First commissioned knives (2/4)

Hey all,

Finally got around to finishing 2/4 of the knives done and delivered, and I'm glad to say that the recipients are really happy with their knives! I don't have too many pictures of the process as it's somewhat difficult to take pictures while your hands are full/ filthy. I'll need to figure something out something if I'm going to do a proper work in progress. The knives I finished were the small EDC blade in cocobolo and the denimite cheese knife, both of which I think turned out pretty well. I finished the handles to a high grit ( 2000+ for both) in order to bring out the character in the materials and finished them both with tung oil and paste wax. Both sheaths were done up in vegetable tanned leather. For spacing the stitches, I used a two pronged stitching chisel, which was a big improvement in consistency over the divider calipers that I have been using in the past, and have been using a diamond profile stitching awl to make the holes, that I found allowed for a more consistent and overall better product. The sheath for the EDC was a simple pancake style sheath. For the cheese knife, given that it had a somewhat unconventional shape to keep things compact I decided to draw from how japanese knife sayas were designed, hence the cocobolo retaining pin, which allowed for a very secure and snug fit in the sheath.

I braided some red cotton skein to tether the retention pin to the sheath so that it wouldn't get lost - not too sure if I would do that again - maybe try a different material?

First commissioned knives and lessons learned WIP (1/4)

Hi all,

For the past two months or so I've been working on several knives for some friends, which would be the first functional knives I've made for people other than myself . It was (is) quite a journey and I learned lots on the way, making multiple pieces at once was more daunting than I had originally thought but it was fun all round. As I still consider myself a learner and didn't want to invest in shipping off my knives to heat treat, I opted to make all of them (save for one) from 1/8" O1 tool steel.

The first two knives I worked on were a cheese knife and a leaf bladed camp knife. Everything was going well up to grinding in the bevels as I was a little too eager with the grinder and ended up getting the bevels too thin while trying to get the flat grind to reach full height, which I had learned the hard way. Upon heat treating and quenching, the edges of the blades ended up looking like a piece of curly lettuce due to the lack of material to provide stability. Needless to say, I couldn't send these knives out the door, but they were still salvageable, but they're now completely unrecognizable as I needed to grind out the warping, and the cheese knife now will live it's life as a very overbuilt marking scribe and shop utility blade and the camp knife is now a very funky looking skinning knife (will post pics of those if people are interested).

Note that the edge is extremely thin - roughly 0.3 mm at most. 

So it was back to the drawing board with those blades, and I ground those ones to be roughly 0.5 mm on the cheese knife and 1 mm on the camp knife as it would benefit from having the extra meat behind the edge and blended the spots where flat grind didn't reach. Heat treating this time was a success, it's surprising how much of a difference those tiny differences in thickness make in the final outcome, and allowed me to have more room for grinding off any decarb that may have formed. 

So far so good - the drill press vise and blocks under the knives were used to bend the camp knife to true since it did get a bit of a bend in the blade - probably due to stresses that were in the flat bar. 

The edges look a bit thick now, but after sanding off the decarb they lost about 0.25 mm, bringing them to a good thickness for putting a cutting edge. 

A small thing that I found with both knives though was that I still had the bad habit of grinding into the spine trying to chase the plunge lines so that they were even. While I did do this with my last knife ( the city knife) to thin out the stock, in these types of knives, this kind of mistake would be viewed as amateurish and would detract from the value of the blade, although in my opinion with respect to function there would be negligible difference in performance. This was due in part to my grinder speed being far too fast (3400 RPM, over double of what I'd like) and having a lop sided work rest that can't be corrected, and a makeshift platen, that made grinding at a consistent angle fairly difficult even when using a jig. Some may argue that I can get around this by just knowing where the skew is and grinding freehand without the work rest. While I respect those who are able to do that, the skew seems to change every time I switch belts, and a jig would a) greatly increase the speed at which I grind b) allow for consistency between knives. I am now in the process of upgrading to a real knife making grinder that I'm looking forward to very much and should allow me to do most of the heavy work. Since everything will be square I'll be able to change the speed of the grinder so that I could really dial in the grinds. In the meantime, in order to get around this problem in the meantime I realized that I'd have to deal with the plunges by hand, which is fairly time consuming, but would allow me to the flat grind just to the spine without grinding into it and compromising the look of the blade. 

This was what I did for the third blade, a pocket fixed blade, which is probably the cleanest ground knife I've done to date. I forgot to take a picture of it before I taped it up for putting a handle on it (so you'll have to take my word for it, haha). The fourth knife I worked on was a nessmuk that I had ground out about 2 years ago but didn't have the will power to finish until a friend of mine expressed interest in the design. Nothing exciting going on with that one, it was a fairly beefy blade (0.25" thick) so there were no issues with the heat treatment and only needed the handle to be profiled down to a more reasonable size, since it was one of my earlier designs where I was still learning how to make ergonomic handles. Had I left it, the handle probably would have only been good for Andre the Giant. 

pocket fixed blade - in the process of having holes drilled in for hardware

nessmuk (before holes were drilled)

After heat treating everything cleaning up the blades, I started on the handle materials. By far the easiest knife to prepare a handle for was the camp knife, as I was using natural canvas micarta for the handle that didn't need any special preparation since it was already flat. For the cheese knife, my friend wanted a unique handle material that was made from a recycled material that stood out and caught the eye, so I settled on using denimite, a composite material made from shredded jeans and 0-VOC resin. The one mistake I made while ordering the material was not specifying that they sand the faces of the material, so to my surprise they came fairly rough and bumpy, and while a very unique looking material, was still annoying to sand. Although it did add extra work, this was not too much of an issue as I was already going to be truing up handle materials for the other two knives since my friends requested cocobolo for those ones, which I cut from turning stock. For people who are making interested in making their own handle scales, unless you have a disk sander and a steady hand , band saw, or some other power equipment, be prepared for constant going back and forth with sanding and checking, and an obscene amount of dust and have a good dust collection system - I needed to change out fresh particulate filters on my dust mask after I was through with all of the scales (it probably means I need a better dust collection system though if anything haha).  In the future I'll probably be sticking to pre-sanded materials whenever I can so save myself the trouble.  

 After that it was just a matter of epoxying on the scale liners and drilling the holes. Following that it'll be gluing and shaping the handles, then making the sheaths, which in itself is easily it's own project. More to come soon!

Gluing up the scales with 2 part epoxy after scuffing all liners and handle scales with 36 grit abrasive. To make my life easier I flattened the bottom of several chunks of 2x4 and lined them and the base ( marble slab) with waxed paper so that I could save on clamps while getting even pressure over multiple pieces at once. Some mistakes I made in my previous knife with a lined handle was not using enough epoxy, over clamping the scales, and not roughing them up enough, resulting in too much squeeze out of what little epoxy there was. Over time the liners began to move over time since they didn't have enough epoxy holding them together to the blade and scale, but given how I did the scales up this time this shouldn't be a problem. 

Drilling holes for hardware - for the wood materials I placed a sacrificial piece of mdf beneath the scale to prevent tear out, which turned out pretty nicely. 

Handle scales test fitted and rough cut to fit the knives. The camp knife and nessmuk were left uncut since I would need to cut those ones outside due to the use of micarta in the scales/ liners. Those materials need a very well ventilated area to be worked since they give off formaldehyde when worked (i.e. I'll need to do it in the garage). While drilling I improvised a dust collection system with the shop vac and vented out the exhaust to outside, but this would not work for steps where more dust was generated. 

Short Weekend Project: Minimalist integral city knife attempt (2/2)

Part 2!

Finally heat treated the blade to a dull cherry red and quenched it in warm vegetable oil, then tempered it immediately at 400*F for about 1 hour with good results - takes an edge beautifully without being brittle and seems to keep it well. That was an issue I was finding with the previous piece I made, where I tempered for only half an hour at 375*F , and allowed the knife to get cold prior to tempering. This seemed to result in some chippy-ness that would make the knife unsuitable for things like wood carving and also prevented the knife from being as sharp as it could have been, which may have been a function of both the edge geometry and heat treatment, still gets sharp as hell but I've seen sharper. That said it's still great for softer mediums like paper, fruits, and cardboard!

I decided  finished the knife and decided to leave the handle portion in its as heat treated state for added rust protection and just to give it a more unique look. The sheath was a bit of a first for me as I haven't made too many completely leather knife sheaths aside from the ones I've made for my kiridashi. In my first attempt I goofed up a bit and it didn't occur to me that I should punch the holes through the leather before bevelling for burnishing the edges and had to start over :( .

 Attempt number 2 went more smoothly, as I took no chances and drew up a template on CAD and was more careful in the steps I did things.  I also decided to add a little feature to make use more simplistic - usually with these sheaths the knife can only go in one way ( as far as I know) as the welt is shaped to the knife for only one configuration. That would be fine and dandy the sheath was a fold over over kind ( the ones made from a single piece wrapped around the knife) , but I found that with a symmetrical one people tended to forget - especially at first, which way the knife went in, resulting in excessive wear and tear on the leather. My solution was to just make the welt work for 2 configurations as you can see in the pics below - so that the blade can go in both ways but still be snug without wiggling about. Anyhow, on with the pictures!

Short Weekend Project: Minimalist integral city knife attempt (1/2)

Finally have some time to breath now that I'm mostly done school. Decided to keep this project simple for the weekend. As the title says, I was attempting to make a Rob Loveless style city knife, but decided to go the minimalist route a la Mike Lovett and go without scales on this one and round out the handle section instead. Again, this one was made using O1 tool steel , but I had to improvise on the grind a bit since it was 1/8" and I needed something on the order of 1/16" and ground past the spine so that it would be thin enough to be a good cutter ( if I recall it was called a rebate grind but don't quote me on that). Unfortunately I couldn't finish it today as I found out that we had run out of propane, so no heat treatment yet, but hopefully next week I can heat treat it, play around with the finish a bit and make a leather sheath with plenty of pics!

My CAD mockup - this is probably the smallest knife I've made. 

Closeup of the rebate grind - thinned down the original stock by approximately half.

Post-Exam Knife WIP - finally done

 Hey all,

Finally done finishing the knife I started from the holidays, not much to say  - enjoy the pics! I also completed a kydex sheath while I decide whether or not to make a leather pocket sheath. This is probably the best one I've made so far, but I'm still learning. The glue joints could be cleaner and I need to find a way from keeping the mosaic pin from cracking out small pieces, but overall ergonomics and geometry seem to be good for now.

Skipped a few too many pictures in the shaping process to the final product - hard to take pictures with the amount of dust coming from this thing

Using a heatgun to make the kydex malleable for the press