Tumbler Upgrade

My tumbler works well for some blades and worse for others, and it works really well for removing scale from pieces with complicated gomtry. However, as I alluded to last time, I had several problems with the drum itself.

The first problem was the water tightness. Not only the lid was not properly watertight, but the sides were neither. I have used screws to secure three wooden planks inside to prevent the contents from simply sliding around the inside without tumbling. And the water was seeping around the screws too. I was able to make it watertight in the end, but it was still not ideal. Plus the inner wooden ribs got worn down a lot quicker than I thought they will, they impeded the contents probably a bit too much.

The second problem was the change of the tumbling medium. I found out that fine gravel with water works great for removing scale, fine sand with walnut shells for a nice satin finish, and walnut shells with ferrous oxide for an even nicer satin finish. However, getting all of the coarser medium out of the drum in order to be able to use a finer one has proven to be nigh impossible. I did not run into any quality problems due to this, given the limited amount of time I have used the tumbler so far, but it did worry me enough to actually postpone its use until I find a solution.

The main problem was finding some kind of receptacle with a screw-on lid of the right size. I was crawling the internet occasionally for months, I even recruited my mother to help me, but we found nothing. We found plenty of products of course, but there were not always measurements written near them and thus we could not order them. And when the measurements were written, they were always of the ronk size.

But the week before Christmas I got lucky and during shopping for groceries, I stumbled upon just the thing I needed. I bought six pieces without hesitation. And this week I took a break from making knives and I made six new tumbling drums. That way I can use six different tumbling mediums without having to worry about contamination.

I started by cutting a 38 cm piece of 100 mm plumbing pipe that remained surplus during house renovations. It is a bit discolored on the outside because it lay outdoors in the sun for a few years, but other than that it is completely fine.

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Second, I have marked and cut in half the receptacles.

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The receptacles were a teensy tiny bit too big and did not fit inside the pipe, but that was not a problem since they are made from PET which is thermoplastic. I have carefully heated the edges with my heat gun and they shrunk a little when cooling town. The edges are not very neat, but that is not a problem.

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Copious amounts of adhesive putty helped to seal both the bottom and the top of the receptacle into the pipes. This was actually the hardest work of all, the putty is a bugger to squeeze out of the tube. theoretically it cannot glue PE, PP, and PTFE, but I did glue PVC to PP with it and it held watertight and strong enough so PET to PVC should not be a problem either. Maybe it won’t be the strongest possible bond, but it should be strong for this application. It is strong enough for me to be able to screw the lid on very tight.

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To prevents the contents from sliding and force them to tumble I have decided to try a different approach, one that does not involve breaching the integrity of the pipe. I have cut three pieces of PVC vinyl flooring, also surplus from house renovations. On one side of those pieces, I have made four cuts and inserted the uncut end s into them as depicted.

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Duct tape helped to hold the pieces in place while I rolled them together and inserted them inside the pipe.

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And voilala (or somtin’)! The inside of the drum is not smooth and round anymore, so the contents should be forced to tumble.

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There were some bugs to figure out and correct. The lids were not perfectly watertight, but I was able to cut circular gaskets from some softer leftover PVC vinyl flooring that has solved that problem. I also had to increase the span between the bearings on the axel on which the drum spins, because I am an idiot and I did not measure it correctly and I made the drum too big.

Currently, it is spinning with fine gravel and a few uncleaned broken blades to see how it works. After twelve hours there were no major problems and it did make reasonable progress on removing the scale.

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One problem remains and I have yet to find a good solution to it. During tumbling, some bigger particles of the tumbling medium (a fine stone or a piece of walnut shell) do wander into the thread of the lid and make it difficult to open the drum afterward. I have tried a few things, but so far without success. But as long as the lids do not get stuck completely, it is a minor issue and I am sure I will find a solution eventually.

 

The Wizard’s Manse and Observatory

I have something wonderfully whimsical to share from Avalus,

A wizard manson with an observatory:

All made from cardboard, leftover foamboard and a few bits of fly netting and translucent paper for the windows. I did not make many photos of the building process.

It was really fun to craft models again and over the next month or so I created a handful of different buildings.

When I was younger I was a regular tabletop wargamer. Over the years, the gaming fell away, but the crafting and painting of miniatures and terrain pieces stayed, if somewhat periodically. In the first week of the lockdown, some stuff in my flat broke and I had to order replacements over the internet (something I do not like to do). And then, when I had a few boxes and other carton pieces, ready to be thrown away, inspiration struck.

I am not sure yet, what I will now do with them, as I don’t really play more than once a year. Probably gift them to my gaming friends.

©Avalus, all rights reserved.

©Avalus, all rights reserved.

©Avalus, all rights reserved.

©Avalus, all rights reserved.

©Avalus, all rights reserved.

©Avalus, all rights reserved.

 

Kitchen Knives Set – Part 1: Thoughts and Design

So, this is my next big-ish project, I have decided to make a basic set of kitchen knives – three knives and honing steel. I am not entirely sure about how useful honing steel is with knives from N690, but I have used it on my mother’s knives and it seems to work. It does not appear to hurt. If this small set works out OK, I will make more in the future and perhaps add some specialized knives along the way, but this basic set is meant for casual cooks like myself (and indeed most of my friends), who do not need a special blade for every task and will be probably very content with one knife for 90% of work.

And because this time I am preparing perhaps for more future projects, I have made templates in photoshop, printed them out, and laminated them in transparent foil for future use.

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

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

The grid is metric, with the smallest scale being 1 mm.

The “meat” knife is a de-facto universal knife, one that I expect to take care of that 90% of work. Medium-sized blade with a round tip, ergonomic handle for firm grip, suitable for slicing protein as well as fine-dicing herbs and vegetables. And for remaining tasks, there is a small peeling knife with a sharp tip for piercing and a relatively straight blade for scratching-peeling, and a big chef knife for tackling difficult cabbage and for those occasions when cutting a lot of big-ish vegetables or huge chunks of whatever is necessary.

The chef knife has holes along the blade edge, which should help with reducing the sticking of whatever is being cut to the blade. It is easier to make than hollow grind or S-grind and it does work too. The handle is ergonomic as well but it is formed with a focus on two main uses of such a big blade. The thicker butt with a hook end prevents the knife from flying out of the hand when chopping, and the thin front with a lot of space for fingers allows for a choked-up grip with the index finger and thumb on the blade for fine slicing and dicing with a rocking motion.

All these designs should work as expected since they are based on knives that I have already made in the past. Of these, the least tested is the chef knife, but I still do not expect any trouble. I won’t follow the designs exactly, they are just approximations and I expect to tune them up a bit during the work. Any thoughts and remarks on the designs are welcome, as well as any suggestions for further additions to the set ( I am thinking about fish-knife and cheese-knife).

However, I will definitively introduce one new and relatively original feature right now. One that I have not seen used by another knifemaker (which does not mean nobody does it, I just did not see it done). As you can see, there are four-five holes for pins in each tang, which might seem a bit excessive and dorky-looking. That is because I need more pins – two will be wooden and two will be metallic. And they will not be visible. That is, the knives are designed as full-width tang, but the pins won’t appear on the outside of the handles. I have tested this idea on one broken blade and it seems to work perfectly OK for a kitchen knife that won’t get hit with a mallet or hammer too much. Or at all, as things should be.

So stay tuned for the following articles with a full write-up of my manufacturing process for this project. I am decently far already given that I only could work three days this week. And because a video was requested, I am filming (almost) all work as well. But I make no promises there – a future video is, at this time, uncertain and might or might not happen.

Serenity

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It’s something that became popular during the first wave of the pandemic: paint pebbles and leave them in parks, along trails… People see them, sometimes take them home (treasures for kids!), leave their own, arrange them in patterns. A way to feel connected with each other without actually being together. Just like the internet, but with pebbles…

Prototyping Chef Knives

This was an interesting project. Interesting in the sense that nearly nothing went as planned.

First I started to make five blades and I broke one after hardening, so I have made it into a smaller knife for my neighbor. But what happened after that was a real bummer – the four remaining blades stubbornly resisted my attempts at tumbling. After over a month in the tumbler, none of them had the pretty, regular finish that I have gotten on my full-width tang blades. Maybe the point of balance of these blades, or their width, or both, have played a role. I simply do not know. I only know that after over a month I took it as “lesson learned, you cannot tumble these, finish them or toss them as they are”. And because they are prototypes whose main purpose was learning, I have decided to use them as they were.

The first piece went on a bed of flowers into a land far, far away. What happens there is in the stars and out of my hands.

The second piece I have finished with an experimental piece of wood – one of the very rotten willow pieces that I have stabilized with resin during my first tests. Only the piece was just a tad thinner than I needed, so the resulting handle is slimmer and straighter than I intended it to be. I am keeping this knife for myself. I just cut onions for dinner with it and it works reasonably well. Whether it works better or worse than other chef knives I cannot evaluate, since I do not use chef knives regularly.

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

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

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

The handle looks…. interesting, but not very kitchen-knifey. I have used dark brown dye for the resin on the assumption that it will give the wood the most natural look. And it did that. Only it gave the wood also a decidedly camo-tacticool look. I think it would be great for a bushcraft/camping knife, but on a kitchen knife, it looks a bit odd. But maybe infusing the wood with bright colored resin – yellow, red, green, or even blue – might lead to interesting results. I am definitively going to try that next time. The rotten log will not burn – yet.

I have made my first bolster from buffalo horn here and fitting that and the handle together with the curved spacer from bone went reasonably well right until the last step in the process. That last step was buffing up of the horn. I have used my DIY red hematite buffing compound because it worked well on the horn – it is less aggressive than industrial steel buffing compounds. But some of it got stuck in the pores in the bone and it is impossible to clean afterward. That is unfortunately a common problem with bone – it has nearly invisible pores that tend to pop-up at the very end of the work when the piece cannot be replaced. So working with bone is always a bit gamble and you often get some dark spots here and there. It is not plastic but a natural product after all. But these red spots look like someone bled all over it. Grrr.

The third piece got fitted with bubinga handle and bone bolster. It goes to my former colleague, who has been patiently waiting for it for nearly a year by now.

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

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

Nothing went wrong with the knife itself. I have fitted the bone bolster with the handle really well, there are no gaps between the white bolster and the blade. Nothing to complain about except the large cut in my right thumb during assembly because the blade cut during all that wiggling through several layers of cloth and masking tape.

Bubinga is beautiful and very hard, but it is not a wood that I would normally use. It is not grown sustainably and the species, while not endangered yet, are on a way to becoming endangered. But since I got this piece for free with a shipment of steel, I have used it. I think I got it for free because it had a worm-hole, but luckily enough it got completely ground away during work. And the piece was big enough for me to make the handle in a shape and size that I have initially intended. It has a trapezoid-profile with rounded edges, for better grip and edge-alignment.

The fourth blade was fitted with a horn bolster and cherry crotch wood with a bone spacer. And this is the closest to my intended design of all three. It is now in the possession of my main tester – my mom.

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

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

The cherry wood is very beautiful, all the more pitty for the unseemly cracks. I will have to devise and use some kind of end-cap for cases like this when it would be a waste to toss the wood but there are some blemishes on the end grain. My mother does not mid it as it is and I hope it will serve well. Apart from these cracks, the only thing that went wrong was a cut in my left thumb – yup, I got symmetrical cuts with different knives.

Stats for all these knives: blade ~210 mm length, 3 mm thick, 50 mm wide, grip ~130 mm long. They are more forward-weighted than my full-width tang kitchen knives, so they would be probably very effective choppers too – the point of balance is right at the heel of the blade.

Soap Opera Part 4: Season 1 Finale

I made the last batches or this year. Now they need 6 to 8 weeks to dry and cure, and if I want them to be Christmas presents that means I need to stop now.

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On top is a mix of pine, rosemary, niaouli (myrtle variety) and a bit of lemon grass and it came out smelling very fresh. Very lemony, actually even more so than the pure lemongrass (I love lemongrass) at the bottom. There I tried to experiment a bit with colour, but it turned out more looking like blue cheese than artful soap, but who cares. If I do it again next year I’ll have to get some mica powders. This year my focus was mainly on getting the chemistry right, we’ll go for pretty next time.

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The very final two are all about the smell again. The lighter ones at the top are honey and oatmilk. I used the oatmilk instead of water here and I think it worked quite well. The smell is very subtle.I think I’d use more fragrance oil next time, but I also like it when soaps don#t leave your hands smelling for days to come. I got those fragrance oils and essential oils from a British seller off Etsy, I hope the current British trainwreck of a  no deal Brexit won’t make it unfeasible to order there in the future. It would be a shame for the seller.

The bottom is cinnamon and orange. There I added some colour, but it seems to have vanished. The smell is surprisingly marzipan-y and just the right thing for a Christmas Soap.

Let#s see if next year brings more soap. It surely has been great fun this time.

Marcus Gave Me Wood, Here Is What I Did With It

Marcus sent me a piece of stabilized maple burl last year. It wasn’t very big, not enough for my usual chunky knife handles, but it was big enough for two badger knives, so I used it for the last two blades in the current batch.

I did not do the brass bolsters and pommels very well, I am afraid. The pins refused to blend in – they do so so seamlessly in aluminum and stainless steel, but so far I did not have any luck with brass. And since this blade is stainless steel, some artificial extreme patina would not look proper. I tried to make the heads rounded this time, but I did not like the look of it at all, especially because I did not position them correctly for that kind of look. Nevertheless, the extremely beautiful wood from Marcus, when polished with beeswax, does redeem the knives a little. And when I saw how pretty the wood is, I have decided to make better and nicer sheaths for these knives too.

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

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

This is the better of the pair. Making the silver maple leaves was real fun, and I have managed to get the colors very close to what I have originaly designed in Photoshop.

It looks pretty, but silver maple is not native here so for the second one I have used a different design and color palette – yellow small-leaved linden leafs.

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

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

The small-leaved linden tree is pretty common here and it is also Czech national tree, so I have been intentionally a bit patriotic with this one. Unfortunately, I run out of the medium thickness leather so I had to use the thicker one and it was just a tad too thick for this small knife design. It is not a functional problem, only the leather could not be formed so snugly around the knife, because the knife would not get out.

I think my leatherwork is improving and I like these leafs-designs. I shall definitively use them more, even though they are a bit labor-intensive, especially since I do not intend to use the same design twice. I might use the outline, but I will always at least mix up the colors differently.

Soap Opera Part 3: I Need Coffee

The next batch is coffee and bergamot with a hint of lavender. Both turned out fine, though the coffee scent is very light, since I used no additional fragrance. Since everybody and their dog will be getting soap this Christmas, I also wanted some more neutral scents, because for reasons I don’t understand not everybody likes fruity scents.

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The “cream” is just unscented soap from the other batch. For some reason that turned out to be softer and a bit grainy and I have no idea why. But now it’s drying. One advantage to sticking it in the oven is that you get it to gel phase beautifully and also it cures a bit faster.

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Bergamot. You can see the “grainy” parts here as well. I can only speculate that it’s too much air in the soap mass before filling it into moulds.

I made another batch that is currently resting, and I’ll make one more batch and then I#m finished for this year,since anything I make later would not be finished in time for Christmas and I DO need to give as much of it away as possible, because soap making is an easy way top make lots of stuff, which is probably ideal if you want to make something with great chances of success  but not too much effort, but if you’re like me, and want to try as many things as possible, you end up with several kilograms of soap…

The huge advantage is that your whole house smells nice because there’s soap drying everywhere…

Degupdate: Candy Mistaking Herself for a Cat

Apparently degus and cats share a tendency to climb up things they then have problems getting down again… I’ll have to take some measures to prevent them from breaking their neck, as Estelle managed to get into the “storage” compartment on top of Degustan and then fall most of the way down…

In the first video you can see Candy trying to jump onto the side track of Degustan where the food is kept.

In the second video she managed to get onto it, and up the side of Degustan. We quickly needed to make that top “degusafe” after that.

Here’s a triumphant Candy with a well deserved stolen treat…

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

They’re also trying hard to gnaw their way out of the enclosure. They’ll find out I have more hinges than that…

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And finally, our “latest degu”: Sugar, a giant crochet degu. There’s a distinctive lack of degu plushies on the market, but thankfully somebody on etsy sold a crochet pattern, so I made one for the little one’s birthday (Happy birthday my love!). While this is meant for small amigurumi projects, that wool was just too amazing.

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Upcycling Old Jeans

During my first experiments with resin stabilized wood, I had a lot of dark brown leftover resin at the end of it. So I have decided to do a little experiment.

I took some old black jeans, cut them into squares of approximately the sizee of a hand palm, soaked the pieces in the resin, stacked them in a receptacle and I poured all the remaining resin all over them. I have tried my best to chase and push manually all the bubles out and let it harden.

The resulting material has an official name – micarta – and the results look quite well, I think.

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

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

The pieces were not too big, but big enough for four small scales for two of the badger knives that I had in production, so I have used them straightaway. The material works well, it is sufficiently hard to take decent polish, but not so hard as to be difficult to work with. It does heat up a bit and clogs up sanding belts, but reducing the belt speed and using only fresh belts did away with that problem.

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

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

That the layers are not perfectly perpendicular and flat adds a bit more character to the material, which I like. I think it is a good way to use excess resin and these knives should now be extremely resistant to elements – the blades and fittings are all stainless steel, the handle scales are micarta and the sheaths are leather infused with beeswax. They would probably survive for a non-trivial duration in fog and rain outdoors. Not that I would do that to them.

I am also pleased that now that these knives are significantly less work than the bowie-type small hunting knivest that I was presenting previously. The goal is to have a mix of cheap(ish) and expensive items on offer in the future, I do not wish to only make luxury items that take weeks to months finish each, neither do I wish to destroy my enjoyment of the craft by bogging myself down in repetitive tasks o making the same thing over and over again.

A Soap Opera, Part 2: Vanity and Hubris

Those are common elements of soap operas, right?

Now, the second batch turned out beautiful:

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I wrapped it tightly in old towels and for good measure stuck it in the oven at 80°C, because those small moulds will of course cool faster, but the “soaping” is a chemical reaction that feeds on its own heat. I could demould it the next day, no problem. The smell is rosemary, orange and lemon grass, with some ground rosemary and food colouring for the visual. Thus encouraged I decided to make that one soap I’d been thinking about: A marble cake soap: One part Vanilla soap, one part cocoa soap, blended in a cake mould and then cut into pieces.

Yeah…

For one thing, both batches experienced “soap seize” (in German it’s “Blitzbeton”, instant concrete): Instead of staying in a custard consistency for quite some time, it turned hard fast, so any attempt at making a marble cake was out of the window. Second, there’s a million recipes for making cocoa soap. Just stir the cocoa powder into your soap gloop. Looks and smells like chocolate, only if you think that chocolate smells vaguely like old fish. I wouldn’t have mixed it with the vanilla anyway, but I still did my best to put it into the cake moulds and let it set. So here’s the result:

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As you can see, because of the soap seize the moulds have not been properly filled. Second, the smells kinda, reversed? The chocolate soap smells now very mildly of chocolate, while the vanilla fragrance smells like cheap, over aged eau de cologne. They are not fit for giving away as gifts, but good enough around the house. At least the chocolate. Also, without the marble, the cake slices don’t look that nice. At least they look realistic enough that my beloved kid bit into one while I was shopping. I swear, she’s the dumbest smart kid I ever met…

A Soap Opera

I’ve wanted to make soap for a long time now. What stopped me so far was the lack of a safe work space. I am not going to handle NaOh in my kitchen with the kids running around. But with the workbench finally set up I got myself a “starting kit” for soap making and tried my first batch.

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I did everything by the book, prepared my stuff, and still managed to grab a bottle of bergamotte scent instead of lavender. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For one, my oils turned the colour pretty yellowish, the purple didn’t look that nice, and for a pure lavender soap it would have been ugly. But with bergamotte in the mix, the yellow “makes sense”. Second, while I used the amounts of essential oil specified in the recipe, the lavender does come off really strong. If I’d used 20 ml of lavender, it would have overpowered everything and probably made the soap unusable.

I let it rest for two days, and it was still too soft to take out of the moulds. Re-reading everything I came to the conclusion that the freshly made soap cooled too quickly as my work shop is quite cool. The next batch will get taken to the kitchen and wrapped thoroughly so it can cool more slowly.

My book also offered a dirty trick for dealing with too soft soap, which is to freeze it for an hour or so. That worked fine, but somehow turned the purple pink. I’m curious to see if it will turn purple again. It’s now off to drying and should be ready in time for Christmas. Yeah, this year’s Christmas presents will smell nice.

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