This Little Fellow Gave Me Quite a Start

Today when I went into the workshop  I had to light the fire because, despite reasonably sunny weather, the temperatures are really low. And this little fellow was sitting on one piece of wood and he gave me quite a start, for I have mistaken him for a wasp. Which is the point of its coloration, of course.

Unfortunately, I was only able to make these two pictures. The beetle was quite sluggish in the cold workshop, but when I took it outside in the sun, it warmed up quickly and flew off before I could make more with better camera settings. I hope my entomologist friend will be able to identify the species. Preliminarily I think it is some species of longhorn beetle that has emerged from a pupa in firewood.

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

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

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 19 – Two Finished Knives

I have decided to throw the pictures at you piecemeal and not all at once. I want to say a bit about each blade and I think that cramming that all in one post would be counterproductive, it would take too long before I could do it and I might get depressed by writing about all the things I did wrong with every piece all at once. I hope you don’t mind.

Two knives are not only finished already, they are with their owners. I did not get any feedback on their use, because for that was not an opportunity yet, but they were well received, despite their flaws. But, well, they say don’t look a gift knife in the mouth or somesuch…

First, let’s say a bit about this universal kitchen knife for my favorite aunt.

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

It is one of the best blades, strong, straight and stiff. Exactly what I was aiming for, capable of cutting leeks as well as melons. The handle is made from black elder (Sambucus nigra) wood.

You can see tiny cracks on the faces. I personally do think they can add a bit of a character to the wood – especially if the wood is partially decayed, as you will see on some of the next blades too – but that is not always the case and sometimes they are just blemishes. From a functional standpoint, they won’t be a problem. They are filled with the boat lacquer and thus sealed and glued shut. Anything that destroys the wood now would destroy it even if it were pristine. But it is something I have to figure out how to prevent. I will probably have to seal the ends with silicone or epoxy glue before pickling the wood in ammonia next time, or make the pieces a lot longer (I did make them longer prior to pickling, but apparently not enough).

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

And pickling black elder wood I shall, that one thing is sure. Untreated elder wood is yellowish, but the color is nowhere near this bright and rich. I have always loved yellow color, and I think this canary-yellow looks just beautiful. Unfortunately, I cannot show you untreated wood for comparison here, but I will at some point in the future.

What I do not like are the dark shadows around the pins. They are not burned wood (they are grey-ish, not brown-ish), but maybe they are dirt from polishing that got stuck in the epoxy. I will have to look into this next time and maybe not go on too high grit polish before the lacquering and maybe carefully scrape it instead. The wood is beautiful, hard, has small pores, and is a joy to work, but it dirties easily.

The second presented today is a fish gutting & filleting knife for one of my uncles.

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

This was ground from one of the blades that came out curly, but it was my plan to take one of these blades and re-grind it for a fish knife from about November 2019, when my uncle expressed a wish for it. The blade is very thin, flexible, and pointy. It would cut vegetables of course too, but I do not think it is suitable for tackling difficult cabbage.

The handle is made from black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), and this is one of the woods that had a really strong and a bit surprising reaction to the ammonia. You can see in one of my previous posts that untreated black locust wood is honey-yellow/brown with a greenish tint to it. But it apparently contains a lot of acidic components that react with the ammonia and its color got real funky in the process.

When working it, I thought at first that I am burning the wood, and I was trying to sand it slowly and carefully not to do so. It took me a while to realize that whilst I indeed can burn this wood (it is super-hard), I am not doing it. It just looked that way. My subsequent reaction during the work was somewhat “meh” and I thought I won’t bother with this in future anymore, there is plenty of brown woods out there.

And then I have changed my mind.

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

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

What you, unfortunately, cannot see in the picture is a sort of tiger’s eye effect the lacquer has brought out in this wood’s grain. It looks iridescent and it changes color from light brown with a golden glint to nearly black depending on the angle you look at it. So I went from ” I won’t bother with pickling this wood again” to “I am going to pickle this in buckets”.

Regarding flaws, this knife suffers from uneven shoulders, and it won’t be able to correct them with exercise. I only noticed when I was etching the logo, that I ground the forward-facing facets on the scales slightly askew. Nothing major, but it is visible with the naked eye.

Slight asymmetries in the handle scales that I have spotted too late are actually a bit of a theme in this batch and it is something that I too will have to try and figure out how to prevent. Eyeballing the things during grinding until my eyes start to water apparently still is not enough.

And that’s it for today.

Behind the Iron Curtain part 35 – The Elusive Socialism

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give a perfect and objective evaluation of anything but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty-eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

At school we were constantly reminded that we are living in a socialist country that takes great care of its people, and where everything belongs to everybody. However, one of my schoolmates has once said “If you read the definition of socialism in a dictionary, you realize we are not actually living in socialism”. Which is a pretty deep insight for someone under thirteen. But was he right?

The blaring of propaganda was constant, overt as well as covert, and it all was poised to inform us about all the ills the societies to the west of us suffer (most of which were, even in hindsight, spot-on) and all the wondrous technological and social advancements that the USSR has made over its competitors (which were, in hindsight, grossly oversold). But the system never got rid of several things that it has criticized. Like private property and money-based economics. Which has left it with the pesky problem of ownership of the means of productions, which I have addressed partially in the past. I have seen this named “state-run capitalism” in comments on FtB, which is a term that I have always found a bit peculiar.

And this was the base of my schoolmate’s argument. The people do not own the means of production, the state does. The people do not have a say in how the fruits of their labor get distributed and used, the communist party does that. And thus the society is not truly socialist and equal, because there are still social strata, only not divided by the personal wealth, but by the status within the ruling party structure. After which this stratification got, of course, cemented by personal wealth too, since the party top brass were not too shy about accruing for themselves a bigger piece of the pie than the rest has got, as it always happens.

But did this make the country “not socialist”? I personally do not think so. It was still definitively a state whose policies were leftist and, at least on paper, aimed at the common good. But the peons were expected to shut up and work their asses off for their masters under the guise of working for the greater good, with the promise that the socialist paradise is just around the corner, if not for them, then for their children for sure. And its arrival was postponed for nearly two generations before the system finally collapsed. Any and all actual progress, both social and technological, was made only extremely slowly, because every criticism implying that the current course is perhaps not ideal, however mildly stated, could have dire consequences for the person making it.

The people have learned this lesson the hard way before I was even thought of, in spring 1968. That year the Czechoslovak communist party underwent a widely popular reform and started “Socialism with human face” politics, which has kept the socialist part of the party agenda but has intended to make away with authoritarianism. The USSR did not like it and invaded us. The top czechoslovak politicians were forced to sign a treaty literally at gunpoint and that was the end of any and all attempts at making their version of socialism viable in the long term. Because the “socialism” was not what was problematic with the regime’s politics, the “authoritarianism” was.

But since those two were (and arguably still are) inseparable in the minds of the communist parties of greatest socialist states in history, it is no wonder they are inseparable in many people’s minds both in the west and east to this very day too. Thus the leftist politics of the sixties has built an invisible iron curtain in our colective consciousness between socialism and freedom. And tearing that one down seems more difficult than the real one.

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 18 – Etching

I did not include this step in the time measurement last time, and neither will I do so this time. It is about 10-15 minutes per blade and the only way to reduce that time would be to forgo it completely. If I only signed the blades with my logo, I would have made a significant improvement actually, but since I have decided to number them too, I am back to square one time-vise.

I wrote about my logo design in the Rondel Dagger series. At that time it was meant to be maybe only a one-time action, but the design has grown on me and I have decided to adopt it as my new maker’s mark for all my wood and metal projects. When working on my first commission, I have built myself a specialized etching electrode that allows me to etch the logo without having to mask the whole blade, prepare big solution baths or construct complicated barriers holding the etching solution in place.

This time around I have further improved on this and for the logo etching itself I have built myself a new stencil, since cutting the logo in adhesive tape each and every time leads to inconsistent results and is time-consuming. I tried to get my hands on photosensitive foil to make a stencil, but I was unable to find any seller in CZ offering one that is not for copper. And then I realized that my mother has an old silicone kitchen pad that she never uses, so I asked if I can destroy it in the name of science. She said yes, so I took it and I cut my logo in a strip cut out of it with a scalpel. It is water repellent, so the etching solution did not want to get in there, but a drop of dish detergent in the etching solution has solved (ahem) that problem.

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

However, another problem persisted. Etching stainless steel works differently than etching carbon steel. When etching carbon steel with FeCl3 solution, all you need to do after the etch is to let the solution sit for a few seconds and it turns the inside of the etch black with oxides. For stainless steel this does not happen. You need to change the polarity of the electrodes to deposit a layer of black oxide on stainless steel. In order to do so I had to remove the crocodile clips and switch them between the blade and the electrode several times, which was onerous and annoying.

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

I have performed tests on the piece of blade that I nearly ground through, and here you can see the results of various etching parameters. On the left, the two etchings are with five minutes of etching time, which was needlessly long and has led to etching the surrounding area under the stencil too. I found out that one minute is more than enough for this logo and those are the two upper logos in the middle. And as you can see, they are grey, not black, because I did not change the polarity. All the other etches are various iterations of me playing with the polarity and whatnot.

After this experiment I have spent a fruitful afternoon cursing in the workshop building this highly sophistimacated tool from a scrap of plywood, brass sheet metal, copper wire, and some left-overs of speaker cables.

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

I can plug my 12 V DC source in the input (on the right) and my crocodile clamps on the output. When the switch is held to the left, the red wire/clamp is the anode and it etches. When the switch is held to the right, the red wire is the cathode and it deposits metal ions (which quickly turn into oxides). And I can flip the polarity fairly quickly, and I can either make the logo entirely black or just the outline, depending on how quickly and how many times I switch the polarity. It was quite fun, although there is still some factor of unpredictability in the outcome that I was not able to figure out.

So I could go etching the blades that were ready and as a bonus I got good use out of the rest of the silicone pad too.

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

And it worked really well. The best results I got with 1-minute held at etching current, then 10 seconds depositing current and then 1 minute quickly switching the polarity back and forth. After that I neutralized the remaining acid on the blade with washing soda solution, rinsed it off thoroughly and that was it. I got some teething trouble, etchings on some blades are not perfect, but they are not terrible either, they are all identical in shape and size and after I found the correct way, it took me less than 5 minutes per blade.

Etching the numbers was a different kettle of fish after that, for the numbers are tiny, Glagolitic numbers can be quite funny-looking sometimes and I do not think I can cut stencils for them from 1 mm thick silicone sheet. I might try, but for now I reverted to my old method – scalpel and plastic adhesive tape.

Next time I will show you the actual knives that came out of this. I have to decide whether to make one post presenting them all, or scatter them over several days. I think I will do the latter. Either way, taking pictures will take some time too.

Behold: The Unbender!

As I wrote at the beginning of my making kitchen knives project (oh my, is it over a year already?), the steel bars often need straightening before a knife can be made out of them. The method I used then was not particularly time-consuming, but it was very annoying, with the screws constantly falling off to the ground and me cursing all the time. So I have decided to build a jig to help with the job. And here it is.

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

This simple thingie took me a ridiculous amount of time to make. Like, three or four times more than it probably should. It might even have cost me more time to build it than I will ever save by using it, depending on how many knives I will make in the future.

The principle is simple, there are three rollers made from old piping and some ball bearings. Two are fixed to the base plate and one is on a plate sliding on two columns opposite them and center between them. A screw in the center can push the upper roller down between the two stationary ones and thus it can bend steel.

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

The use is easy. Put the end of a flat bar between the rollers with the concave side down, tighten the central screw a bit and pull the steel back and forth end-to-end through the rollers (but careful not to pull it out completely, because that would mean starting over). Then check for straightness, eventually tighten the screw a fraction, pull, check again, rinse and repeat until the bar is straight.

It works actually very well. I have straightened all my bar stock in minutes and to a better degree than I was able to achieve previously. But still…

Well, hopefully, the finishing works on the forge will go a bit faster, because without the forge I can’t do squat.

Making Kitchen Knives – Interlude 3 – Knifemakers Do Not Make Mistakes…

…they just make smaller, thinner knives

When polishing the blades, I run with one of them accidentally across the edge of the platen. Literally, in a blink of an eye, I ground it paper-thin in a spot, almost through, and I overheated that tiny spot too.

Instead of simply tossing it, I have decided to re-grind it into a prototype of a small knife for peeling veggies and fruits, like garlic, onions, oranges and similar, and also for cutting small things like radishes. For these tasks, the universal kitchen knife that I was aiming for can be a bit unwieldy and I need to test various knife shapes and sizes anyways, so why waste a perfectly good hardened steel, amirite?

This is the resulting knife. The handle is from black elder (Sambucus nigra), artificially infused with silica. That makes the wood a bit harder and it also changes the color a bit in places, making the grain stand out a little more and with a greenish tint. It looks and works actually a bit like an untreated black locust – go figure.

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

It is a nifty little blade that goes well in pair with the one I gave my mother two years ago. ~19 cm overall length, 9 cm blade. So far it works well for intended purposes, we will see if my main tester (my dad) is going to have some remarks or complaints. I think that with a sheath it would be a good pocket knife for mushroom hunting too.

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 17 – Watching the Paint dry

This step was a real bugger this time. Forming the handle before it is assembled onto the tang has its downsides, but it also has its upsides. And they seem to prevail, in comparison to the approach I took this time. It took me a lot of time to get all the handles into shape. Part of the problem was also that I have used woods of different properties and thus I had to adjust my approach several times – something that entirely defeated the purpose of saving time by working in bulk. But I got eventually to the stage when I could impregnate the handles with boat lacquer.

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

For some of the woods on display here infusing them with drying oil or buffing with beeswax would be entirely sufficient. For some, it would be much, much better to stabilize them with resin beforehand. But the boat lacquer is the most durable and universally applicable finish I have right now, so I have used that. And to make the work more convenient, I have built myself a little stand to put the blades in to dry.

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

Unfortunately, I am not done yet so I do not know how much time I have lost in this step. I only have enough data right now to know for sure that I have lost a lot, maybe even an hour per blade. The reasons for this are several.

First, this step was evaluated as “high hanging fruit” because I knew upfront that saving time here will be difficult. Lacquering is the most labor-intensive wood finish imaginable in this context.

Second, some of the savings in my previous step were not really time savings, it was merely that I have changed the order of operations this time and that moved some of the work time from that step into this one.

Third, I messed up, bigly, several times. I repeated steps tat needed not repeating and in the end, I had to redo the coating for four blades. This is why I do not have full data yet – right now, only 8 knives out of 12 are truly finished. But the purpose of learning was achieved, and I have definitively saved some overall time.

 

TNET 39: Jelle’s Marble Runs

Previous thread.

I never was into sports of any kind, neither watching nor doing. But about two months ago I stumbled across this YouTube channel and I did watch quite a few videos of theirs. They are strangely captivating in their resemblance to real sports events, despite being decided solely by chance.

And yesterday I was reminded about its existence when watching John Oliver. He mentioned that if you are starved for sports events right now, then this might be something to satiate that hankering somewhat.

Open thread, talk whatever you want, just don’t be an asshole.

A Simple Knife Stand

The Covid-19 pandemic has prevented me from giving my brother the knife I made for his birthday, so I have used the time and I also made a simple stand for it. I have used black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) wood from my firewood treasure trove. The wood is poisonous to ingest, but it won’t rub off on the stainless blade enough to be a problem.

It took me a bit longer time than it would had I been working with good planks because the cuttings were not perfectly square or flat and I had to do some fitting and gluing up in order to get big enough chunk for the base.

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

After the glue-up when I started to square and polish the base I have realized that, quite coincidentally, I have glued it from two pieces that came from the same original plank, and that I have aligned the grain so that it makes a nice V-shape at the face.

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

I have also found out that I will have to use another glue next time, since the one I am currently using turns black when gluing woods with high tannin-content, a problem that I noticed also when gluing leather with it. Which is a bummer, because it is very good, strong, and water-resistant glue that is really easy to work with. But the thin black line looks much worse on the picture than in reality.

The stand is covered with the same boat lacquer as the knife handle, but it is deliberately not polished and it has fewer layers since it should not get exposed to nearly as much water as the handle.

I will probably make some more knife stands/racks in the future

Women Artisans on Youtube – Carpenter

3x3Custom – Tamar is a Youtube channel that I have found interesting enough to actually subscribe to. She is one of those people who likes to experiment and invent things, which is exactly what I like too. I have learned a lot from her and I cannot wait to put some of those things to use, even though my equipment is not as fancy and I will inevitably be forced to improvise a lot.

The video for today is one where she makes very cool patterned boxes for sick kids – out of scrap wood.

 

Bobbin Lace: Roses are…

While the knife handles were being covered in varnish, which is a few hours work a day followed by a whole day of waiting, I have designed and made another bobbin lace picture. This time a rose. It was a lot easier than the two previous designs because the blossom is de-facto just a spiral. And whilst the leaves are more complicated, they were just ten bobbins and could be made almost in one go.

We tried several backgrounds and the grey one worked best again. On a dark background, the thorns on the stem were not visible at all and on a light one, the blossom was poorly defined.

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

To show you the difference in style between me and my mother, here is one of her roses, several decades old by now.

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