing food for one person, what is happening daily to the professional chefs, food inspectors, and culinary workers preparing food for hundreds?

The answer required a different kind of engineering. Not softer handles or cushioned grips — but quantitative biomechanical design that distributes grip force across the full hand contact surface, reducing peak grip pressure by 98% to within safe intermittent ranges.

Our independence — our ability to nourish ourselves and the people we care about — depends on tools that work with our hands, not against them.

That's why DBx exists.

Daniel Bottner grew up on a tobacco farm in Southern Maryland, where his father and grandfather crafted custom tools in their own metal and woodworking shops. He learned to work with hand and machine tools before he learned to drive

That foundation — old-world craftsmanship rooted in precision and purpose — shaped everything that followed.

Daniel spent his career developing world-class products across industries where failure was not an option:

**Competition Motorsports** — engines and drivetrains engineered for extreme performance under extreme conditions.

**Computers, Electronics & Digital Imaging** — systems demanding precision at microscopic tolerances.

**Aerospace & Medical Devices** — components where safety-critical design isn't a marketing claim, it's a regulatory requirement.

Every one of these fields demanded the same discipline: measure precisely, test rigorously, and never assume something works — prove it.

When Daniel turned that discipline toward kitchen knives, he found an industry that had been selling the same fundamental handle design for centuries — and no one had bothered to ask whether it was actually safe for the human hand..

His approach was to start from the hand itself: optimize every contact point in the handle to the individual user's hand size, and validate every knife design decision with instrumented testing. The result is a knife that fits your hand like a glove — safer, more comfortable, and easier to control than anything produced for the mass market

DBx knives aren't designed by intuition. They're engineered & contoured to reduce cut force requirements & peak pressure levels in the hand.  

Handle profiles, blade geometries, and performance claims are validated using custom-built instrumented testing equipment — designed and fabricated in-house specifically for this purpose

Our three primary test systems & protocols measure cutting force requirements, grip pressure distribution, and knife grip stability under real-world cutting conditions using high-density foods.

This isn't a garage operation borrowing someone else's test data. We built the tools to build the tools to craft & test & the knives.

Combined with a full array of custom knife-making tooling — from precision grinding fixtures to contouring jigs — every DBx knife is handcrafted with raw materials to finished product in a single workshop.

**Old-world craftsmanship** learned in childhood workshops.

**Modern materials** — high-tech composites and German steel.

**Custom instrumented testing** — every claim backed by measured data.

**Computer-aided design** — precision profiles for 14 individual handle sizes.

The result: a handmade kitchen knife that performs at a level mass production can't replicate, validated by testing methods,.which expose engineering flaws in traditional knife designs.

We place the highest value on functionality and safety in real-world use — not in marketing copy, not in controlled demos, but in the hands of real people preparing real food in real kitchens.

Our competitors sell blade sharpness . . .

blade sharpness — a 15% temporary advantage that fades in days and never addresses the forces destroying your hands.

We sell engineering backed by data — a permanent solution validated by instrumented testing and grounded in biomechanical research.

Every DBx knife is designed, tested, and built by hand to protect the hands that use it.