Making Kitchen Knives – Part 2 – Draw, Drill, Cut

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

Each bar I have is big enough for two knives, but I cannot simply halve them – there is nearly 10 cm overlap towards the tips. That way I get longer knives whilst wasting less material. I have made a new paper template and here you can see how I laid it on the bar. To draw the outline I covered the whole bar in blue color using very thick (1 cm) marker. A much cheaper and more readily available option to machinist’s blue. You can also see that  I have lost my drawing needle somewhere in the 10 square meters of my shop so I have made a new one from an old shuttle bobbin. I hope I won’t lose it too.

When doing this I have wanted to test an idea how to improve my process already, so I have made another template which allowed me to mark not only the two holes for pins, but also a hole at the center of the finger groove. Unfortunately I did not make a picture of that.

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

But here you can perhaps see why the third hole. After marking the hole positions with a center punch, I proceeded to the drill. But instead of a normal drill bit, I have spanned in it a step drill which allows me to drill holes from 4 to 22 mm. So I drilled 6 mm holes for pins and an 18 mm hole where the finger groove is. That way I do not need to mess around with some improvised way to grind a nice tight radius that I need. This is a big time and hassle saving in itself.

This is also first significant change in design to the prototype that I have given to my mother. She did not exactly complain, but she commented that a deeper finger groove would be more comfortable. So I am making the groove deeper and therefore the handle inevitably skinnier in this part.

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

I have marked and drilled both halves, then I cut the bar diagonally with an angle grinder. Using an angle grinder I have also cut excess metal on both knives since I live by the rule – if you can cut it, do not grind it.  After that I have tried another time-saving measure that I have thought up in my idle time – I have connected both knives with screws through the pin holes. With that I proceeded to the belt grinder to grind the outline of the blades.

It worked very well and I had outlined two knives very quickly, in fact these three steps took a lot less time than I expected – just one hour overall. And I even see big time-saving potentials here:

  1. For drilling I could make a template for guiding 6 mm drill bit instead of punching the holes for each blade separately. So for next run I will first fish around in my scrap pile if I find a scrap piece of the right shape and size. Then I can stack and drill more pieces in one go. I will lose some time by stacking, but save time drawing and punching. Also next time I will first drill all stacked pieces with a 6 mm drill bit for the finger groove as well. That means changing the bit once, but I think it will be more than made up by the time saved from drawing and punching.
  2. I can probably stack at least two, maybe even five, pieces before cutting all the excess with the angle grinder.  Five pieces would be 9 mm thick, and an angle grinder should be able to grind through that without big trouble and without too much reduction in speed. And I will waste less time per blade by repositioning the piece in the vice for each cut.
  3. Ditto for the belt grinder. A new 40 grit belt should be able to grind five pieces at once with only marginal reduction in speed. That would also improve reproducibility.

So I am putting this in the “low hanging fruit” basket, since the 30 minutes per blade is significant 10% of my goal time and I estimate I can cut that easily down to half or maybe even less.

The White Kangaroos of Bordertown

This dose of extreme animal cuteness comes from David in Oz who says,

And now for something completely different, I give you the white kangaroos of Bordertown. (http://www.abc.net.au/local/videos/2015/08/19/4296371.htm) 

Shot these pics a week ago, just in time to catch a joey with mum. Enjoy

Well, they certainly are something completely different and I can’t stop smiling at the photos. In the second to last picture it looks to me as if mama has heard a rude word and is gently covering her joey’s ears. Thanks for sharing, David.

©David Brindley, all rights reserved

[Read more…]

Verschlimmbessern

Verschlimmbessern, verb, German: Making something worse by trying to improve it.

I tried to somehow righten the mistakes I made with the first bracelet, but instead made matters worse, though I think it would have come to this eventually anyway. But I learned quite some things.

bracelet with matte top

Cut off top section

bracelet

Sticky front

I tried to cut off the sticky top section, round the edges and then polish it up to shine again. This didn’t work well for several reasons.

Most importantly:  If your resin didn’t cure properly, there’s not a lot you can do. Reflect on what you did wrong. Do better next time.

The soft spots were all over, and when I cut off the top, the fine dust stuck to the soft spots and made them matte. And since the whole thing isn’t as hard as it should be, it moved quite a lot so the resin and the stones separated in places, leaving more matte spots.

Another lesson: you cannot get around very fine wet sanding paper. All my mats and polishing stuff were still way too coarse to make it shine again. This will be very important since one of the projects that I’ve planned involves makeshift moulds* and requires grinding and polishing.

*Resin Obsession can speak many words to the wise about not being too ambitious in the beginning, but nobody ever accused me of being wise.

Wheat Kings

Sometimes my head has too many thoughts.

Today’s song holds more than just a nice melody for me. In a lot of ways, what it is about is a reminder of why I do the work that I do, and why it is important to do it well. If you google “David Milgaard” (the inspiration – what a terrible designation – behind the song), you can probably divine more than a hint of what I do. The why is a complicated mix of ‘I like it’ and higher values and the feeling that I can do something to make the world a little… better, I suppose. Or something that makes me feel useful on a daily basis. Anyway, here’s your music:

The Tragically Hip is a strange kind of band, they’ve been around since the 1980s and they really sunk deep into the Canadian consciousness. They were certainly a fixture of the music world in the 1990s and early 2000s. I don’t know if they ever tried (too hard), but they never made it big outside of Canada. Within Canada, though, hoo boy. Everyone knows them, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily like them. They have a very unique style that doesn’t always feel accessible. It’s taken me years to grow into my appreciation of their music, and they certainly have a rich collection of Canadiana that touches on stereotypes and themes and very specifically Canadian subjects, even though their songs that I do like are definitely among my favourites. Their lead singer, Gord Downie, is a whole other kettle of fish. He did their farewell tour 2 years ago (he was diagnosed with a brain tumour and was given about a year, he walked on later that same year) and it was one of the biggest things to happen in recent Canadian cultural history. Not least because in his final months he addressed the subject of residential schools (I’m a bit out on a white dude saying so much without hearing about him giving First Nations people a voice of their own, but I can’t say he did wrong). We’ll be hearing more from the Tragically Hip in the future.

In any case, enjoy the music. I have a very social weekend ahead of me and it’s tangling with new stuff at work that makes me feel out-of-step but has many possibilities for personal and professional development. I hope to recover soon. :)

Even When Not in Doubt Marcus Knows

Yesterday Giliell posted about the wonderful gift of acrylic casting supplies that she received from Marcus, noting that she’d been considering trying this art form.  Well, I received the same gift from Marcus last week and I wasn’t even thinking about trying resin casting. Marcus just knows. He knows that I have a large collection of seaglass and that this is the perfect medium to pair with them. I can’t wait to try it, but I’ve been rearranging my cabinets and my work table is buried under a ton of paper crafting crap right now so I haven’t gotten past the gazing in wonder at it all yet. Well, I have watched a few how-to videos (link below) that have given me lots of ideas for using seaglass and more. I love the bracelet Giliell made and it’s made me even more anxious to try it. Alrighty then…time to clean up the mess and play. Tune in over the weekend to see if I can make something as pretty as Giliell did. Thanks, Marcus. You definitely spread sunshine.

Resin Obsession (a very good site)

Wow, Thank you Marcus

Yikes! The bigger picture (my work table is under there somewhere)

 

 

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 1 – In the Beginning…

… there was a bar of steel.

After a short break due to harvest I have started two knife making projects and I will share the progress on them as I go along.

The first one is about developing a viable process for making small-batches of kitchen knives.

The knife that I have given my mother for Christmas has proven itself to be an excellent cutter. It held an edge for half a year and still shaved hair when my mother requested honing the edge because it had a few blunt-ish spots. The handle does not show any sign of deterioration too. And it is used daily, by at least two people, on everything from fine chopping veggies to de-boning chicken. So I think that with some adjustments (mostly making it look prettier) it might be a saleable product.

I reckon (I will not bother you with the math and reasoning, some of it has solid rational basis, some of it I pulled out of my nether regions) that in order to be able to eventually barely survive whilst making knives, I would have to be able to make a passable kitchen knife in under five hours spending with the fun work, i.e. manual labor. The lower the better. Rest of the working day would in such a case be eaten by the unfunny part of the job, the actual business of business.

But developing a viable production process is something I have a professional experience with and so I want to have a go at it, even though right now making knives is just a hobby. And I will be sharing with you all the failures as well as the improvements in trying to achieve my time goal.

The first step is straightening the steel. For this project I am using N690 steel 1,8x50x500 mm and all the steel bars had a slight bend to them that had to be corrected. Currently the only way for me to do this is to use a vice and three thick screws. Had the plates had a kink, I would place the middle screw straight on that kink and bend it with ever-increasing pressure until after taking the steel out of the vice it would be straight-ish. However these did not have a kink, they were nearly universally bent in a very slight regular arc.  To straighten that, I first tried to bend the bars slightly at multiple points. It worked, but it was time-consuming and unreliable. Later I have tried to close the vice only slightly on the steel bar and then pulling it through the screws – essentially using it as an improvised roll bender. That worked much faster and reasonably well.

Even soo, all in all it took me less than 1 hour to straighten 12 knives worth of steel. That is less than 5 minutes per knife. I think that building a small roll bender specifically for straightening these thin long bars should not be difficult and it could potentially shave off quite a reasonable chunk off of that too. But right now, I am putting this into the “high hanging fruit” basket, since despite the clearly impromptu setting it takes only about 2% of my time goal. That means, I will ignore this step in the process for now and not bother about improving it.

For the first knife made let’s write down 5 minutes for this step and move on to the next.

Jack’s Walk

Last year we didn’t really have too much of an autumn show of colour. Instead, most trees just went from green to brown to leafless. This year, though, autumn is glorious and all the trees are wearing their best, bright party dresses. Jack and I invite you to join us as we stroll around our neighbourhood and look at all the pretty October colour.

Just starting to colour up

[Read more…]

More Spiders!

OK, it’s just one more spider, but (s)he’s beautiful. This one came to us from Avalus who says,

I found this spider in August when I was riding home from work under the lit handrail of a pedestrian bridge. She had many moths woven in silk hanging just under the rail, so it seems she picked a good spot.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   She did not like the flash too much. I think it is a common orbweaver (Kreuzspinne – “cross spider” in german).

Photos are below the fold. The detail in the second shot is outstanding. Thanks for sharing, Avalus. [Read more…]

Friday Feathers

This week’s Friday Feathers come from Nightjar who writes this:

 

These sanderlings briefly landed in front of me during a relaxed walk on the beach, understandably I was not carrying the 500mm lens with me. I took these with the 50mm, and then I cropped and cropped some more, and then I pretended I meant to compose the images like this all along because sand and seawater are pretty too. :D

I completely agree that the composition IS beautiful and I sympathise with “if only I had the other lens”. I am wondering, are sanderlings related to starlings?

Sanderlings on the beach

©Nightjar, all rights reserved

Sanderlings on beach

©Nightjar, all rights reserved

Sanderlings on beach

©Nightjar, all rights reserved

 

Spring Tulips from Down Under

I never tire of autumn colours, but the sight of these gorgeous tulips sent in by David from Australia made me more than a little nostalgic for the season of new growth. The white ones in particular caught my eye. They look so fresh and crisp. David Says,

It may be Autumn/Fall up North, but here in the South, Spring has sprung, The Grass has riz. Shot these tulips last week in Bendigo, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendigo)

such a lovely sunny day it was impossible to shoot without humans getting in the pics. Enjoy.

Thanks, David. I am enjoying and so will everyone else.

©David Brindley, all rights reserved

[Read more…]

Tummy Thursday: Plum Liqueur

This week’s recipe comes thanks to kestrel. Hmmm, too bad we don’t have plums this year. I’ll let kestrel take over:

This time of year I am overrun with plums and like to find ways to take advantage of the bounty. Way back in 1984 I got this recipe from a friend, and over the years I’ve tweaked it a bit to make it more to my own satisfaction. I want to let people know that one of the first things I did was to cut the amount of sugar in the original recipe in half! If having LOTS of sugar is important to you, remember that you could double my amount and still be in line with the original recipe.

Ingredients and tools needed

Very neat setup

ere I have all the things I’ll need to make plum liqueur: plums, spices, empty jars, brandy and sugar. This is the basic recipe:

1 1/2 pounds (680 grams) plums
3/4 cup (255 grams) sugar
12 cloves
Piece of cinnamon stick
750 ml plain brandy

The original recipe called for vodka, but I felt it was not as smooth as I like when finished, I think brandy gives a better taste.

cut plums

Destoning plums. Probably everybody’s least favourite part…

Start out by cutting the plums in half and removing the pits. If you are busy, what you can do instead is take a fork and pierce the skins to the pits, in five or six places on each plum. That will work just fine and is a lot faster.

plums in a mason jar

Looks good already

This is a half-gallon (1.89 liter) jar. I’ve put in plums, 3/4 cup (255 grams) of sugar, plus the spices.
the jars are filled with brandy now

No, don’t think about it

Now I’ve put the 750 ml of brandy in the jar. Put the lid on securely, and shake the jar. Shake it for a minute, wait, shake a bit more, until the sugar is more or less dissolved.
closed jars

I’m not going to wait those three months, whatever kestrel says

After 24 hours, you can already see the wonderful color developing. Leave the jar(s) on your counter, giving them a shake now and then. This is the hard part: wait three months (I know, it’s very hard to wait so long!) and then strain the contents into a jar. By then it will be a lovely deep purple color. Not only is this nice for sipping on a cold winter evening sitting by the fire, it also makes a nice base for a stir fry. It’s a wonderful gift for the holidays; use a fancy pen to write up the recipe, put the plum liqueur in a decorative bottle, and there you have a memorable and welcome gift.

I only have one question: Would it not be easier to dissolve the sugar in the brandy first so you don’t have to shake the whole jars?