Olfa Banno L-Type Cutter

The Banno L-Type is a utility knife for heavy cutting: cardboard, vinyl, thin plywood. Its body is a long yellow plastic grip, ridged along its sides and pierced with a hanging hole at the end, enclosing a steel channel in which an 18-millimetre blade slides. The blade is scored diagonally across its length, so that when the point dulls it can be snapped off to expose a fresh one. A black knurled wheel on the side screws down to lock the blade at any length.

The snapping blade was the idea of Yoshio Okada, an Osaka man who in the 1950s worked for a printer, where paper was cut with loose razor blades thrown away as soon as the tip went dull. He thought of shoemakers who broke off pieces of glass for a fresh edge, and of the scored chocolate bars American soldiers had handed out after the war, and in 1956 made a blade that could be broken in the same way. His knives went on sale in 1959.

His first firm failed, and in 1967 Okada and his brothers began again as Okada Kogyo, calling the knives OLFA, from the Japanese for 'folding blade'. That year they launched the L-Type, a large knife, and coloured it the yellow of an egg yolk so that it would stand out in a toolbox. In 1976 they reshaped its grip and renamed it Banno, meaning all-purpose. Because Okada had patented the blade only in Japan, foreign makers copied its sizes and the angle of its scoring, which became the world standard.

Olfa, as the company has been called since 1984, celebrated the Banno L-Type's fiftieth year in 2026. Its maker says the shape has hardly changed in that time; the steel holder and the locking slider have been refined. It is still made in Japan as model 11B, and costs a few hundred yen.