Project Badgermascus – Part 5 – Handle Scales

Tomorrow you will get a break from this project, I promise. But today, the Great Flattening from yesterday has continued.

After some deliberations I have decided to try and go for fully blackened brass fittings. That means that the blade will be dark grey, and the fittings really, really dark gray. What kind of handle material should I use? Marcus has sent me a nice piece of stabilized spalted maple, but I do not think it is the right material for this project. Ditto, any of the dark woods that I have. I think the blade deserves the poshest material I have available – bone. I think it will provide a nice contrast to the dark metal.

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Which meant I first had to rough-cut the scales with a hacksaw, which is one hell of a job, let me tell you. Bandsaw or any electrical saw is a big no-no for cutting bone, this has to be done manually. Including pre-cutting he flat sides, before grinding them truly flat.

Thus I had to spend the whole working day with a respirator and my fingers are all sore now. Because the grinding had to be done manually too. Belt sander does work on bone, but it destroys belts way too quickly for my liking and as I learned in the past, these thin flat pieces would have a tendency to be dragged out of my grasp, increasing the risk of injury or bungled work. So flatstone+glue+sandpaper it was. Maybe after I build myself a disk-grinding attachment this work will be easier, but now it is not.

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The scales are ever so slightly bigger than the tang and thicker than the bolster now, and they will remain so. I do not intend for a flush fit, but for a proud one ( I have seen English-speaking knife-makers refer to it as “heirloom fit” although I was not able to find anything specific about it, so I am not sure that is the correct term).

The principle is the same in carpentry – whenever two surfaces join, you can make the joint either hidden or visible, but it should not be visible because you failed to hide it. So if you make it visible, it should be apparent that it was intentional. Like gluing in spacers, making the surfaces meet in a groove and not on a flat, etc.

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Today’s work ended in the kitchen, where the two rough-ground scales ended in a pot at 60°C for an hour or so with circa a teaspoon of washing soda and one spoon of washing powder in 1 l of water to dissolve and wash out as much of remaining fat as possible. In the end I have added a teaspoon of hydrogen peroxide to whiten the bones a bit, although complete whitening is not possible on these.

Tomorrow when they are dry I shall fill the hollows on the inside (where marrow used to be) with epoxy to make them flat. After that, I can start the remaining works, i.e. fit and polish the pommel, drill all the holes, and finally, the glue-up. We will see how that goes.

Project Badgermascus – Part 4 – The Great Flattening

Today I have started the work on the handle, starting with brass fittings. First I have cut four pieces of brass, two for the bolster, two for the pommel, and I drilled 2,5 mm holes in the bolster pieces. On the left piece, I have then cut M3 thread and on the right piece, I have widened the holes to 3 mm.

For pins, I am going to be using a 3 mm brass rod. I cut 4 small pieces and on each, I have made a bit of M3 thread to go into the left side of the bolster (and later on the pommel). The M3 threads are, strictly speaking, unnecessary, but I find they help with two things. First, they help to keep track of which part is left and which is right, so I do not confuse them at some point and make a false cut with a file. Second, fiting the two halves together is easier, because the pins hold fast in place and do not fall off when manhandling the assembly.

I guess these preparations should not take me too long. They took me over five hours. The drilling, cutting etc was not the biggest issue. The biggest issue was the tang. During polishing of the blade it became noticeably thinner, and because the polished area bleeds over to the tang, the tang was not flat anymore – it was a few tenths of a mm thinner at the bolster. So I went and flattened it on a stone.

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As you can see, the tang has relatively deep gashes cut into it with the edge of the grinding wheel. Those are there for three purposes – they reduce the weight, they provide a good grip for the epoxy later on, and they reduce the area that needs to be manually ground off when making the tang flat.

Even so it took me a lot longer than it should have because I did not have the correct sandpaper readily available. What you see here is green corundum, which should be used only dry and only for wood. I have to buy very coarse wet & dry sandpaper, but I keep forgetting and the coarsest I have in stock is 120 grit, which is not nearly enough for this.

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And this is where I am now. Next, I will polish and finish the front side of the bolster but not assemble it. Then I will make the handle scales, fit and drill those, and only after that is done I will drill and fit the pommel part. I have not decided yet whether or not the pommel needs a hole for a lanyard.

The way things are going, I have still quite a few days of work ahead of me.

Project Badgermascus – Interlude 3 – Blackness Achieved!

Kestrel mentioned some commercial blackening compounds containing Tellurium and that train of thought sent me down a path of thinking whether I do or do not have some chemical compound containing sulfur anions, which too react with copper to make a black color. And I realized that I do because a solution of polysulfide is sold as a common fungicide. It does not work on brass directly, but if that brass is first coated with copper, then it does work. So I did exactly that, and voila! It takes a long time, but it works.

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It is not pitch-black, it has a bit of bluish-grey tint to it, but under a coat of wax or lacquer, it would be a lot darker. I consider it a definitive success.

I am wondering whether it would be possible to make pictures on brass with different patinas. As a kind of colored etching process. I do not see a reason why that should not work.

Project Badgermascus – Interlude 2 – Practice Makes Perfect (Allegedly)

I want this knife to be special because the blade deserves it. That means not only patined fittings but also decorations. So I have decided to do some filework – definitively on the tang spine and possibly the belly too.

However, I did not do a lot of filework yet. I did some, but that was twenty years ago and not only was it rubbish, but I have also already forgotten everything I learned back then.

So I am in this conundrum – I really want to make something I know I am not good at making. So I have decided to do today a practice day. I took a piece of mild steel, ground it to roughly the thickness of the tang, straightened it and I went on to figure out the hows and whats.

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What you can see here from top to bottom is a progression both in time and (I hope it can be also seen) in quality. The top one took me over two hours, the last one under one hour. Whilst the photo magnifies all the little imperfections to an unreasonable degree, there is still definitively a lot of space for improvement, some issues are still visible even at arms-length viewing distance.

I am bloody nervous about doing this because if a file slips, there is no way back. It was a huge problem for the first three patterns actually – establishing the first cut was the biggest issue I had. Files have angled teeth and they cut best when drawn perpendicularly to the edge. When you run a file at an angle, not only has it a tendency to slip and wander off, it also behaves differently when used left-handed as opposed to right-handed. Once the cut is established, all these problems are a lot less pronounced, but establishing that first cut precisely where you need it to be and at the right angle is a major PITA.

For the fourth pattern, I have finally found out how to best establish that initial cut. I have a beat-up knife made from an old saw blade in my workshop, that gets used for all those jobs a knife is good for but simultaneously not advised for. Like putting the edge on a piece of steel and hitting the spine with a hammer, to establish a cut line in the metal surface. Which is what I did here. Essentially like a center-punch for drilling. And just like center-punching prevents drill bits from wandering, line-punching prevents files from doing the same.

Now to beat my anxiety and to convince myself that I can do this…

Project Badgermascus – Interlude 1 – Sciencing How to Patina on Brass

So, the blade came out of the etch just spiffing, and giving it dark bluish-grey patina with tannic acid made it look really cool and mean, almost tacticool. But it is, of course, no longer shiny. Which made me think a lot about how to proceed from now on.

As you know, this is my first time working with damascus. Up until now, I have worked either with carbon mono steel or stainless mono steel, either with mirror or satin finish. Making the fittings on such steels from new brass, aluminium or steel is perfectly OK and does not detract from the blade. But making fittings shiny on this blade would feel, as we say in Czech, “jako pěst na oko” (like a fist punch in the eye). I do not have any spare damascus or mokume gane to go with it, nor the means and knowledge to make them, so what can I do? And the title, of course, gives away what I have decided to try – to make the fittings out of brass and make a patina on them.

So I went to my personal library, took out my favorite book “Chemistry for everybody” (published in CZ in 1990) and looked up the recipes in there. Then I looked a bit around the internet too. And then I went and bought a lot of pre-made commercial solutions for the job… NOT.

I looked up which chemicals that I already have could kinda-sorta emulate what the book says should be used for copper, brass and bronze and then I have of course performed a series of experiments to try whether I can make my own solutions. And the results are pleasing. And because there are a lot of pictures in this, the rest is below the fold.

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Project Badgermascus – Part 3 – Polishing and Etching

Well, now that I am down to only one blade, I can at least concentrate on it. So I did and today I have polished it all the way to 7.000 grit. There is still cable damascus on the very tip, but I have decided against making the knife shorter again and I will go with it as it is. The cable damascus is hardened and in composition similar to the 1095, so it will still cut and hold an edge well.

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

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

Now it will sit in FeCl3 for a while.

Initially, I have used still relatively concentrated solution (~1/10 dillution of solution for printed circuit boards) to see where the 1095 is. Now I am using a very diluted solution (~1/100) for the final etch, because etching this works a bit differently than etching damascus made from two kinds of steel where one has high nickel content. Why is that?

As a former chemist, I know at least a bit about what is going on now so I can show off.

The way etching works on carbon steel like this is an electrochemical process. The impurities gather during the forging process at the boundaries between the various steel layers and those impurities make the steel in those areas more susceptible to chemical attack because they create a sort of microscopic electric cells that attract the ions from the solution to the area. That is why in the etch with the more concentrated solution the cable steel quickly turned all grey and the 1095 remained all silvery – the 1095 is a mono steel with very few impurities uniformly spread throughout, whereas the cable, whilst being similar to the 1095 in chemical composition, has most impurities concentrated at the boundaries between former cable strands and at the boundary with the 1095.

In a concentrated solution, the reaction happens too quickly and can lead to pitting in areas with inclusions or more impurities. And a layer of various oxides builds up, leading to blotchy, uneven etch. That is ideal for revealing where the mono steel in the sandwich is, but not so great for showing the grain boundaries.

A diluted solution gives the reaction more time to attack the steel more evenly, but it of course also takes a lot longer. I probably won’t risk letting it sit in there overnight, but it will take hours. Allegedly the smiths of times bygone have used fruit (citrus, apple) juices, and it took a very long time, but I do not have several pieces to make a scientific study of it. Although, I might just cut the failed pairing knife into several pieces and perform an experiment….. Hm. I will think about it, that would be one way to get some knowledge and some fun out of a failure.

Project Badgermascus – Part 2 – More Failure

I want to stress up front, that none of these failures is Marcus’s fault.

So, what went wrong this time, I don’t hear you ask? Well, a lot, I am down one blade out of three.

I thought the pairing knife goes on really well, until 320 grit when I noticed a little perpendicular line on the spine. And It was not a line in the damascus pattern – those become visible during polishing, and that is very cool – it is a crack. I do not know when it happened. It might be there from the start, it might have happened when I was straightening the blade, it might have cracked due to the stresses involved during polishing – it is a very thin piece of steel after all. There are also some imperfect welds with inclusions in the piece, but this is not one of them, this is a crack.

Cracked spine. There is one more crack on the other side of the blade too. © Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

No matter the cause, this blade is now irredeemable garbage, the only thing it could be reworked to is an awl,

I am going to finish the piece only as a show of what it could have been, but I am definitively not using any fancy materials for the handle. I planned on using stabilized maple burl (also a gift from Marcus), but now it will probably be just some random piece of birch or oak.

Works on the boot knife also did not go well. First I messed up the grind, bigly, but that was not the problem, that was still repairable, there was enough material that needed thinning out anyway. What was not repairable was the position of the cutting edge towards the blade’s tip. It turns out that I did not hit the 1095 at the center of the blank quite well. My grind was straigth, but the the 1095 in the center of the san mai damascus was bending ever so slightly to the left in this area. Had I positioned my grind just about 0.25 mm to the left, this would not have happened.

The darker cable damascus is reaching all the way to the cutting edge near the tip, where only the shiny 1095 should be.
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I have tried to re-grind the blade, but for that, I had to make it about 1 cm shorter and I  do not think it looks as well as it did before, it is too short and stubby. It should become a usable little knife, but I am not happy with it, and I am not finished yet.

Next time I will work with san mai damascus, I will probably first polish and etch the edge to see exactly where the cutting steel is. Too bad I did not think of that before.

All in all, so far this project has made me nearly cry several times and to want to quit knife-making because I am no good at it. When one spends several days with some work only then for all that effort to be for nothing, it has quite an influence on one’s mood.

Project Badgermascus – Part 1- Three Pieces of Steel, Two Kinds of Failure

Well, the title gives away that this article won’t end well. I am glad I did not start to write about this project right from the start as a series, I dislike having expectations build up only to be disappointed so I do not wish to do that to readers. And this is why I was also putting off work on this for so long – it was always a project with the potential of high reward – and high risk of failure.

You may remember that Marcus was so very kind and has sent me some damascus to play with, three pieces to be precise – one san-mai of 1095 and cable and two pieces of just cable.

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Here you can see the san-mai piece on the right already partially cleaned and ground, then in the middle is the smaller piece of cable with the scale cleaned off already with vinegar bath and on the left the big piece of cable damascus as it came. On that one, I had to grind the scale off with an angle grinder and after that, I have ground all the pieces to flat-ish until I could not spot any imperfections on the surface that might signify poor weld. This must be done since each inclusion or poor weld increase the probability of failure. It took me the whole last Friday to do this.

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With all the pieces flat, I could decide what kind of blade I would want to make out of them.

The san-mai damascus had one end of the bar rather ugly and it had an unseemly weld right in the middle, so making it into a long blade with hidden tang was not feasible. So I have decided to make it into a small drop-point boot hunting knife.

The smaller piece of cable damascus would look great as a dagger, but for that, it was too thin, so I have decided to make it into a pairing knife.

The big piece was just about the right size for either a big chef-knife or a chopper. I have decided to go for a chopper.

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I cut the excess with angle-grinder and then ground the outlines and bevels with 40 grit belt (which was a matter of mere minutes with my new magnetic jig, it works really well and I am happy with it). A draw-filing took care of all the perpendicular scratches and flattened the surfaces a bit and my new file-guide has proven itself very useful for making the shoulders flat and straight. It really does speed up the work when you have proper tools at hand. And in case you are wondering why the clothespins  – they reduce vibrations and therefore the noise the blade and the tang make when filing the shoulders.

Drilling the holes was a nightmare, I have destroyed three 3 mm drill bits, which is something I did not expect. But I have managed to drill al I need and with this, I was done on Saturday.

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Today I have decided to normalize the steel before quenching, so I have covered all three pieces with a thin layer of clay to protect them from decarburization, I have heated them above austenitic temperature and then put them into a bucket of pearlite to cool off. That is a bit slower than how normalizing is usually done (which is air-cooling for about an hour) but faster than how annealing is done (which is very slow cooling in the furnace for multiple hours). I have done this two times for the cable damascus (with straightening after the first cycle – the pieces warped, showing that it was a good call to normalize them) and after that, I have performed one more air-cooling cycle for the san-mai, because it is much thicker than the other two and has required more straightening.

I wanted to try differential hardening on the cable damascus so I have prepared a mixture of clay, perlite, and a tiny bit of water-glass as a binder and adhesive. I did not want to wait overnight for it to dry, so I have used first a heat gun and then the forge with low-fuel reducing flame to dry it quickly, thus the dark greyish color of the clay. No clay fell off, it did not crack either, so far it seemed all to work well.

Well, quench is when it all went wahoonie-shaped.

First I have quenched the small blade, in water. Unfortunately, it was so small that I have overheated it, and thus instead of the differentially hardened blade, I got a full hardened one. I have decided to not try again and I will finish it as it is, it can still be a good blade, just not with a hamon.

As second went the san-mai. I have quenched that first in sunflower oil, pre-heated to 100 °C, and then in water. It has definitively hardened and it seemed to be OK afterward.

Last I have hardened the big chopper. I have learned my lesson from the small blade so I have paid more attention to color, adjusted the flame, and took care to heat the blade to only just above the austenitic transition on the cutting edge and just below that on the covered spine. Then I plunged it into water, agitated, pulled it out, plunged it in again, and agitated it some more to cool it off below the martensite start temperature quickly enough for it to harden.

And during that second plunge, I heard a quite tell-tale “ping” sound. That was the moment I knew this blade has failed. I have scraped the scale and clay off with an old angle-grinder disk and took it in daylight to search for a crack. And I found it, right in the middle of the blade.

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I will polish the blade a little bit in order to see whether I have succedes at the differential hardening at least (preliminary scratch-test would suggest yes). However the size and position of the crack make it unlikely that the piece will be salvageable for a smaller/thinner blade, it is smack in the middle and it seems to go all the way through the hardened part right up to the soft material on the spine.

Today was not a good day, however from what I have read, this happens even to very experienced smiths. Even so, it sucks. I hope that at least the remaining two blades have no nasty surprises hidden for me.

I will have to buy some high-carbon tool steel to practice differential hardening some more.

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 22 – Second Evaluation

The results are in, and there is not too much to say. First, a picture that is worth a thousand words:

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As you can see, I have indeed reduced the time needed to manufacture a knife by working in bulk, but only partially. The biggest time-saving was in the polishing of the blade, and that was mostly achieved by changing the method from manual polishing to mirror-polish, to satin-finish with the tumbler.

Where I have saved time by working in bulk, was in the basic grind of the blade – here has also significantly helped the magnetic jig that I have later improved again – and later on in heat treatment – here I did save a lot since I did not have to wait for the forge to heat-up and I only had to prepare everything once.

The small savings in other steps are “nice to have” but they are mostly insignificant. What I have to concentrate on now is the 20 minutes time per piece that I have spent correcting various mistakes, like re-grinding curly blades etc, and the nearly an hour that my workload grew for finishing the handles. But I think there I can only significantly save time by working with resin stabilized wood, which is not possible for all the woods involved (oak, jatoba, black locust), but could significantly help with the semi-decomposed wood that turned out some really beautiful pieces.

The overall time reduction of nearly three hours is nothing to sneeze at. Plus, it would probably be even better had I really worked on this consistently from start to finish and not with various interruptions over the span of over a year.

From this point onward I won’t write about this project in detail, but I will continue to take time measurements and trying to optimize my manufacturing process some more.

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 21 – The Last Six Knives

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.

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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.

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 20 – Three Finished Knives

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.

Magnetic Chuck for Grinding Bevels

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

© 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.