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.

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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.

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 16 – Human-knife Interface

Last time I did this, I shaped the handle-scales first, then I fumed them wit ammonia and then I glued them onto the knives. This time I have changed the order of doing things, but time comparison should still be possible.

After taking the pieces of wood out of the solution I have left them dry. First for a few days outside, out of direct sunlight and out of the wind, with both end-grain ends covered with plastic to reduce cracking (still insufficient, next time I will have to try something more drastic). After they were dry and stink-free, I put them for a few days into the direct sunlight to dry even more, and then I left them to stabilize in the workshop for a few days. That way the wood should be neither too wet nor too dry and hopefully, it won’t change in size too much.

When I started to polish the pieces to sort them out properly – any markings were taken out by the solution – I could not find the oak pieces anywhere. So I took an offcut that was not in the solution and I polished that a bit and I realized that it is not, in fact, oak, but an especially dirty and grimy piece of black locust. I do not even remember where I got it and why I thought it is oak in the first place…

Anyhoo, after grinding all the pieces to flat and parallel, I drilled the holes for pins, cut all pieces to a rough shape on the bandsaw and I paired them up and I shaped and fully polished the forward-facing facets since those won’t be accessible once the scales are glued on. What I learned here was that I will need some finer scaled drill bits, since different woods react differently and when you drill with a 6 mm drill bit, the resulting hole can be anywhere between 5.5 and 6 mm. And trying to force the 6 mm brass pins through some pieces was a real pain in the nether regions. I have to drill the holes in wood ever so slightly bigger than the intended pin, but whilst 6.5 mm was fine for the softer woods it was almost too much for the harder ones.

The next step was glue-up.

To get as near perfect flat surfaces as I can, I have bought a spray-on glue and I used ti to attach a piece of coarse sandpaper to a granite tile. It worked really well, I have got a very nearly perfect match between the tangs and the scales on all twelve knives, the best result I have got yet for this type of handle construction. But I also managed to get a lot of glue on my hands and I lost the spray nozzle when wiping it off and it took two days before it resurfaced under the shop vacuum. So yeah, not my finest hour and the good came with some bad-ish.

During the glue-up, I have suffered from a common ailment –  the insufficient clamping power syndrome. I had to do it in two stages, gluing six blades in the evening and the remaining six in the morning next day, Which was not too much of a problem this time,  since I was tired and I would have to call it quits anyway, but I will probably need some more clamps or maybe even some thingamajigs for gluing the scales on the tangs more efficiently.

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

And this is what I got in the end – a pile of roughly shaped handles attached to the finished blades.

During the subsequent grinding to shape with a 40 grit belt, I still could not do too much to evaluate the real effect of ammonia fuming on these woods, but I did get some inkling of what the results might be already. And let us say that for some of the woods I have preliminarily considered the results promising, for some surprising and for some completely “meh”. More about that when the knives are finished.

This whole step took me approximately 73 minutes per knife, and that is a significant improvement against last time – 38 minutes, 34%.

The last step is polishing the handles up to ~300 grit (already done) and putting on a protective coat of boat lacquer. That will take about a week, an hour or so a day. We shall see how that goes, but that part should be relatively free of any surprises.

Is a Homemade Face Mask Better Than Nothing?

The best thing an amateur can do in times of crisis is to follow experts, specifically the expert consensus and not the hand-picked cherries who pander to one’s preconceived ideas. Not that the consensus is automatically true, but it probably is the best that human knowledge can offer at the moment. What we are seeing right now is a consensus shift regarding the wear of facemasks, as more and more countries recommend them or even make their wearing mandatory in some places.

This is accompanied by new research, and one such research in the Czech Republic focuses on comparing various materials. The findings are not published yet, but one such preliminary finding is mentioned in the Czech article – five layers of ordinary t-shirt fabric are effective at catching nearly all particles of the size that have droplets exhaled/coughed out. That is huge since it is nearly equivalent to a surgical mask. And since the main argument for widespread use of face masks is that they should slow the spread of disease from those who have it (especially those who might be asymptomatic), then yes, even such self-made masks are better than nothing, if everybody has them.

But the article mentions another thing, which is even more interesting. One layer of t-shirt fabric was able to stop 11% of the much smaller sizes, those that are expected for the dry incoming particles. And five layers would stop nearly 46% of such incoming particles at maximum breathing speed (i.e. during intensive exertion). Slow breathing increases their efficacy.

That might be significant. There is some evidence that the initial viral dose of SARS-CoV-2 might have an influence on the severity of the illness. That seems logical – the illness has several days incubation period during which the virus grows in the body exponentially. A smaller viral dose thus might give the immune system may be a whole day or even more to develop appropriate antibodies, as is the case with influenza. But I could not find any study looking at whether there is a correlation between the incubation period and the severity of the disease.

It is a work in progress, but to me, it seems the answer to the question in the title is “very probably yes, possibly even for your own protection”.

Before you submit any argument against wearing face masks, please consider whether said argument could be used with the same weight against the universal and non-controversial recommendation of washing your hands. For example, an argument that many people are wearing masks incorrectly is not an argument against wearing them, just like the fact that most people wash their hands incorrectly and insufficiently was never an argument against hygiene. It is only an argument for making an effort to educate the public.

Like this video, which educates about both.

YouTube Video: DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION – Film and TV weapons

I found this video to be informative and interesting, as well as very painful to watch. I cannot imagine doing something like this to a knife that I have spent several days making. I would do it if I got paid and the destruction were for a purpose, as it is in this case, but even so – ouchouchouch…

Bobbin Lace – an Orchid

My next bobbin lace project was a picture of an orchid. It was inspired by the orchids that my father grows on the windowsill in our living room, but it is not, of course, intended to be an accurate representation of any specific plant/species. This time I did not use paper and pencil at all, I started rightaway drawing on my PC with my tablet and I ended up with this coloured sketch.

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

From the sketch, I have made a template that could be printed out. The important thing to not forget by an assymetrical design like this is to mirror the image – the lace has a front and back. In this case not only all the knots are on the back side, but important is also the stalk of the blossoms which is in front of the right leaf.

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

The final step was, of course, making the actual lace. It took me circa 40 hours. you can look below the fold whether it was worth the effort.

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