Today a show that a woman who puts her mind to it can indeed weld better than many a man, certainly better than me.
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Today a show that a woman who puts her mind to it can indeed weld better than many a man, certainly better than me.
There is not much to say about these, they are all made from one partially rotten palette. Therefore I do not know precisely what kind of wood it is. I suspect it is birch because one of the boards had still a bit of bark on it, but the palette was obviously made from scraps, so there could be several species involves. So other realistic possibilities are poplar and beech.
Since it was from planks, I had no control over grain direction, but I have at least paired the slabs to the best of my ability so they are of the same species – they varied wildly in coloration – and in three cases, I ended up with pairs where one slab had more interesting grain. And, in those cases, I have given this slab on the right side of the knife, where the signature is.
© 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 three are those with more plain-looking handles, besides rich brown color from the ammonia fuming there is not much to see here. I have no idea why the logo etched so strangely on the second one, it just did. Maybe the metal was a bit dirty so it etched only on the edges, where there is stronger current? I did wipe all blades with acetone, but maybe not enough.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
This one has a nice dark stripe of ever so slightly more decomposed, but still hard, wood running down the middle. The placement of the pins is purely coincidental, at least I do not remember consciously putting the holes exactly into the stripe.
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This one has a knot in the wood. Unfortunately, it is so dark, that I currently cannot make a good photo of it without overexposing everything else. The blade on this one is one of those that curled on the edges, so I had to re-grind it into narrower shape.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
And lastly a piece with extremely beautiful grain, almost like a burl. This one piece really shows that half-rotten wood is not necessarily only fit for burning.
Works on this project are finished, so today I will share three more of the resulting products with a bit of commentary about the lessons learned with each.
First a knife with handle from larch.
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This single piece is one of the biggest reasons why I have lost a lot of time with the finishing of handles. Larch wood, as it turns out, is pretty, but it is really shitty for knife handles. It is softwood, but that would not necessarily be a problem in itself. The problems are two: 1) It is stringy, so it has a tendency to tear-out, burning, and gumming up belts. 2) The late-summer-growth is significantly harder than the spring growth and that causes all kinds of problems when trying to shape it to anything other than a plank.
Further, the ammonia fuming did nearly nothing to it, except perhaps making it a bit darker.
I suspected that it is probably not a very good wood for this purpose, and my suspicion was confirmed. I won’t use this wood anymore unless perhaps stabilized with resin. I only used this one piece because it was a gift by a former colleague, who is in turn the intended recipient of this knife. The result is not ugly, but it is much more work than it is worth.
Next is jatoba.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
This was commissioned, so this is the only blade that will be sold (for a very moderate price). Part of the order was the etched star on the left side. I am a bit anxious about how the knife will be perceived. This customer too was warned that they cannot expect perfection, because I am still learning, but you never know. If they toss it on my head, I will have to deal with it.
I probably will not bother with treating jatoba with ammonia in the future, not in big chunks. It only makes the wood significantly darker and it is prone to develop cracks in due course, nothing else. It is not ugly – otherwise, I would toss it away – but I personally do not think it is worth the hassle. What untreated jatoba looks like you can see here.
And last today cherry.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I am a bit ambiguous about how this turned out. I love the look of untreated cherry wood (see here) and I was hoping perhaps, that the orange color will become richer and deeper. Instead, it has turned into chocolate brown. Not ugly brown, mind you, but brown all the same. Cherry wood is also very prone to develop cracks, but these two pieces almost miraculously were crack-free, I suspect that the strictly perpendicular and straight grain orientation has played a role (they were split from a log, not cut). I will perhaps do the fuming for cherry in the future for thinner pieces with straight grain to use them as a contrast with untreated cherry for intarsia, spacers, inserts, etc. The wood is a joy to work treated as well as untreated, I would use nothing else if I had enough of it.
I have messed up the etch of the number, you can see the straight line where I have accidentally run with the etching graphite rod over the edge of masking tape. But nobody is going to complain about this, because I am keeping this knife for myself.
There will be one more post with the remaining six knives and then we shall look at the time-analysis.
You may have noticed my previous iterations on building a chuck to help with grinding consistent bevels on kitchen knives. Well, I had a lot of thoughts about it and I thought I can significantly improve it. And luckily I have managed to buy some raw materials before the shops were closed.
I am not going to write full how-to instructions this time, a few words, and the finished thing must be enough for this time around I was still figuring some things on the fly and there were some issues that did not go as planned. However I will probably make another, smaller one, for shorter blades and if I manage to not mess that up, I will make a full tutorial on that one, with clean pictures and components and so forth.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Here you can see the face with four magnet batteries up front and a tiny ledge on the bottom to have a reference point for the top of the blade. I have made magnets using the same method as last time, only this time I have glued pieces of aluminum between the faces of the mild steel slabs. The body is made from a square aluminum pipe. I cut openings for the magnets in it and to fill the hollows, I have used squared beech timber. That allowed me to simply glue everything together with epoxy and added a bit heft to the piece. I have also used square pieces of aluminum to glue in the sides of the pipe to get perfect seal all-around against water.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Setting the angle on the last one was a bit difficult. It was done by means of four screws protruding from the bottom, and if they did not stick out all exactly the same amount, it could wobble during work which is not ideal. And they did catch on the edges of the grinding table. Here you can see the simplest solution to that problem that I could think of. On the back of the chuck are two holes with M6 thread. On these two M6 screws hold a flat aluminum profile through two elongated holes. To adjust the angle I simply loosen the screws, slide the aluminum profile up/down as needed, and tighten them again. Against the last iteration, this has the advantage of full linear contact with the base plate all the time, even on the edges, and also it is much easier to set up.
I am trying to get my ducks in the row again, finishing finally the current batch of kitchen knives and preparing for the next one. I hope the two and a half days that I have spent with making this were well spent. I still have no functioning forge, but I work on that too, and hopefully, I will have something to say about that soon.
Trump likes to refer to himself as the president of “Law And Order” these days and his sycophants in the Geezers Only Party repeat those three words as a mantra. And their voters, presumably, lap it up as a chant worth following, as if those words represent something intrinsically good.
They do not.
Laws can be, and quite often are, impractical, counter-productive, or downright immoral and wrong. Lawful behavior is only as good as the laws that it follows, and unlawful behavior is only as bad as the laws it breaks are good. The order that ensues from enforcement of laws is in this regard completely value-neutral. It has no moral property in itself, it only reflects that of the legal system that has brought it into existence.
To anyone who yearns for Law and Order and not paying particular attention to what kind of Law and what kind of Order, I would like to put forth following points for consideration:
Draw from that any conclusions you want.
Don’t blame me for the used neologism, it is courtesy of Eric D Red.
But I like it.
I also like what can be done with epoxy resin. I am in no hurry to jump on this bandwagon, but I do have it somewhere on the back of my mind.
This little buddy has climbed out of a hollow brick yesterday when I was processing dog-daisies into chemical weapons against wooly aphids infesting my bonsai trees (long story).
It was kind enough to remain in place for quite some time, allowing me to take pictures from all possible angles.
© 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.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I have never seen LegalEagle lose his cool on camera, although I did not watch all his videos.
I have also never expected to live through a deadly pandemic and USA coming apart at the seams at the same time.
Life is full of surprises. To all our USA readers – please stay safe. Our hearts are with you, although we cannot do anything to help.
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.
Just as with carpenters, there will be more of these in due course. Is there a terminus technicus for people who craft things from resin? Probably not, we will have to do without.
Today I want to share two videos actually because there is a follow-up to the first one, where she learns from her mistakes and improves her art.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
