Knives on Snow

Winter did not want to give up yet, which suits me just fine. I wanted some pictures of my newly made knives with snow/winter backgrounds and I could not do it because the winter was insanely tepid and wet with nary a snowflake in sight. Yet tonight the weather obliged and I woke to a nice sunny day with a few cm of snow cover. Thus right after breakfast I went out and arranged all three knives and took pictures. I might never use them for the intended purpose, but I am glad I made them anyway.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I am also glad for the cold spell since it gave me reprieve from hard labor in the garden and I could spend the day indoors making knives again. I still have a lot of undressed blades to finish.

The snow melted right away and everything is soggy now.  Still more should come according to the forecast. I was just about to plant the potatoes when it started to snow and now it might take a few more days before I can do that. Hooray!

A Howlicool Knife

I am still undecided on whether to offer this knife for sale or not. It is a cursed knife, mistakes, and obstacles just kept popping up. I tried to use the oak extract blackening on mild steel fittings and it did not take. So I used heat and linseed oil and the results were great – but they got damaged badly at the last minute when I was sharpening the blade. That damage is irreparable now, although one might not spot it if unaware of its existence. I damaged the blackening on the blade too, but I was able to restore that to an almost new look. It turns out that some paper masking tapes have glue that is damaging to both blackening techniques used. It sticks too strongly after a while and it is nigh impossible to clean it off the metal surface.

Pictures below the fold.

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Still Not a Masterpiece

Strictly speaking, I can never make a masterpiece, because I do not know about any knifemaker’s guild or similar organization around here that could grant me one. And even if I knew, I could not be bothered with going through the hassle accompanied by obtaining one. There was a knifemaking vocational school in CZ, but a quick Google search failed to confirm whether it is still functional. When I found out about its existence, I already had my Master’s degree in Biology and Chemistry and it was not feasible to go back to vocational school at that stage of my life.

Nevermind. I just finished two knives and I do think I did a good job, although they both took an absolutely unholy amount of time to finish. The blades were first seen in the first Overabladeance post. Both blades are highly polished, which makes them a PITA to photograph. I am not entirely convinced my choice of background for these photos was correct but I am reluctant to go through all the hours of photographing it again with another color.

Lotsa of pictures under the fold. [Read more…]

My Creative Process

Marcus’s recent posts about AI got me thinking and as a part of my thoughts on the issue, I want to start today by writing about my creative process, using my most recent art pieces. Those pieces being knives, because why not.

For me, the idea of how to create something usually pops into my mind without any conscious effort. I can be sleeping, eating my lunch, or driving my car, mulling over this and that and I get the starting of an idea about how to create something. And then it grows from there organically during the process itself.

Of course, all my knives are influenced by my experiences with using and making knives, as well as the designs I saw, whether conscious of that influence or not. But with these two knives, I can be a bit more specific. One of them started nearly thirty years ago and it is inspired by another knifemaker’s blade that I saw in one of my books. I changed both the outline and the grind profile, but the inspiration from someone else’s work was the starting point. For the other knife though, it started with my first failed attempt at a machete (-click-), thus the inspiration for this specific design was an accident.

When I started to make the two blades, I had no concrete plans for them and I had originally intended to make them with ordinary wooden scales. But as the works progressed, I started to think more and more that they would look splendid with engraved bone scales and I left them lying for a year with that idea at the back of my mind. During that year, I worked on other things, as the ideas for what to do with these two slowly matured in my mind. The bigger one got me on a line of thinking that ended up with the idea of engraving a picture of an auroch on the scale, but I still had no idea about the smaller one.

Then in the fall of last year, I successfully sold a knife with a picture of a roe deer on the sheath and when talking with my mother about what animal to use next, she suggested a wild boar. And whilst I have declined the idea for a sheath decoration (for now), I did think that it would look well on a bone scale, thus I finally got the idea for the second knife. Again, inspiration for one came out of some murky associations in my subconscious, the other one came from a nudge by another person’s ideas.

So with a rough idea in my head about what I wanted to accomplish, I started outfitting the knives. And as I wrote in my previous post, during the manufacture I decided to make the handle scales with hidden pins, which gave me an even bigger area to embellish. And when the knives were finally finished, I could start on the designs for the engravings.

With animal designs, I normally start by looking through my books and the interwebs for photos and drawings for inspiration. Not to copy – not the lest because to find a picture with the exact pose that I could use would be a stroke of luck indeed – but to use it as a guideline for a picture that is not egregiously anatomically incorrect. When I find a picture that is roughly what I want the end result to be, I start sketching. Most of that process can be seen in this picture:

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Nowadays I start with biro sketches on paper that I subsequently refine on PC. In the past, I would go with pencils on paper all the way to the finished product. I wanted to use a whole pig, but I had trouble fitting that on the scale due to its shape, so I decided to use just the head.

When I fine-tuned both designs on PC to my satisfaction, I decided to test whether the boar head would look acceptable, so I made a test piece on an offcut of bone.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

As you can see I made again changes from the previous sketches. Not only because I am not a copy machine, but also because each medium imposes its own limits on the creative process and thus each medium demands some changes in attitude to get a usable result. At this stage, I thought I was finished with designing and ready to set out to work, but my mind kept working. It kept nagging me that the scales looked too empty. There were no visible pins and thus there was ample space to fill. I added a rope pattern as framing around the head, but it still was not enough. I tried to fish my mother’s mind for ideas and she delivered – I should add some spruce twigs. I initially dismissed the idea because I did not know how to implement it, but when I tried to google “spruce twig pattern”, I got an idea for how to do it, I drew it and I was finally satisfied.

Nevertheless, I still only had decorative designs for the right side of each knife. I decided to leave the left side on the auroch blade blank, but I felt somehow that the boar needed to have something on the other side too. And without prompting, an idea came to me in the evening just before sleep – to continue the rope frame around the boar head to the other side and engrave a decorative knot there. As far as which knot to use, this time I did not look for inspiration to others, I simply took two pieces of paracord and arranged them into knots for about an hour until I got a result I liked.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I have redrawn the design on the PC into a shape that fits the scale and thus my designs were finished. I printed them out on paper labels and set out to work.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The actual realization is more about craft and technique than about the creative process. If you are interested in that, tomorrow there will be a short article on my Knife Blogge about it.

Next time I would like to write about how this all connects to generative AI. I do not know when, but hopefully next weekend.

Hidden Pins on Bone Scales

I wrote about how I make handles with hidden pins before (-click-, -click-) so I won’t repeat myself in this post too much. However, I tried that technique with something new this time – bone scales.

I am currently making two big outdoor knives with highly polished blades. Those blades alone were a lot of work so I have decided to go all the way and make the knives really posh. So I have decided to make the handles with bone scales. However, when making handle scales from bone this big, they were a bit too thin. Thus I have decided to bulk them a little bit with 2 mm micarta (dark brown for contrast). And using micarta gave me the idea to use my hidden-pin technique for bone scales too.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I did not originally plan to make the pins hidden so the holes were placed just as if they were visible (I originally planned a different bolster shape too). So there are six 3 mm metal pins and 4 6 mm bamboo dowels holding the handles together now. The super big holes filled with wood were drilled so big to remove needless mass from the tang and the wooden plugs are there to increase glued surface.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I drilled all the way through the micarta and about 1 mm into the bone. I would not use this technique for bone alone because it is very rigid, stiff, and brittle. But micarta is somewhat pliable, elastic, and strong both in tension and pressure so I think it is an ideal material for the transition between the metal tang and the bone scale.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This gives me a nice, big surface on which to draw something pretty. I already have designs for both handles and one is half-finished.

Mechanically, I think this handle construction should withstand everything that a classic one with pins going all the way through would. As far as aging goes, the epoxy glue did not fail on any knife I have made yet, but should it fail at some point in the distant future, it should also be relatively easy to fix with new glue.

Improvipairing mah Belt Grinder Again – New Platen

The steel platen behind the belt has been a bit problematic since the start. As you can see in older pictures, it was a piece of angle iron that was on the left side attached to the belt-grinder arm with two screws. The problem was that when I exerted pressure on the right side, it bent ever so slightly and the belt started to wander off and the whole thing behaved a bit unpredictably. I learned to work around the problem, but it was a problem and it needed solving. So this week I finally solved it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I bought two hinges and screwed them on a piece of 3×40 mm mild steel at a distance slightly bigger than the thickness of the belt grinder arm. Then I drilled two holes through the arm and put in them two carriage bolts with winged nuts. Then I cut slots into the hinges that I could slide under the screw heads and the nuts. Because the hinges are slightly more apart than the thickness of the arm, when I tighten the screws they work as flat springs with a slight bend and it all holds together very nicely.

To serve as the platen I have screwed a piece of 10×50 mm mild steel on. It works perfectly. It is stable regardless of which edge of the platen I work on and I can exert as much pressure as I want, although admittedly, I have only ground bone on it and not steel. I might either harden the platen by carbonitriding it or I can weld a hardened steel plate on the face, but mild steel works just fine too and with my rate of making blades it will hold for a long time as it is.

There is one last problem that I need to solve, and unfortunately, I do not know how. It is also difficult to describe, doubly so in a foreign language, so if you do not understand what I say, the problem is probably not at your end.

I need a reliable and stable way to adjust the belt’s traction. The spanning arm was a bit wibbly-wobbly, and when I fixed that, I got new problems. When I optimized it for a forward-running belt and tried to run it in reverse, it wandered off to the right and fell off. And when I optimized it for a reverse-running belt, it wandered to the left and bit into the arm. After a lot of faffing around I managed to get the belt stable in both directions – but then it was off-center and the sideways position of the spanning wheel had no influence on it whatsoever. The spanning wheel is crowned and that should make the belt tend towards its apex and thus I should be able to move the belt sideways, but it did not have any influence – the same thing happened whether it was near the arm or as far from it as it could go. Only the tilt of the wheel had an influence, but when I fixed the wobbliness, I lost the ability to tilt it.

I have managed to get the thing running by bending the screw on which the spanning wheel is fixed. When I turn the screw now, the wheel tilts, and I can adjust the belt. The problem is that it is too responsive and not very stable, just like it was before. I am wracking my brain for solutions, but so far I have not come up with any that are doable with my equipment.

Belt Grinder Re-Wheeeeeeled

The belt grinder has now all the wheels newly surfaced with micarta and all 30 mm diameter wheels were increased to 60 mm.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Subjectively it runs quieter and smoother now, unfortunately, I did not make a noise measurement before to have an objective comparison. I still have the previous tracking and spanning wheels, but not the motor wheel, so I cannot get it to the previous state now – shame that I did not think of that but whatever. Maybe I will try it with the smaller wheels, maybe not, because when I was at it, I ground even the previous wheels to better roundness than they were, so even they should now run smoother. I will keep the 30 and 40 mm wheels to grind fullers and finger grooves.

The belt grinder has done a lot of work over the years and it shows, but it needs more improvements. The spanning wheel still does not work as well as it should and the belt is not entirely sideways stable.  I do not know how to do that yet, unfortunately. But I do know how to improve the platen behind the belt to make it more stable. That should be done next week when I get some 50×10 mm mild steel that I ordered. I had to order it, because I had nothing suitable in my scrap pile to use, which sucks since money is short.

Improvipairing mah Belt Grinder Again – New Tracking Wheels

My tracking wheels made from alu-tubing had a diameter just 30 mm, so the ball bearings were running really rough when at full speed. and they chattered and were generally noisy too. I have been thinking for a long time about how to make bigger and better wheels. I tried to glue soft PVC on the surface. That stopped the chattering and added ca. 1 cm in diameter, but when it ran at full speed, the PVC was ripped off. I tried to glue on leather, and the same happened. And now I hope I have finally found a solution – to make them from micarta.

I have used a technique that I learned from my older brother as a child when making paper car models. To get nice and sturdy wheels for those models I wound a glue-covered strip of paper around a wooden skewer until I reached the desired diameter. One could get nice, sturdy, and round-ish wheels that way. Later in university, I used the same technique to build a complete chess set (I still have it). So for the wheels for my belt grinder, I soaked strips of cloth in epoxy resin and wound them around the (scoffed and thoroughly de-greased) alu-tube that is the core of the wheel until the diameter was approximately doubled (that should halve the rotational speed of the ball bearings and thus reduce noise and prolong their life).

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

After that, I put the whole thing in a plastic bag and I sucked out as much air as possible with my vacuum pump. I could not do a very good job of it and I also could not seal the bags very well, but I think it was good enough.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

After the epoxy was thoroughly hardened, I cut the excess on the sides and pressed the ball bearings in the tubes. I did not cut the sides very well on one wheel, but that should not be a problem. The wheels also were not exactly round at this stage. This was the snag that stopped me from doing this a long time ago. I knew they wouldn’t be very precise and I do not have a lathe that would allow me to make them really round. But last week I finally got an idea of how to make them round with my belt grinder.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

First I have made a fixture for the wheels from 5 mm mild steel and a piece of board. I could span the wheel on it and push it against the platen of the belt grinder, fix it with a clamp, and then with a slowly running 40 grit belt (and very carefully) I could grind it to a roughly circular shape concentric with its rotational axis. The result was a rough and round-ish wheel and I managed to not hurt myself too badly, only one fingernail is now thinner than it should be. I did not take pictures of that, because I forgot.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

To get a smoother surface I ran the wheel against a slow 100-grit belt a bit and then I changed the direction of the belt and used wood turning chisels and fine abrasive cloth to further improve the surface.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And it worked reasonably well. The wheels are not perfect, but they chatter less than the previous ones and I expect that with wear the surface will get smoother. If not, I will try to coat them with epoxy mixed with a fine sawdust and polish them again. The advantage of micarta is that It glues well so I can re-surface the wheels at any time. It is also tension-strong so there is no risk of the wheels exploding or cracking mid-work.

Now I will make a new, thicker spanning wheel this way too. And I will add a few mm micarta on the motor wheel as well because it too is not exactly concentric and that too introduces vibrations and noise. This opens a lot of opportunities to make better concentric wheels of different diameters – I still need 3 and 4-cm wheels for grinding fullers and finger grooves and I might need other diameters in the future too.

It unfortunately also means I have to make a new platen. I have jerry-rigged the old one so I can do some light work on the grinder as it is now, but It is not as stable as it used to be because it was built with smaller wheels in mind. But I am working on that problem already and I do have ideas that I think will work. I am also planning on making a new jig for grinding fullers.

The Ever Growing Absurdity of UK Knife Laws

Today I stumbled upon these two videos during my breakfast and I listened to them at 1,5 speed. At least this story has a good-ish end:

As an outsider, I have always considered UK laws about knives absurd. The same goes for similar daft laws that are active worldwide (like for example in the USA, Canada, Germany, Japan, and more). If laws were made based on evidence and logic, these would be significantly revised and reduced long ago because they are doing diddly squat to reduce actual crime. Instead, it seems that the UK is going in the opposite direction – more and more vague restrictions that do nothing to solve the problems, but make it easier for the police to harass innocent people.

Vague laws that are difficult to not break and/or that can be interpreted in a dozen of ways some of which can criminalize ordinary people on a whim are a staple of authoritarian regimes. What baffles me is that when it comes to knives, they appear to be a staple of even democratic-ish regimes. I completely do not understand it. And in the UK, allegedly, both of the ruling parties in their ludicrous non-representative voting system agree on this one thing and both parties propose these nonsensical laws when they are in power.

I am not in opposition to regulating carrying certain types of knives in certain situations or areas, although they are not necessary in my opinion. There is no causal link between the crime rate and the availability of any type of knife whatsoever. If there were, the Czech Republic would be absolutely riddled with knife crime. It is not. I was capable of only finding approximate statistics of stabbing deaths and CZ is not an outlier within the EU, there are countries with knife restrictions that are both above and below. I would argue that there is even no correlation between how restrictive knife laws are and how high is the knife-related crime rate, although both of these factors are difficult to quantify with any degree of accuracy.

Inventing ever more ridiculous knife laws as a response to rising crime in some areas (allegedly in the case of the UK to rising knife crime in gang fights in London) is pure “performative governing”, i.e. one that pretends to do something to address a problem without actually doing something that actually would effectively address the said problem.