Pin Cutting Thingamajig

As I am (very slowly) ramping up my production, some problems arise that simply are not an issue when making knives only on occasion and each time of a different design. One of the most recent challenges was to cut a lot of 10-11 mm long pins & dowels for the “hidden pins” construction that I have decided to deploy as my main thing for kitchen knives with full tang. Currently, I am making four two-knife sets, and that means sixteen wooden dowels and sixteen metal pins. And whilst the length must not be exactly precise, it does need to be at least somewhat uniform.

Putting the dowel/tube/stick into the vice, cutting it, and then filing them in a jig to exact length was very boring and time-consuming, and fiddly. And I am glad to say I came up with a much better solution.

I drilled a 6 mm hole through a piece of black locust wood (6mm being the diameter that I will be mostly using for this design). Then I used the table saw to gouge approx 2 cm in the middle in a way where the blade cut just below the hole and just touched one of the edges, creating a sloped surface between two walls with holes.

Here you can see it in action. The screw on the right side plugs one of the holes and allows me to adjust how far a dowel/tube can be inserted on the left side. Then I can cut the dowel with a hacksaw inserted into a slot on the left side, cutting it off at an exact-ish length. The cut-off falls then off the slope onto the vice and the table. I might add some simple paper funnel in the future so they fall directly into a receptacle of some sort.

I haven’t tried it on metal tubes yet, but it has proven to be absolutely perfect for wooden dowels. I have cut more than 20 in under five minutes. If it works on metal too – and I hope it does – I will be very happy in da tent indeed, because that is one time-consuming and boring task reduced to near nonexistence. And it also should minimize material waste. Brass tubes don’t grow on trees, you know.

Getting a Different Grip on Handles

I have recovered from the vaccine haze and Christmas laze so today I was able to finish (i.e. sharpen and clean up) five knives. Initially, I have intended to make these with the usual rounded ergonomic handles, but during the work, I have decided to try something a bit different and I have made the handles with a hexagonal profile. With a flat back and belly and ridges somewhere around the middle of each scale. They do feel comfortable enough in the hand and this profile is very safe against the knife twisting in the hand if big force needs to be applied. With a knife, everything is about trade-offs between comfort, safety, costs, and functionality. What a piece of wisdom that surely does not apply anywhere else /s.

The first one is my medium-sized universal knife, with a rounded (or this time “clipped”) tip. The wood is a piece of very uniform birch wood that was pickled in ammonia which gave it a slightly brown color.

The second one has a handle from jatoba, and it is a kinda prototype of the type of knives that I want to make to make use of my jatoba treasure-trove.

Both of these have a bit thicker blades than I ideally want them to have. That makes them very sturdy, but perhaps less ideal for cutting some hard foods. Still should cut about anything with ease.

Of the five finished knives, three are chef knives.

One has again the handle from jatoba. I am very pleased with the handle, not so much with the blade. The curve of the cutting edge did not come out as I wanted it and I was unable to correct it during sharpening without risking destroying the blade.

The same objection applies to a knife with the handle from black locust, with the addition of the blade not having proper taper at all. – I have messed up the grind mightily on this one. Nobody else is probably going to notice it and the knife will be still perfectly functional, but I need to hold myself to a higher standard than that. Anyone can make a perfectly functional knife, it is not that hard.

The third one, with the handle from spalted poplar wood stabilized with honey-color dyed resin, is the closest to what I was aiming for of these three. A broad blade comes to an extremely fine cutting edge, slightly curved to allow for slicing as well as draw-cuts. This is a knife that I have no objections about. Well, except for a slight asymmetry in the handle shape. The asymmetry in coloring is of course due to the used wood and is part of the character,

These knives were supposed to be parts of sets, but I have messed up the numbering, so they will have to make their way in the world solo. I could not make a set of the spalted poplar anyway, I only had two pieces of that wood and I messed one of them up.

These angular ergonomic handles are easier to make than fully rounded ergonomic handles so I will make more of them, especially for cheap-ish knives with handles from jatoba and black locust. The pile of naked blades shrinks, but very slowly. There is still a lot, and I mean a lot of work to do.

Plush of the Month: Dragons!

Yes, I know

I’m two months behind, but in my defence, I don’t actually need any. This is supposed to be fun, and I didn’t have the spoons. But now I have a few days off and finally finished one of the three dragons I embroidered and cut out. Next project will be a bit more freestyle, but I’m not going to spill the beans yet. Anyway, here’s Fuego, the latest addition to the Giliell household. I think we need a third bed…

An orange plush dragon with big tan horns, a tan belly and floppy ears. He#s looking straight at the viewer

An orange plush dragon with big tan horns, a tan belly and floppy ears. You can see the tail fluff in red. Side view.

Well, Fuego got quickly adopted as Knöpfchen’s best friend

View of my Knife Testing Lab

Its Christmas and that means cutting up a lot of food in a lot of different ways. So I thought I might share a little peek in our humble knife testing facility.

My mother is giving the knives thorough testing and so far she has not found any task they are not suited for. I have tested them too, yesterday, when I was gutting, skinning, and fileting the carp for traditional Christmas dinner. The three knives were up all the tasks, including sewering the head from the body and de-boning the fish (which consists of cutting out the ribcage and spine). I am usually very critical of my work, and these knives do have some cosmetic issues but functionally I am very satisfied with the design. The handles do allow for a variety of grips that are commonly used in the kitchen by both noobs and pros. The rounded tips on the medium and the chef knife did allow me to easily scrape off the scales with the former and place one hand safely on the blade for additional pressure for the latter. The tip on the smaller knife was sharp enough to pierce the wall of the abdominal cavity and its shape did help to avoid piercing the guts as well when cutting it open. Which is important, especially regarding the gall bladder – if you pierce that, it can render a lot of the meat useless.

The testing will continue of course – what is not known yet is how the cheap oil finish will stand up to time. For that several months are needed at least, several years would be ideal. But I do know already that when I am finished with my current batch of knives, it is worth making these sets for sale because they are not just ornaments and will be genuinely useful to whoever buys them.

Regarding my third Covid shot, yesterday the slightly elevated temperature was gone and I was feeling mostly OK. But I did notice a symptom that I do not remember from my previous two shots – in addition to a sore shoulder near the injection site, the lymphatic nodes in my left armpit swole a bit and became tender, and the pain extended to my left pectoral muscle. It has receded a bit, but it still hurts somewhat, although not as much as to impede me in any meaningful way anymore.

It seems that I had a different reaction to each of my three shots, although they were all Pfizer. And not only different in duration, but also where, when, and how the symptoms are expressed. Interesting but hopefully not very consequential.

Birch Bark Handles

When I was flatterooning birch bark, I have got some sheets big enuff to make handle scales on smaller knives, so I did.

This one badger knife has one handle scale significantly darker than the other, and the lighter one has a distinct camo-look. I am not sure what to make of that, but the knife looks nice and functional.

On the second knife I had better luck finding more similar pieces of bark, but I was also experimenting with making ornamental pins and those were not entirely perfect. But I will probably continue making them, I think they do have kind of charm.

There is still a lot of blades to outfit before I can seclude to warm cozy indoors and make the leatherworks. In the meantime, I am thinking a bit about what kind of sheath would fit these knives best.

Simple Finish Knives

I have made twoo puukko. To be honest, I was not a fan of this type of knife at all. I have only decided to make them just as a part of my ongoing knifemaking education. But now I am totally a convert.

The first one has a handle made from birch bark, cow bone, and white brass. It looks a bit like a stacked leather handle but it feels different in the hand. Birchbark can be flattened by boiling it in hot water and pressing it between two boards to cool and dry off, making it into flat hard sheets. They are slightly more brittle than wood, but they do not have any preferred failure direction, so they do not split and break easily.

The second one has a handle from birch wood with a small burl in it. It is not proper burlwood, it was just a piece of firewood that I thought will be interesting. I think I was correct in that surmise. The endcap and bolster are from pakfong.

Both of these knives have just a simple finish to them. The blades’ primary bevels were ground only up to 120 grit and then tumbled after quenching in sand as long as it took to take all the scale off. Bolsters and end caps are not highly polished, as well as the handles. In fact, I took a steel brush to them to roughen the surfaces a bit. And the finish is just several layers of ordinary boiled linseed oil.

I was aiming for a simple, rough-looking sturdy knife as well as a simple, easy-ish manufacturing process. I think I have managed both. I really like these knives and I will make at least somewhat fancy sheaths for them. And I will definitively make more puukko in the future. I also think that this design is ideal for recycling old files into knives, so I will probably do some of that too.

Relativity of Value

In accordance with Czech law, my house must be visibly marked with my business identification number, my name, and the trade(s) that I am running here. So there is a small sign on the garden gate that says “manufacturing, sharpening, and repair of knives, shears and gardening tools and manufacture and repair of leather goods”. I have expected to get exactly zero business that way, because not very many people come by since I live at the end of a dead-end road, in the middle of large meadows. But my elderly neighbor has noticed it and she came by asking if I would sharpen her some shears, and two pruning shears ((large -loppers – and small). I have told her it will cost about 20,-€, which she accepted.

The pruning shears were modern tools and not in very bad shape. I had to disassemble them in order to sharpen them properly, but there was nothing interesting about them and sharpening did not take too long. But the ordinary shears were in very bad shape indeed.

Those were tools over fifty, some possibly even a hundred years old. They were extremely dull and battered, most did not even close fully at the tip due to excessive wear and lack of proper maintenance for decades. The protective nickel or chrome coating has mostly worn off and they were covered in patina instead. But they were made in times when things were made to last, so I got to work.

Thus I have sharpened all the edges and I bent the blades and the handles and peened the rivets so they close and cut properly all the way from the base to the tips. I did not attempt to remove the patina, since that could destroy them. But I have restored them to full functionality and, given the quality of their manufacture, they will now probably last several more decades. And I managed to do all this in just over an hour of work since it was not my first time I have so I knew what to do and how, otherwise asking for money would be a bit cheeky.

Even so, I was in for a surprise when I brought them to my neighbor, who was so thrilled with them that she offered twice the agreed price, which I had to decline. I would feel like a thief taking the price of several new shears for sharpening old ones, although I am convinced that these old ones are better now than many of the cheap new ones she could get for that price. But I have told her that I will gladly accept any pretty pieces of wood if she fells some of the sickly fruit trees in her garden.

I Made a Shoe Rack

I took a break from making knives and the last three days I have spent testing my new circular saw by the means of making something with it. My mother has requested a small shoe rack that would fit between a wall, an open bedroom door, and a washing machine. That meant the rack has to have a bit funny shape, as you can see.

It was made mostly from recycled materials. All the shelves and the sides are made from old kitchen cabinet doors. The sides are covered with adhesive wallpaper and the tops of the shelves themselves are covered with pieces of PVC flooring leftovers from house renovations. The upper one has a different color in the photo due to additional light from the window, they are all the same IRL.

Doing this kind of work with my new table saw was a joy, but the saw has one design feature that I think is done extremely poorly in comparison to my previous one (and in fact even in comparison with my home-built belt grinder and tumbler) – the design of the on/off switch. The old one had an extra emergency switch that could be easily pressed with an open palm, or a knee or whatever body part is near. This one only has an elevated red off button that is not very big and not readily accessible, it requires a bit of fumbling about under the table edge to find and a firm and relatively precise push is needed. I must say that as much as I love the tool, this particular feature would earn the designing engineer a clip around the earhole from me because it is very, very daftaroony. Everything else – the dust collection exhaust, the folding legs, the extendable table supports, the adjustable cut depth/angle works very well and easily, the ergonomy of all those parts is great. But for that bloody daft on/off switch alone, I would take it one and a half star out of five if I were writing an official review. A beast of a machine like this just must have an emergency off-switch that even a panic-stricken and/or injured person can immediately find.

I may be overly strict in my expectations, but this one is a real bummer for me. If it did not violate the warranty, I would change it for something more suitable straight away. I might build something with an extension cable that would allow me to have an easily accessible emergency switch without compromising the integrity of the machine.

Accidentally Tacticool?

I have designed this knife with a focus on ease of manufacture. It is meant to be a simple design that would allow me to utilize micarta made when impregnating wooden handles with epoxy. The metal bolsters are not exactly easy to make, but micarta would allow me to forgo them completely if I ever decide to do so. I do not like knives without bolsters, thou.

The ornamental pins came out more asymmetrical than I hoped for, I will have to use another method to get them more consistent. And the black micarta, made from old jeans, looks tacticool, which is not entirely intended. The knife is a small outdoor knife, suitable for example for mushroom picking. In fact, my father immediately said it would be a knife ideal for mushroom picking upon seeing it, which made me happy because that was my intent.

Then I have also made a badger knife with a handle from micarta. But this time it was not micarta made from stacked layers of fabric but from smaller cuts of different colors crumpled together in the resin.

It is hard to take a photo of, but the crumpled fabric does give the micarta a black&grey camo look, which is again more tacticool than I intended. I will probably start making micarta with bright colors because those are more suitable for a forest walk IMO – if you lose them, you have better chances of finding them than these. Although the stainless steel would, of course, gleam like a naked bum amongst the undergrowth.

I will probably furnish both of these with simple black sheaths. These knives are meant to be simple.

An Experimental Kitchen Knives Set

This set is numbered, but I won’t be selling it. I have tried several new things whilst making it and it was designed in part with a focus on ease of manufacture, except the experimental dimples in the blades.

The stand is made from three slabs of massive black locust wood and the front of the knife stand, the bolsters, and the end caps on knife handles are made from a coconut shell. Fitting the curved coconut shell perfectly to a piece of wood is of course not possible, and I have solved that problem quite successfully by dyeing the epoxy glue dark brown.

The finish is simply drying oil (commercial “Teak oil” which is a mixture of various oils) applied in several layers daily for over a week. It is still a bit tacky to the touch, but that should solve itself in time and with use. The surfaces are not overly polished – I did not go above 330 grit for both the metal and the wooden parts. Black locust wood has big pores in its growth rings, so polishing it very highly makes little sense anyway. I have, in fact, brushed the wood with a steel brush to accentuate the pores.

I tried to make divots in the blades to make them less sticky to food, but it did not work out, they have too small a diameter to have any noticeable effect (I think). I will either have to build a tool to make these divots wider or to make very shallow fullers reliably and reproducibly. Neither of those two tasks is easy and I do not currently have any ideas.

The handles are not of an overly complicated shape, they have simply hexagonal profiles with some curvature to the facets and smoothed edges. They are reasonably easy to make and comfortable in the hand. The tang is held not only with glue but also with a nut on the end, which is covered by the coconut shell endcap.

I think these three knives should cover just about any task that an ordinary home cook needs to do in their kitchen. I hope. I have given the set now to my mother to test and I have forbidden her to use any other knife for the time being under the serious threat of confiscating her other knives. She has got instructions to use and abuse them to test them thoroughly. If they pass the test, I will make multiple sets (without the divots in the blades) for sale.

I have also been thinking of adding this kind of picture in the future to my blades when I offer them for sale on the interwebs, to save myself the trouble of having to write the sizes in words for each piece. What do you think about that idea?

One Santoku, Two Santoku, Three Santoku…

Today was finishing day – I finished six knives, three of which are Japanese-style santoku kitchen knives.

Japanese knives are not my forte. I know a bit about them, but not much. I do not intend to make them in significant numbers. Not only because I am not Japanese, but also because some of them are highly specialized tools optimized for one specific task and most people here in Europe would have no clue whatsoever how to use them or care for them and those who do would probably prefer to buy them from actual Japanese craftsmen. But I had three offcuts that just lent themselves for this type of blade and I am all for making the most with the least amount of waste.

Where I (afaik) differ most significantly from Japanese blades is the round-heeled ricasso. And the knives are glued together with epoxy.

This one has a handle from olive wood, cow bone, and buffalo horn. The handle is asymmetrical – the bone piece is not flat but rounded. Fitting the wood, bone, and horn together was thus a bit of work, but I have managed to fit them together fairly well, albeit not perfectly. The handle has a D profile, with a flat-ish top and rounded belly.

Olive wood is extremely beautiful and I should have probably saved the piece for a worthier blade. But it stinks to the heavens when worked and is somewhat greasy so it tends to clog up abrasives something awful. Due to the greasiness of the wood, I have finished the handle with tung oil, five layers over two weeks. And when I was at it, I used the same finish for the other two as well.

This is just a simple two-piece handle, bone bolster, and Santos mahogany wood. This wood works reasonably well and is very dry, the exact opposite of Olive. It does not gum up the tools, but it makes a lot of dust that likes to float around. I think it is a neat knife. The handle has a rounded belly and a faceted back.

And last a knife with a handle from my late cherry tree, cow bone, and buffalo horn. The handle is faceted, probably the closest to a true Japanese-style knife.

They are all 160-170 mm long blades, with handles 110-130 mm. I am not planning to make more unless I get suitable offcuts again.,

I Think This Will Cut It

My new circular table saw arrived today. I haven’t got round to using it yet, for I had some time-sensitive work to do in the garden, but tomorrow I am definitely going to use it because I have bought a small bedside table that needs some modifications to fit into my living room properly.

It is not the most prestigious and expensive tool imaginable, but it was fairly expensive so I really, really, really hope it works well. I was putting off this purchase for as long as I could, but I needed a proper table saw for a long time by now. This one seems to be sturdy, the table is nice and flat and it has built-in extension support and various end-stops, as well as grooves for cutting jigs.

It can cut up to 87 mm depth, which is nearly double what I was able to cut with my previous setup. And of course, setting of cutting depth and angle is much more convenient with no fiddling under the table and cursing the whole time because I cannot get the depth and/or angle right. It is powerful but can still be connected to my shop vacuum (it has 2000 W usage, which is near the maximum), so I do not need to plug it separately and turn on two devices for each cut or have the vacuum run continuously – the vacuum will start automatically with the saw when the saw is plugged into it.

And the thing that makes me most happy so far – the legs can be folded and it can be stowed away under my workbench in the same place where my previous saw was residing. Hooray! I need not do any big changes to the Shoppe!

I got a new toy

There’s some things I’ve been eyeballing for ages, but could never justify the expenses, and one of those things is a die cutting machine. Basically those things are two drums that are moved with a crank and the cutting happened via pressure. You can make very fiddly and intricate designs . Having paid off my teeth (and just before I got a new toothache and our washing machine broke), I decided to treat myself to a basic die cutting set and make some paper crafts.

These are beautiful. And a lot of work. They are about 10 cm in total and consist of three parts: the bottom and two side pieces. Not to mention the deer and squirrel, which are added separately.

Making the little boxes from colourful paper was a good time filler for the little one’s birthday. I guess I#ll be making my own christmas cards this year.

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Pin Cutting Thingamajig

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Getting a Different Grip on Handles

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Plush of the Month: Dragons!

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View of my Knife Testing Lab

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Birch Bark Handles

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Simple Finish Knives

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Relativity of Value

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I Made a Shoe Rack

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Accidentally Tacticool?

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An Experimental Kitchen Knives Set

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One Santoku, Two Santoku, Three Santoku…

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I Think This Will Cut It

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I got a new toy

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