A bone-splitting tool, not a vegetable knife. The Western heavy-duty cleaver is built around brute force: a tall blade (100–130mm of height), a thick spine (5–10mm), and a heft that runs from 300g to well over a kilogram. That mass is the point, since the weight does the work of driving the edge through bone. It is far too thick and heavy for everyday vegetable prep, where its bulk would crush more than it cuts.
Primary tasks: splitting through bone, including poultry joints, pork ribs, and beef neck bones, along with the heavy butchery tasks that would damage a chef's knife. This is a knife you reach for when you need to get through something hard, not when you need finesse.
Ideal steel: here the priority is A steel's resistance to chipping and cracking under impact, as opposed to its ability to hold a fine edge. over hardness, because the blade has to absorb repeated bone impacts without chipping. Tough, impact-resistant carbon steels such as 52100, AISI 5160, and 1095 are the classic choices. For a stainless option, X50CrMoV15 or a 420-series steel in a thick, robust geometry works well. A very hard steel (60+ on the The Rockwell C hardness scale, the standard measure of how hard a knife blade is; higher numbers mean a harder, more wear-resistant but more brittle edge. hardness scale) is the wrong call here, since a brittle blade would chip catastrophically the moment it met bone. Sharpening reflects this too: the care and construction of a cleaver favor a sturdier edge angle over a delicate one.
Critical distinction: this is not the same tool as a cai dao, the thin Chinese vegetable cleaver. Despite the shared silhouette, the cai dao is a light, finely ground slicer for produce, while the Western cleaver is a bone-chopper. Mistaking one for the other is a common error among cooks first encountering a Chinese knife set, and using a cai dao to split bone will ruin its edge.