A New Workbench

Today was lazying-around-doing-nothing-in-particular-day. I needed it, my back hurt as if I were shoveling gravel. Four days in a row I was working as much as I could on making the best of the bad weather and making a new work bench for my workshop, something that was desperately needed for a long time by now.

I have started by taking some ca 5 m long boards from their storage in my garden-shed half of the workshop building.

These super long spruce boards are reclaimed from attic renovations when a few years ago the old board flooring was replaced with OSB boards. They have some insect damage, but not excessive so they are still strong, and they are super dry. Thus whilst they are straight lengthwise, they are slightly bent across. They also have fitting tongues and groves.

I have cut 10 of 2300 mm long pieces and 17 of 700 mm long pieces and cleaned all the grooves and tongues first with a chisel (they were full of decades-worth of dust) and then with sandpaper. After that I have put five long boards next to each other with the concave side up and I flattened them with my handheld belt sander.

The concave side of the boards required less material removal than the convex side would have, therefore the belt sander was sufficient. And it has also removed the oil oil/wax finish on the boards.

Flaterooned boards could be glued side-by-side together, forming the base of the workbench. To keep them together I have lashed them with four Spanish windlasses.

I have used PU-based glue for his bench but I have used PVA for my first one and it worked too. The PVA only needs a longer time to cure and the PU has a further advantage in that it foams up, filling neatly small voids, etc.

I did not wait for the glue to set, however, and I started sanding the convex sides of the short boards straightaway.

When those vere sanded flat, I started gluing them to the base and attaching them with screws to hold them in place. That was my first workday finished.

So I have two layers of boards, perpendicular to each other, glued at flattened concave sides. The next day I removed all the screws and then came the hardest part of this whole ordeal – flattening the convex sides of the bords in the upper layer and of the five remaining long boards.

The convex sides needed to remove more material than the concave sides, thus belt sander alone was not sufficient. I had to take out the one tool that I actively hate – the electric hand planer. I never figured out how to use it properly. It hogs material away quite successfully, but it also makes gouges in the boards no matter what I do and the gyroscopic force makes its movement extremely difficult and tiring. And it is extremely dangerous on top of that. And it makes an unholy mess.

But I have managed to get the sides at least somewhat flat so I could glue on the long boards as the top layer. again using screws to hold them in place. That was the second day finished.

The next day I again removed all the screws and I filled all the holes and gaps with bbq skewers, popsicle sticks, and/or a mixture of PVA glue and sawdust as appropriate.

It has cured very quickly so in the afternoon I could flatten this side, using mostly the belt sander, but I had to use the dreaded planer too a few times. I made one unseemly gauge on the surface :-/

I had to fill in some voids again, but I was able to give it the first coat with strongly diluted acrylic paint that very same evening.

At this point, I was so physically tired that I could not even sleep properly. Fighting the electric hand planer made my back and neck ache something awful. But at least the 2300x720x70 mm workbench board was mostly finished at this point. It is not tutti flatti perfetti, but it is flaterooni enough.

The third day was thus finished, the first coat of paint dried overnight.

The next day I have again filled some cracks with sawdust and acrylic paint mixture, gave the whole thing a coat of undiluted paint and I weighed it. It weighs approximately 42 kg. It did take some work to get it through the workshop door and into the workshop, but I have managed it and I managed it solo. I was afraid to ask my father for help because he could easily hurt himself. I was more comfortable with banging the board about and eventually breaking something than with him getting some serious injury. Luckily I did not break anything, nor did I injure myself, I was just very, very tired at the end of that endeavor and I have not made any pictures of what I have done inside the workshop. I just remembered to make this one picture at the end.

The board is fixed to the wall on the rear edge and supported by two legs on the front two corners. Under it are some reclaimed furniture cupboards that were there even before, just without a nice continuous workbench above them. Because it is fixed to the wall, it is very sturdy and It can take my whole body weight in the middle without bending.

That was the fourth day finished. I was still too tired to even sleep properly, so I did not.

Now that it is in place, it will get two more coats of paint (one is drying right now) and then I will put on it the machinery. Either tomorrow or the day after that, depending on how fast the paint cures and how I feel.

I intend for this workbench to be a permanent home for my belt sander and band saw and also, in the future, a lathe. That should free my first workbench significantly, allowing me to do manual work more comfortably and have more than one vice.

A Big Commission – Part 9 – Da Pictures

Today the customer has picked up his brand new machete. He was apparently delighted, at least he said so. His exact words were “This is much better quality than I have expected, especially the leatherwork.” So today I did not feel like a total waste of space. Here are some nice pictures for you to look at. I did not have to do too much post-processing after all.

Spatzenbaden

We do not feed the birds in the summer but there is an old baking tray among the bonsai trees that we fill with clean water once every few days, especially in this heat. Today I managed to take a few pictures of sparrows frolicking in the water.

A Big Commission – Part 8 – Photographing

I do not need to make nice pictures for the webshop for this one – unless the customer rejects it, which I hope he does not – but I do want to have nice pictures for myself, for Instagram and, of course, for Affinity. And since it was a nice sunny day today, I took my photography session outdoors. One advantage of that is the sunlight, one disadvantage of that is way too focused light. Shade has, of course, diffuse light, and whilst it is very bright on a cloudless sunny day, it is alas also of the wrong color for this thing and I did not want to spend too much time with corrections in either the camera or on the PC.

So I have rigged up a small thingamajig to make pictures in diffuse light whilst getting the benefit of direct sunlight’s color whilst getting it a bit diffuse. I will have to edit out an occasional ant or piece of debris though, so I am not entirely sure I have saved time in the post-production at all. Well…

A slightly overcast sky would be best but despite my valiant efforts, the weather still refuses to obey my commands. Mind you, if I could command the weather, I would not command a slight overcast right now, I would command a week of slow, drizzling rains and make the pictures indoors.

Pictures will be posted here and on Instagram after the customer picks up the item. I hope it will be tomorrow, but it might take a few weeks too, depending on circumstances.

A Big Commission – Part 7 – Missed Opportunity

AAAARGHHH! Amidiotextrordinaarggh!

Today I have sharpened the machete, thus de-facto finishing the commission. I have decided to test it in a way that poses minimal risks to the nice surface finish and still tests its cutting capabilities. By cutting milk boxes filled with water standing on a pole. That is a good way of testing an edge because a blunt blade just bats the box away from the pole, a sharp-ish one cuts partly through, tears the rest, and throws both pieces away, and a really sharp one sails through the box, the top falls off and the bottoms stays on the pole. A bad cutting technique may lead to a bad cut, but not even a perfect technique can lead to a good cut with a blunt blade. It does not test an edge’s durability – a well-sharpened bronze sword would perform well too.

I considered filming it and then I thought to myself “Nah, nothing interesting ever happens, waste of time”. Then I cut the first box and I immediately cursed my laziness and stupidity.

I cut the top of the box cleanly off, and it stayed on! I have cut dozens of these boxes when I was testing my own machete and this has never happened. And since there was enough of the box left for a second cut, I went on and cut it a second time.

And the blade sailed through like there was nothing there and both cut pieces stayed atop the bottom part. If my hair was long enough to grab and tear out, that is what I would be doing. A rare thing happens and I did not film it because I was lazy to go upstairs and set up my tripod.

Of course, I went upstairs for the tripod in a hope that I will be able to replicate it or at least get some interesting footage from the remaining three boxes that I had at hand. On two I got useless footage because I messed up my cutting technique. Probably nerves. Definitively nerves. On the third attempt, I did manage to get three clean cuts through the box, but the first two stayed on only because they remained connected on a minuscule (~1 mm) strip of paper – I was standing a tiny bit too far from it. After the third cut the top fell off but the bottom stayed on the pole so at least there’s that.

It is a wicked sharp blade, it cuts like a lightsaber. It will be a good tool. But I missed an opportunity for getting good advertising footage. Bigly.

A Big Commission – Part 6 – The Sharpenstone

Today I have made the last piece of the puzzle – a small whetstone for edge maintenance in the field. I expected it to take me two to three hours, it took me twice as much. Partly because it was the first time I was doing it so I did not really have a clear plan on how to properly proceed and what will work best, partly because I screwed up and I had to start all over with one part. But I think that if I were to make another, it would indeed be those two hours that I used for price calculation.

I started with a piece of native, strongly metamorphized phyllite. It has visible big garnet grains and it is very hard.

I cut a strip off with a diamond stone cutting wheel in my angle grinder. I have used that wheel also to roughly shape it and thin it.

For the second, fine layer, I have used a piece of old roofing shale. Those can sometimes be found around here on building sites and even in my garden.

Those are not native stones, they are the remnants of long demolished houses from before WW2. Initially, I wanted to use a different piece of local phyllite, less metamorphized, softer, and with finer grain, but I screwed up and it delaminated down the middle, becoming too thin. So I went for the shale for my second try because it is stronger and I wanted to be definitively done today.

Using five-minute epoxy, I glued both roughly shaped flat stones on a thin jatoba board, making a small stone popsicle.

After the epoxy cured, I shaped the outline, covered both outward faces with adhesive tape, and submerged it whole into linseed oil for a minute or so to soak the wood.

After that, I had to grind down the faces a bit again, it was just a bit too thick to fit into the pocket. I ground them down with the diamond wheel and then flatterooned them on granite stone with wet&dry carborundum abrasive paper on it.

Both phyllite and shale are soft enough so they can be shaped with abrasive cloth or paper, but hard enough themselves to abrade steel.

This is not a stone for serious sharpening work and I have told the customer so. Its abrasive action will be relatively mild compared to modern carborundum-based whetstones, even on the rougher phyllite side. But it should be excellent at maintaining an already sharpened blade and giving it an occasional touch-up during work. I have used pieces of phyllite or shale for exactly that, although those were stones found by the wayside, impromptu flattened and used out of necessity, not nicely crafted like this one.

Thus almost all work is finished – tomorrow I will sharpen the blade and make nice pictures to present here and on Instagram.

A Big Commission – Part 5 – The Stitchening

The original sheath the customer provided as a template has the tip reinforced with plastic. I cannot do that of course. Making a metal cape would be an option, but an expensive one since I would have to make multiple metal templates to press it and then solder it, polish it and all that jazz. So I have convinced the customer that reinforcing the tip with 4 mm thick leather should suffice. Which I think it should. But I did make an extra step to make that thick leather just a bit harder – I heated it to 70-80°C in water and kept the heat until it shrank to about 80% of its original size.

This makes the leather inflexible and somewhat brittle in bending, but very hard. Hard as plastics in fact. Caskets or boxes can be made that way. It has several caveats that need to be taken into account, however.

After it is taken from the hot bath, it remains pliable for some time but not very long and it keeps shrinking for a while. If it needs to be formed in a specific shape, it needs to be pressed into the form quickly and left to cool down and dry in form.
Because it shrinks, any decorative carving that is done can only consist of outlines. Any fancy pressing or stamping simply won’t work. And the shrinkage has to be taken into account – as well as the fact that the shrinkage is not completely regular in all directions and predictable.
As it shrinks, it gets also significantly darker, dark brown. So it reduces the possible dyes that can be used to change the color to any shade you wish, as long as it is black.
It needs to be heated up carefully. If overheated, it curls up and becomes way too brittle.
If there is a risk of any bending stress, it should be reinforced with fabric or untreated leather. It is hard and scratch resistant but breaks when bent.

For my purposes, I needed two flat plates, so I left them to cool down and dry under two flat pavement bricks.

On the top, you can see the already dry pocket taken out of the form. On the right is a glimpse of my impromptu cardboard template for the sheath.

Working on a complicamaticated thingamajig like this the ooo is very important – order of operations. If one glues and sews together some parts it can make some other parts impossible to add or modify, so I had to think carefully about how to progress. For example, on the outside, I had to first sew on the pocket flap, and only after that I could sew on the pocket itself.

The kukri sheath is wide open on the back and the blade itself is thus held in place with a flap with two snap-fasteners. To avoid rubbing of metal on metal, I have pressed the lower part of the fasteners on an extra piece of leather and glued & sewn that onto the sheath.

When making the belt strap, I had to form it, glue it and sew it together about 90% of the way, then I had to leave it with the threads hanging, glue the eye shut, and sew the rest. The strap is sewn from two layers for several reasons – I have used relatively thin leather and I was afraid it would not support the weight of the whole assembly, which will be over 600 g, and the way the sheath was cut, on the strap it would be the suede side of the leather facing out, and on this one, it is not particularly pretty.

I have possibly slightly overengineered the whole thing – there is double stitching along the edges as well as stud reinforcements and I have spent several more hours with it than I planned to. I do hope that it bears out in durability, I need satisfied customers to spread the word.

I have now applied some dye to the finished product and it hangs outdoors in the shade to dry. I have also applied linseed oil to the handle and it hangs outdoors in the sun to dry. Tomorrow I will condition the leather, and sharpen the blade and I am nearly finished. All that will be left is to make a small sharpening stone that fits into the pocket. I hope that won’t take too long, a few hours at most. Although I have some funny over-engineering ideas there too…

A Big Commission – Part 4 – Surface Finish & Glue-up

As I said because this blade is supposed to go “only” to 100 grit, that in no way meant that polishing it will be an easy task. I had to polish it on the belt sander to 150 grit in fact, and then remove all perpendicular scratches with 100 grit wet&dry sandpaper manually with scratches that follow the curvature of the blade. It was a bit of work not only due to the steel being hard but also because the surfaces are fairly big and wide when compared to even the biggest knives.

After it’s been polished, I etched the logo and number and put the whole thing into oak bark extract overnight, then I washed it off, made the handle scales, and put it into the extract overnight again. Today morning it had a nice dark grey color all over.

You can see the boundary between the hardened blade and soft tang near the sharpening notch. I forgot to tell the customer about that, I hope he won’t mind. In my opinion, the boundary is really neat and it is just another small detail. A good sign is that there are no such sharp boundaries anywhere on the blade. I have tested the whole blade by scratching but this is yet another confirmation that the whole blade is properly hardened and tempered.

Today was glue-up time. You have seen that already, but this time I think I have a nice picture to illustrate the construction of the handle here.

For kitchen knives, I only use dowels 6 mm in diameter, 2 bamboo ones in the middle, and two metal ones on the front and back. However since this tool will probably encounter a lot of impacts, bends and vibrations, I have decided to use 2 metal pins and 3 beech wooden dowels with 8 mm in diameter (the third pin is there for the lanyard). The wooden pins are there for the glue to have something to really adhere to and the metal pins protect the assembly against shearing forces. And because none of them go all the way through, there are no visible pins on the outside. Except the one for lanyard, which must go through the wood otherwise the end would most likely split sooner or later due to the lanyard.

And so today, after the glue fully cures, the machete is 90% finished. All that remains is apply linseed oil to the handle. But before I do that, I will have to make the sheath otherwise I would have to wait several days before the oil hardens. So tomorrow is leather cutting and maybe leather glueing and stitching day.

A Big Commission – Part 3 – Stuff Got Really Hard

It rained a bit on Wednesday, which was lucky. I did not want to start a charcoal fire when the whole garden was bone dry. And I had to start a charcoal fire because this blade is way too big for my small gas forge. I have managed to quench and harden all that I have set out to (it would not be worth starting the fire for just one blade, so I prepared three more plus a platen for the belt grinder – I will post about those later) but it was extreme pain in the ass. And I finally found out why I have sometimes – but not always – trouble reaching the right temperature with this setup. As the coals burn, they get smaller and smaller and since I am blowing the air in the pile from the sides and from up, the air cannot reach the bottom of the fire anymore and thus I get scorching heat on the surface, but barely any heat just one-two cm below it. It makes perfect sense when one thinks about it. I will probably have to build a bigger gas forge for such big blades or a charcoal forge with air input from below the coal. If I will go through the trouble, I will probably build a gas forge since it is significantly safer than charcoal. The problem is in getting my hands on proper housing for the forge – I do not have any.

Anyhoo, the quenching was such a pain in the ass that I spent several hours with it after which I was dead-tired. I managed one tempering cycle at 150°C in the oven in the evening that same day, and the next day while the knives were in the oven for a second 150°C cycle, I tempered the kukri manually with a propane burner.

I put water-soaked paper towels on the edge and heated the spine of the blade until the blue color crept almost all the way to the bevels on both sides. The paper towel near the tang is not there to shield the tang, however, just to shield the plastic clamps. Later on, I tempered that area more than the rest of the blade because that is the area where there will be the least cutting action – thus least need for edge retention – but the most stress during chopping – thus most need for toughness. Here you can see the fully tempered blade shining with some of the colors of the rainbow. You can see that after I took the towels off, I tempered the edge a bit too.

Here is where things got really hard. 54SiCr6 is very tough spring steel. On the spine here it is tempered at 300-400°C, where it is at its toughest. Which is good.

What was not good however was a slight left-leaning bend towards the tip of the blade and a slight wave near the tang. This is 4 mm spring steel, tempered to springiness. It was difficult enough to straighten the blank before work – It broke my unbender so I have reckoned that straightening this will be hell on earth.

I was 100% correct. I tried a clamp and two steel shims, a method that I used to straighten the blank. It did not budge. Then I tried the old method with two screws in the vise. It did not budge, but I was very close to breaking my vise. After over an hour of completely futile effort, I have decided that I have to repair and reinforce my unbender and if that fails, I will have to ask the customer if they accept the bend.

Therefore I took some steel L-profiles from my scrap pile, some flat mild steel, an M10 threaded bar, and some ball bearings and I got to work.

As you can see, I have replaced the upper connection with two girders from L-steel profiles. What you cannot see is a similar reinforcement under the two rollers on the base. What you also cannot see in this picture is the upper rolling wheel – that one got totally obliterated.

The axis of the upper roller was completely bent out of shape. It is bent on one of the lower ones too, but not so drastically. I could not easily make a new roller with a thicker axis from materials available to me straightaway so I have just put 6 ball bearings side-by-side on an M10 threaded rod and that’s it. Next week I am taking my parents to a doctor in a nearby district town where I can buy more ball-bearings to make the lower rollers sturdier too. I have decided that buying and using ball bearings directly will be probably easier than trying to find a pipe in which they fit. Sometimes not having a lathe is really a pain in the nether regions, but one cannot have everything.

Thus reinforced unbender – bolted to the table – was finally strong enough to actually do something. I did not get a perfectly straight blade, but instead of the tip straying over 2 mm from the center line it has now just a few small wobbles, under 1 mm. One has to look very close to notice them and some of it will come out in the polish too.

I took the now hardened, tempered, and straightened blade outdoors and I bashed a few things with it – a brick, a stone pavement, and a few ash logs in the firewood pile.

It is not sharpened yet but it did stick in the end grain of the ash logs already. I was not joking when I said that I have bashed a brick with it. I really did, I wanted to make sure that the blade does not shatter. It will be used as a foresting/garden tool and it must be able to withstand some serious abuse. If it did not, it would be very wrong of me to charge the money that I do.

I took a picture of the blade stuck in the log so you can see the straightness a bit. It was difficult to align the lens of the phone properly, but I think you can see that it is mostly straight.

Now there will be some grinding and gnashing of teeth. Luckily this blade will not need very high polishing, just to 100 grit. Even so, it will be a hard slog since it is hard, tough material.

Showing off My Wood – Part 2

I should have put aside some offcuts from each species for testing various treatments (above all ammonia and bleaching) and for making a catalog on my website so potential customers have something to choose from. I should have done that, but I did not because I did not think that far ahead. All the offcuts are in bags for use as firewood. Over fifty bags to be imprecise. Enough wood to heat the house for a month in moderately cold weather. In this regard, the work has already saved me some money.

I do hope that when it comes to making knives, and perhaps other things, I will now be able to work much more efficiently because I have immediately usable wood at hand in suitable quantities and I do not need to dick around with a chainsaw and table saw to make a single knife anymore. And as far as the testing and cataloging go, all is not lost yet. Not only will a lot of wood still be cut away in work, but I am also the one who does the heating, and thus I will have plenty of opportunities to get through those offcuts again.

So let us dive into what else I have in my stockpile now.

Juniper (Juniperus sp.)

I have two boxes of wood that is probably from either Juniperus chinensis or Juniperus x media or both. Some I have got from my cousin, and some I have found in various places when people tossed away trees that they cut in their garden (yes, that happens).

I do not have big enough pieces to make knife blocks, maybe one when used as a veneer. So most of this will probably be made into handles. You have seen how it looks already on my not a masterpiece. It is light, soft, homogenous wood with nice creamy white sapwood and reddish-brown heartwood. I suspect ammonia would probably just turn it into brown, in my experience that often happens with darker woods. I might test that if I fish out some offcut from the bags, but the wood is very beautiful as it is.

Ash (Fraxinus excelsior)

I have a few small boxes and some bundles of slightly insect and fungus-damaged ash. That will probably be used for knives and maybe even for blocks. I did not test it personally yet, but allegedly ash turns grey in ammonia, which could be interesting. On its own the wood is not particularly remarkable, it is white and it turns yellow with age. Like oak, it has a distinct pattern of alternating small and big pores. I might try to bleach it and infuse it with UV-stabilized resin so it stays white. My sister-in-law has said that white might be fashionable for some people, but there are not very many non-synthetic white materials out there.

I had put aside one huge log when a friend of mine got permit to fell a huge ash tree in his garden over a decade ago. I was afraid that it was destroyed by wood borers.

I was lucky. The wood borers only ate the bark, the wood underneath was completely healthy. This won’t be used for knives, at least not if I don’t have to do it. This is top-notch wood for the ax, hatchet, and hammer handles. The only other wood that is better for that purpose is hickory, and that does not grow around here. Besides these huge pieces I have also several smaller and shorter ones, so I won’t need to buy a hammer handle ever again.

Jatoba (Hymenaea courbaril)

A few days were spent not cutting but sorting my unexpected treasure pile. I have probably over half a cubic meter of jatoba wood. Enough to make thousands of knives, if I made only knives out of it. So I will also make knife blocks, end-grain cutting boards, and maybe other things too. I have big plans, and I do hope to live to fulfill at least some of them.

It is an extremely hard and dense wood, very difficult to work with but it should also be very durable in the end product. It turns in ammonia to dark brown, almost black. I do not think the wood is improved that way so I probably won’t bother with it.

Shame that in that huge amount of wood there were only several pieces that show the heartwood-sapwood boundary. And of those three show very interesting spalting patterns in the sapwood. I think these should be reserved for special occasions.

Sycamore maple (Acer pseudoplatanus)

White-yellowish wood with visible lignin rays on tangential cuts. It is reasonably hard with small pores, prone to burning when cut with a table saw – as you can see. Like ash, there is no visible difference between heartwood and sapwood. It stains well, but ammonia has no effect on it whatsoever. I have several pieces big enough to make knife blocs out of, especially if I use it as a veneer. I also have some spalted pieces in there, although so far nothing exceptional.

I have a huge log from my own garden that was half-eaten by ants and fungi. Unfortunately, I did not manage to cut it into prisms yet, so I do not know if it will be useful or not. Like all maples, sycamore is not very resistant to rot and insect damage, spalting in wood that was exposed to elements for any length of time is common.

Most of the sycamore wood I have gotten from one of my friends, whose parents felled a huge tree over twenty years ago. I helped with the work and got some wood in return. That is a recurring theme, as you can probably see by now. But I have also one huge plank (you can see it with the jatoba pile)- from the top of my head circa 30 x 50 mm and 1 m long – and I have absolutely no idea where I got that one. It looks like an offcut from a sawmill, but I never bought this wood at a sawmill. Well, the mystery will remain unsolved, I will probably make a nice knife bloc out of it.

Wych Elm (Ulmus glabra)

The white insect-damaged bundle is from a tree that died standing in the forest from whence I have taken it a few years ago. The healthy wood underneath it is from a log that I have gotten from my friend more than two decades ago, from a tree in his garden.

I am bummed that I did not have a chance to get my hands on elm wood when elms were felled during road renovations around here. Felling elms should be criminal since they are very rare due to dutch elm disease. But if they have to be felled, it would be better to make them into something pretty than just burn them. It is not an exceptional wood, but it is not completely plain-looking either. It is hard and my table saw vas already blunt at this point because I have hit a stone in one of the rootballs. It would probably be excellent for end-grain cutting boards because it has interlocking grain and is thus resistant to splitting.

Meranti (Shorea sp.)

A mystery wood that reader tuatara was kind enough to identify for me. It looks kinda like palm wood (for which I have initially mistaken it), other than that I know nothing about it. It is also similar to mahogany. I only have two pieces, so it will either go into handles or a two-knife kitchen set.

And with that, I am done for today but not done yet. There will be more.

A Big Commission – Part 2 – New Magnetic Thingamajig

My magnetic chuck for grinding bevels works well and I am still using it but it is unsuitable for establishing the bevels on a huge blade like this. I have actually been thinking about this for some time, and the kukri commission was in the end just a suitable excuse to play for two days with magnets and exercise my grey matter a bit.

The thing I came up with was a combination of a magnetic jig and the sharpenatrix. That alone could not work because it does not allow me to get as close to the belt as I need. And also it has a fixed length, so in certain positions, the blade like the kukri would actually be partly above the tallest point on the belt. Thus I established that I need:

a telescopic arm
a switchable permanent magnet

Both of those things can be bought, sometimes even in conjunction. But they are really expensive and for my purposes, even the cheapest and smallest ones are needlessly bulky and heavy. Yes, at long last, finally a chance for me to just dick around with various scraps and it is really economic use of my time!

After some trial and error, I have gotten the best results with just two magnetic arrays from two broken speaker magnets and four flat pieces of mild steel from a broken clamp.

The magnets are oriented in both arrays with the north in the same direction on both sides of the pipe in the middle. And since they were broken into irregular pieces, I have glued them in with a mixture of steel dust and epoxy to better facilitate the transfer of the magnetic field into the steel. With one exception – the side that is going to hold the workpiece has a bit of brass between the steel bars, so the magnetic field does not extend there all the way to the surface between them. The piece of stainless steel non-magnetic pipe in the middle allows me to connect the two magnets with an axis around which they can swivel freely. When the poles of both arrays are aligned, they repulse each other but the whole assembly sticks to steel on the sides very strongly. When they are misaligned, the whole thing is nearly non-magnetic all around.

Here you can see me testing it. A threaded copper rod is fixed to one of the magnetic arrays and will connect it to the telescopic arm later on. A stainless, non-magnetic steel rod is also fixed (riveted) into that magnetic array. The second array can rotate freely on the top. At this stage, I got my first bonus – both extreme configurations are stable without the need for any mechanical locking mechanism and the outward magnetic force builds up/disappears quickly, not gradually.

Now you can see it nearly finished. The telescopic arm consists of several parts:

the 8 mm copper rod with stainless steel nut fixed into the array
thin 12 mm steel tube lined with 10 mm brass tube in the upper half to ensure a tight fit for the copper rod.
10 mm steel rod with thread at the end on which the ball from sharpenatrix can be screwed
2 screws go through threads in two pieces of thicker tube and through all the tubing to lock both the steel and the copper rods in fixed positions. There are brass inserts under each screw to ensure they do not scratch the surface of the rods. Hopefully.

The knob was only added so I do not poke myself with the sticking screw during work and it turned out to be a second bonus – it allows me to hold onto the blade with one hand and comfortably hold and switch on/off the magnet with the other.

With that, the arm was not finished yet, but it was functional, so I went on and tested it. And it worked really well. Not ideally, but it did help a lot, especially with a complicated grind like this. Kukri changes the blade width over the lenght of the blade, so to reduce the weight, keep it strong, and optimize the cutting capability towards the end of the blade the primary bevel has to be steeper on the wider portion of the blade than on the narrow part. So I had to grind it in two steps. The first step was to establish the less- steep bevel on the whole blade (approx 5°).

The second step was to establish the steeper bevel on the wide portion of the blade whilst carefully feathering it into the narrow portion. The grind on the intermediate portions is a bit funny-shaped, which I will have to correct with a file. Later during polishing (this will only go to 100 or perhaps 120 grit), it will smoothen out, I did make blades like this already, although not of this size and not with a belt grinder.

I made this grind in about an hour, which is speedy, especially considering that I was working with a new jig. I slipped up on two parts on the other side before I figured out how to best use it, but nothing that would not be corrected in polishing.

As a final touch, I have encased both arrays in alluminium housing so they do not gather steel dust. And I painted ON/OFF markings with a sharpie to have visual clues during work.

If it were a bit stronger, I would not have those two slip-ups that I had, but it is strong enough to be useful – it has over 2,5 kg lifting force, which is in my opinion impressive given that the initial magnets on their own have barely lifted anything.

Overall I am very pleased with the result. I now know how to make small switchable permanent magnets. I still have some ordinary black magnets to play with, but I will probably also buy some small neodymium magnets and build myself a variety of magnetic holders with high force. Even a small flat magnetic plate can cost several hundred €. With some care and planning, I think I could make a useful one myself for a fraction of the cost in just a few days.

Showing off My Wood – Part 1

In case you have been wondering about what I was doing for these last two months, I was cutting wood.

I have not planned on making knives for a living, not consciously at least, but I have been hoarding various kinds of wood for crafting for over two decades by now. It was very disorganized, for some pieces I have never known the exact species and I had to guess it now with varying degrees of certainty, and most of it was not immediately useful – mostly logs and branches of various sizes and thicknesses. I wanted to cut the wood into prisms for a long time, but for that to happen I had to 1) have a saw that would allow me to do that and 2) the weather must be suitably dry but not extremely hot for a significant amount of time because I need to work outdoors, my shop is not big enough. And this year both of those things finally coincided. I have now a big-ish table saw and the weather was suitable long enough. I also had the additional incentive in the rising prices of firewood that I have mentioned previously.

Table saw is not ideal for this kind of work, a band saw would be better and safer. But I have managed it without an accident, all my appendages are still appendaged and I did not have any serious kickbacks (two moderate ones I admit) or even near-incidents either. I am terrified of tablesaws since childhood, so I am very, very careful around them. That is one of the reasons why it took me two months, appart from the huge amount of wood that I had to process – I have taken breaks whenever I felt that my attention begins to fade, which was after two hours of work at most.

So now let’s dive into it and show you my wood – in no particular order (actually the order is alphabetic but in Czech).

This will be a series, otherwise it would be waaay toooo loooong.

Black elder (Sambucus nigra)

Light-colored wood with small pores. Not very rot resistant, so many pieces have visible damage from fungus and insects – some in an interesting way, some might still just end up heating the house. I have a lot of it, even a lot of completely healthy pieces. When worked, it stinks to the high heavens. Finished wood has a nice creamy-white-yellow color, when treated with ammonia the yellow becomes even more pronounced, becoming canary yellow, almost light orange.

Birch (Betula pendula)

I do not have big enough pieces to make whole kitchen knife sets, but I have enough smaller pieces with an interesting small burl or wavy pattern to make several dozens of puukko and possibly some wooden jewelry too. I also have some pieces that might be worthy of a chef’s knife, but most of them will be puukko. Birch has creamy white wood, very hard but not rot-resistant. Ammonia does change it to light brown.

I also managed over the years to get my hands on a few impressively thick pieces of birch bark, not only the papery outer layer. The thick bark is very hard and it does have an interesting pattern. It can be a bit brittle under tension, but it holds up under compression well, so it can be used as a spacer between the bolster and the handle, or for stacking handles.

White Oak (Quercus sp.)

I have a small box of handle scales cut out from crotch wood that I sorted out from firewood, although not very many. I also have a box of smaller pieces and several big-ish pieces of spalted and insect-damaged oak root balls from several smaller trees that died standing in the forest and I poached them from there several decades ago (it is legal to take dead wood from the forest here, but it must lay on the floor and only up to 7 cm in diameter). Those could make very interesting knives and knife blocks.

And then I have a big pile of prisms cut from an old church cross, here is just the tip of the woodberg. Enough for dozens of knives including blocks – from masive wood. This oak wood is mostly light brown, it can be made dark brown or nearly black with ammonia.

Garapa (Apuleia leiocarpa)

I have written about this in one previous post. I am not 100% certain about having the species identified correctly, but this is very dense and very hard wood with tiny pores, which is typical for wood from the family Fabaceae. It looks very promising, but unfortunately, all the pieces are of the same dimensions – 30×30 mm. That limits the type and shape of the knife handle that I can make. Even so, I do have enough for several knife sets including blocs. I have no idea how it behaves and how it reacts to ammonia treatment, I will have to find out.

Hawthorn (Crataegus sp.)

I was surprised to find this wood in my pile. I have no idea where and how I got it, it was probably in the pile of wood that I got from my cousin about twenty years ago. He worked at that time in park maintenance and got his hands on various species. It is hard and dense wood, but that is all I know, I haven’t made anything from it yet. One of my neighbors has several relatively freshly dead hawthorn trees on his property, I consider asking him if I could have some of them for crafting. It appears to be moderately interesting wood.

Apple (Malus domestica)

I have one small box of smaller pieces of burl, root, and crotch wood. There could be some very interesting knife handles in there.

I also have a lot of healthy apple wood, enough for several knife blocks and dozens of knives. But I will probably use it as a veneer for the blocks, I do not have that much. It is very prone to insect and fungus damage, so I had to toss a lot of it. But there is an upside to that too.

The upside is that I have several huge pieces of interestingly colored spalted apple wood, enough for luxury high-end cutlery sets. I am doing some research in that regard and I am coming to interesting – and favorable – conclusions.

Apple has small pores and not very distinct growth rings. I do not think I have many pieces with the heartwood-sapwood boundary because the sapwood was destroyed by wood borers and cracked, but I have enough heartwood to make some really interesting and pretty stuff. I do not know how apple responds to ammonia treatment yet. I suspect it would turn dark brown to nearly black.

That’s all for today, there will be several more posts.

Corona Crisis Crafting: This Time for Real

Well, sitting in a chair making tiny movements is something that still works, so I made jewelry, what else…

This set predates my Covid infection. It’s polymer clay with so called silkscreen stencils.

Who’s a good little fire demon? Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle is one of the sweetest half-villains ever conceived.

Come swimming in a sea of flowers. Yes, those roses are hand made. Yes, I know. My sister got a matching pair.

Come to the beach with me. This was a cane made after a Youtube tutorial and I really like the results.

And last but not least, some beadwork: The Sungoddess

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Affinity

Art, Fun, & Nonsense.

I made a video!

Eddie Izzard on the Daleks

Computer difficulties

The Probability Broach: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story

Bin Laden Victory Lap

Update on my new novel, Revenge of the Phantom Press

LLMs Can't Code

A New Workbench

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Spatzenbaden

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A Big Commission – Part 8 – Photographing

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A Big Commission – Part 6 – The Sharpenstone

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A Big Commission – Part 5 – The Stitchening

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A Big Commission – Part 4 – Surface Finish & Glue-up

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A Big Commission – Part 3 – Stuff Got Really Hard

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Showing off My Wood – Part 2

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A Big Commission – Part 2 – New Magnetic Thingamajig

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Showing off My Wood – Part 1

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Corona Crisis Crafting: This Time for Real

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