The tell-tale sign of a home groom is the line: a hard step where the blades went through in one pass, leaving the coat below sitting shorter than the coat above it. Chunkers exist to stop that happening. The teeth take out a proportion of the hair and leave the rest standing, so bulk comes away and the coat falls back into itself without a visible edge anywhere.

The blades are 440 steel with a protective coating, which is the sensible choice for a tool used wet and cleaned daily, because it holds the edge and resists the pitting that dulls a scissor long before it ever goes properly blunt. Twenty-six teeth on the 8-inch is a middle setting: fewer teeth remove more per pass and mark the coat more easily, while more teeth barely touch anything thick. The tension screw sets the resistance at the pivot to suit your grip.

• 8-inch blade length
• 26 teeth, balancing bulk removal against texture
• 440 steel blades
• Protective coating to help keep the blades in condition
• Adjustable tension screw at the pivot
• Lightweight build to reduce hand fatigue

On what a chunker will not do. It is a blending tool and not a shortening one, so you still need a straight or curved scissor for the actual shape, and a chunker taken to a matted coat will snag and pull rather than cut. Tension needs rechecking as the screw beds in over the first few grooms, and the coating protects the blade rather than the edge.

Who it's for: Groomers and confident owners working on spaniels, retrievers, border collies and shetland sheepdogs, where a thick or double coat needs thinning without a visible step.