Personal (Distr)Action Against Climate Change

I did donate to TeamTrees when it was doing the rounds on YouTube but I have ignored TeamSeas completely as pointless. I will continue to ignore future attempts to extract money from me to save the environment too, except in the case of rare natural disasters that need an acute response.

We all have probably seen campaigns urging us to do this and that to reduce our carbon footprint. Go Vegan. Meatless Mondays. Walk instead of driving. Plant a tree. Etc.

Well, I have been using public transport for most of my life until I was 30 years old but it was driving a car that has allowed me to cut my personal carbon footprint significantly. Why? How? And why it does not matter in the Grand Scheme of Things?

Driving a car has allowed me to get a significantly better-paid job in a destination where public transport just did not go at times that would allow me to have reasonable working times, even with a very lax and flexible working schedule. And while initially using fossil fuels for driving did of course increase my personal carbon footprint temporarily (and minusculy), the extra money that I have earned has allowed me to do things that I would never ever be able to do on my previous pay. I was able to replace old leaky windows in my house. I was able to insulate and renovate the facade and the roof. I was able to overhaul the central heating system. In a few years, the biggest contributor to our carbon footprint – burning coal for winter heating – was reduced to less than one-third. From burning through 10 metric tonnes of coal and being cold all the time we went down to 3 tonnes and having constant-ish temperature throughout the day whilst more than handily offsetting the 100 700 l of gasoline that I have burned on commute per year.

I did not stop there and I made another overhaul to my central heating, converting it to a high-efficiency wood-burning stove. Wood is not always a renewable resource, but I do grow 5-10% of it in a truly renewable fashion on my own land and it would be much more by now if it were not for the blasted water voles who keep destroying my trees planted in the coppice. My health does not allow me to go vegan and my finances are no longer so good that I could put solar panels on my roof, but I do not think that it matters anymore (for the environment) for the same reason that none of my personal actions so far mattered.

I was able to significantly reduce my personal carbon footprint because I have in many aspects fairly privileged life. I own a house with a huge garden, in the country, where I am free to use the land as I please (within reasonable limits). A person living in an apartment in a big city, or even a person owning a house in the suburbs, does not have the same range of choices that I had, or even might not have any choice at all. Thus most people here are stuck with heating their homes with fossil fuels and using electricity from the grid that mostly relies on fossil fuels. Meatless Mondays, planting dozens of trees, or even going full vegan and cycling everywhere will do diddly squat to their carbon footprint, as will literally any other thing they personally can do within the limits given to them by their life circumstances. Not to mention that it is possible to grow meat in a carbon-neutral (and in some places for a limited time even carbon-negative) way.

I view the calls for personal action as a distraction and I am cynical enough that I would not be surprised if at least some of these campaigns were covertly financed by fossil fuels interests. Trying to convince a large number of people to significantly change their lives on their own does not work, because many simply cannot do it no matter how right or righteous the cause is. Trying to convince everyone to go vegan is an exercise in futility, but it might help to associate people advocating for green policies with fringe, unreasonable ideas. A red herring, throwing the public of the scent and putting the guilt on people instead of the corporations and moneyed interests.

However, that does not mean that nobody should take any personal steps to reduce their carbon footprint. Everyone should still do that. If going vegan works for you, go for it. If you can cycle to work, great. I won’t dissuade anyone from doing what little they can to help.

But public campaigns must focus on the only thing that matters in the Grand Scheme of Things – changing policies in a way that makes the polluting of our planet, including CO2 emissions, unprofitable. Without that, nothing you or I do will do diddly.

Pin Cutting Thingamajig

As I am (very slowly) ramping up my production, some problems arise that simply are not an issue when making knives only on occasion and each time of a different design. One of the most recent challenges was to cut a lot of 10-11 mm long pins & dowels for the “hidden pins” construction that I have decided to deploy as my main thing for kitchen knives with full tang. Currently, I am making four two-knife sets, and that means sixteen wooden dowels and sixteen metal pins. And whilst the length must not be exactly precise, it does need to be at least somewhat uniform.

Putting the dowel/tube/stick into the vice, cutting it, and then filing them in a jig to exact length was very boring and time-consuming, and fiddly. And I am glad to say I came up with a much better solution.

I drilled a 6 mm hole through a piece of black locust wood (6mm being the diameter that I will be mostly using for this design). Then I used the table saw to gouge approx 2 cm in the middle in a way where the blade cut just below the hole and just touched one of the edges, creating a sloped surface between two walls with holes.

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Here you can see it in action. The screw on the right side plugs one of the holes and allows me to adjust how far a dowel/tube can be inserted on the left side. Then I can cut the dowel with a hacksaw inserted into a slot on the left side, cutting it off at an exact-ish length. The cut-off falls then off the slope onto the vice and the table. I might add some simple paper funnel in the future so they fall directly into a receptacle of some sort.

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I haven’t tried it on metal tubes yet, but it has proven to be absolutely perfect for wooden dowels. I have cut more than 20 in under five minutes. If it works on metal too – and I hope it does – I will be very happy in da tent indeed, because that is one time-consuming and boring task reduced to near nonexistence. And it also should minimize material waste. Brass tubes don’t grow on trees, you know.

Getting a Different Grip on Handles

I have recovered from the vaccine haze and Christmas laze so today I was able to finish (i.e. sharpen and clean up) five knives. Initially, I have intended to make these with the usual rounded ergonomic handles, but during the work, I have decided to try something a bit different and I have made the handles with a hexagonal profile. With a flat back and belly and ridges somewhere around the middle of each scale. They do feel comfortable enough in the hand and this profile is very safe against the knife twisting in the hand if big force needs to be applied. With a knife, everything is about trade-offs between comfort, safety, costs, and functionality. What a piece of wisdom that surely does not apply anywhere else /s.

The first one is my medium-sized universal knife, with a rounded (or this time “clipped”) tip. The wood is a piece of very uniform birch wood that was pickled in ammonia which gave it a slightly brown color.

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

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

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

The second one has a handle from jatoba, and it is a kinda prototype of the type of knives that I want to make to make use of my jatoba treasure-trove.

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

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

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

Both of these have a bit thicker blades than I ideally want them to have. That makes them very sturdy, but perhaps less ideal for cutting some hard foods. Still should cut about anything with ease.

Of the five finished knives, three are chef knives.

One has again the handle from jatoba. I am very pleased with the handle, not so much with the blade. The curve of the cutting edge did not come out as I wanted it and I was unable to correct it during sharpening without risking destroying the blade.

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

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

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

The same objection applies to a knife with the handle from black locust, with the addition of the blade not having proper taper at all. – I have messed up the grind mightily on this one. Nobody else is probably going to notice it and the knife will be still perfectly functional, but I need to hold myself to a higher standard than that. Anyone can make a perfectly functional knife, it is not that hard.

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

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

The third one, with the handle from spalted poplar wood stabilized with honey-color dyed resin, is the closest to what I was aiming for of these three. A broad blade comes to an extremely fine cutting edge, slightly curved to allow for slicing as well as draw-cuts. This is a knife that I have no objections about. Well, except for a slight asymmetry in the handle shape. The asymmetry in coloring is of course due to the used wood and is part of the character,

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

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

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

These knives were supposed to be parts of sets, but I have messed up the numbering, so they will have to make their way in the world solo. I could not make a set of the spalted poplar anyway, I only had two pieces of that wood and I messed one of them up.

These angular ergonomic handles are easier to make than fully rounded ergonomic handles so I will make more of them, especially for cheap-ish knives with handles from jatoba and black locust. The pile of naked blades shrinks, but very slowly. There is still a lot, and I mean a lot of work to do.

View of my Knife Testing Lab

Its Christmas and that means cutting up a lot of food in a lot of different ways. So I thought I might share a little peek in our humble knife testing facility.

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My mother is giving the knives thorough testing and so far she has not found any task they are not suited for. I have tested them too, yesterday, when I was gutting, skinning, and fileting the carp for traditional Christmas dinner. The three knives were up all the tasks, including sewering the head from the body and de-boning the fish (which consists of cutting out the ribcage and spine). I am usually very critical of my work, and these knives do have some cosmetic issues but functionally I am very satisfied with the design. The handles do allow for a variety of grips that are commonly used in the kitchen by both noobs and pros. The rounded tips on the medium and the chef knife did allow me to easily scrape off the scales with the former and place one hand safely on the blade for additional pressure for the latter. The tip on the smaller knife was sharp enough to pierce the wall of the abdominal cavity and its shape did help to avoid piercing the guts as well when cutting it open. Which is important, especially regarding the gall bladder – if you pierce that, it can render a lot of the meat useless.

The testing will continue of course – what is not known yet is how the cheap oil finish will stand up to time. For that several months are needed at least, several years would be ideal. But I do know already that when I am finished with my current batch of knives, it is worth making these sets for sale because they are not just ornaments and will be genuinely useful to whoever buys them.

Regarding my third Covid shot, yesterday the slightly elevated temperature was gone and I was feeling mostly OK. But I did notice a symptom that I do not remember from my previous two shots – in addition to a sore shoulder near the injection site, the lymphatic nodes in my left armpit swole a bit and became tender, and the pain extended to my left pectoral muscle. It has receded a bit, but it still hurts somewhat, although not as much as to impede me in any meaningful way anymore.

It seems that I had a different reaction to each of my three shots, although they were all Pfizer. And not only different in duration, but also where, when, and how the symptoms are expressed. Interesting but hopefully not very consequential.

Third Shot Experience

On Friday I got an SMS from our government that per new regulations, I am eligible for the booster shot. I wasted no time and on Monday I made a reservation with our GP for Tuesday morning when I got the shot at 9:00 a.m. For the first about ten hours, I got nothing but very mild shoulder pain and occasional pain in other muscles and joints. Definitively nothing as serious as after the second shot. Today I got a very mildly elevated temperature, but again, not as bad as after the second shot. Though I am tired as if I were shoveling gravel and my left shoulder and pectoral muscle hurt really, really badly. I do hope it subsides till tomorrow morning because I need to go and buy christmas carp, then dismember, skin, and de-bone it so my mother can cook it for christmas dinner. I need to be fit enough for that task to not cut my fingers off, so I really need at least the brain fog to go away completely and some of the pain. I will do my best to perform that task using only the three knives of my latest experimental set because if those knives are fit for this purpose, they are fit for 99% of kitchen works.

Gingerbread Houses

These are the more “traditional”

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

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

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

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

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

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

gingerbread houses my mother made this year.

 

Gingerbread Bird Feeder

My mother has tried her hand on something a bit different this year. She has made “ordinary” gingerbread houses too (I will post them later), but she also made this.

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

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

Birch Bark Handles

When I was flatterooning birch bark, I have got some sheets big enuff to make handle scales on smaller knives, so I did.

This one badger knife has one handle scale significantly darker than the other, and the lighter one has a distinct camo-look. I am not sure what to make of that, but the knife looks nice and functional.

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

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

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

On the second knife I had better luck finding more similar pieces of bark, but I was also experimenting with making ornamental pins and those were not entirely perfect. But I will probably continue making them, I think they do have kind of charm.

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

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

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

There is still a lot of blades to outfit before I can seclude to warm cozy indoors and make the leatherworks. In the meantime, I am thinking a bit about what kind of sheath would fit these knives best.

Simple Finish Knives

I have made twoo puukko. To be honest, I was not a fan of this type of knife at all. I have only decided to make them just as a part of my ongoing knifemaking education. But now I am totally a convert.

The first one has a handle made from birch bark, cow bone, and white brass. It looks a bit like a stacked leather handle but it feels different in the hand. Birchbark can be flattened by boiling it in hot water and pressing it between two boards to cool and dry off, making it into flat hard sheets. They are slightly more brittle than wood, but they do not have any preferred failure direction, so they do not split and break easily.

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

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

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

The second one has a handle from birch wood with a small burl in it. It is not proper burlwood, it was just a piece of firewood that I thought will be interesting. I think I was correct in that surmise. The endcap and bolster are from pakfong.

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

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

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

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

Both of these knives have just a simple finish to them. The blades’ primary bevels were ground only up to 120 grit and then tumbled after quenching in sand as long as it took to take all the scale off. Bolsters and end caps are not highly polished, as well as the handles. In fact, I took a steel brush to them to roughen the surfaces a bit. And the finish is just several layers of ordinary boiled linseed oil.

I was aiming for a simple, rough-looking sturdy knife as well as a simple, easy-ish manufacturing process. I think I have managed both. I really like these knives and I will make at least somewhat fancy sheaths for them. And I will definitively make more puukko in the future. I also think that this design is ideal for recycling old files into knives, so I will probably do some of that too.

Relativity of Value

In accordance with Czech law, my house must be visibly marked with my business identification number, my name, and the trade(s) that I am running here. So there is a small sign on the garden gate that says “manufacturing, sharpening, and repair of knives, shears and gardening tools and manufacture and repair of leather goods”. I have expected to get exactly zero business that way, because not very many people come by since I live at the end of a dead-end road, in the middle of large meadows. But my elderly neighbor has noticed it and she came by asking if I would sharpen her some shears, and two pruning shears ((large -loppers –  and small). I have told her it will cost about 20,-€, which she accepted.

The pruning shears were modern tools and not in very bad shape. I had to disassemble them in order to sharpen them properly, but there was nothing interesting about them and sharpening did not take too long. But the ordinary shears were in very bad shape indeed.

Those were tools over fifty, some possibly even a hundred years old. They were extremely dull and battered, most did not even close fully at the tip due to excessive wear and lack of proper maintenance for decades. The protective nickel or chrome coating has mostly worn off and they were covered in patina instead. But they were made in times when things were made to last, so I got to work.

Thus I have sharpened all the edges and I bent the blades and the handles and peened the rivets so they close and cut properly all the way from the base to the tips. I did not attempt to remove the patina, since that could destroy them. But I have restored them to full functionality and, given the quality of their manufacture, they will now probably last several more decades. And I managed to do all this in just over an hour of work since it was not my first time I have so I knew what to do and how, otherwise asking for money would be a bit cheeky.

Even so, I was in for a surprise when I brought them to my neighbor, who was so thrilled with them that she offered twice the agreed price, which I had to decline. I would feel like a thief taking the price of several new shears for sharpening old ones, although I am convinced that these old ones are better now than many of the cheap new ones she could get for that price. But I have told her that I will gladly accept any pretty pieces of wood if she fells some of the sickly fruit trees in her garden.

 

Look at the Grinding Noise!

I have been contacted by my previous employer, which has led me to remember the various works I used to do. One of which was measuring and evaluating noise. That has meant that I was making and interpreting pictures like this.

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Of course, this was only done with my phone, whereas at the laboratory I had various kinds of fancy equipment and software available. But back then I did in fact check whether this phone app measures reasonably accurately, and it does.

At the very top, you can see that grinding handles is a very noisy work indeed. When the equipment runs idle, it emits over 78 dB, which is very near to a level when the noise becomes truly dangerous (80 dB). And during work, it exceeds 89 dB. So I am indeed diligent about wearing hearing protection since that noise level would damage my hearing pretty damn fast.

Whoever knows how to interpret the above picture, can tell that when the grinder runs idly (those parts with green at the top), most of the noise – and indeed the loudest noise – is below 500 Hz. And whenever the wood touches the belt, another very loud component is added, between 5 and 80 18kHz (those parts with red-magenta stripes at the top). There is nothing I can do about the noise that is emitted during the grinding, but I could if I were inclined to spend my time on it, try and identify the spots where the loudest frequencies are during idling and try to do something about that. For example, I suspect that a significant source of the low-frequency loud noise is the tensioning wheel.

However, as much fun as it might be, I do not think I will spend a lot of time over this anytime soon. It would be fun though. I liked my previous job, the work was not the reason why I quit.