Eye Yam on Insta Gram

It is not as if somebody complained, but I do not wish to constantly “knife up the joint” at FtB anyway, so I have finally, reluctantly, made an Instagram account to share pictures of knifemaking and knives. If nobody minds, I will still post longer written articles about knives and knife-making here, but only for bigger or more special projects, whereas on Instagram will be snippets and pictures and off-the-cuff thoughts. Probably mostly about knives. There may be some garden pictures in due time too.

There won’t be any sexy photos of my beautiful body in lingerie or insights into my lavish lifestyle with expensive gadgets, that I can promise for sure.

If you are interested, here is a link – click -.

I Got Nuts

Last year I made a tool to pick up walnuts, but I had no opportunity to really use it. Just when the tree was in full bloom, late frost came and destroyed everything. Well, at least the tree got some rest and it is not like we are wanting walnuts – we still did not eat all we had.

And this year’s humid and cold-ish summer seemed to agree with the tree mightily. You can try and count the nuts in this picture but it would not be easy for they are difficult to spot and there are many, many, many.

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

And this picture was taken after we already have several kilos of shelled and peeled fresh walnuts in the freezer, several kilos drying in their shells for long-term storage, and giving several hundred grams of low-quality ones to birds in the feeder each day. Which I suspect that a squirrel takest, for I doubt tits make them disappear this quickly.

So these last few days I go twice a day with the ladle and pick the nuts. The first that fall still have some green stuff on them (as seen in the picture) and are usually of lower quality.

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

The tool works like a charm. No aching back and legs, no effort. I can easily scoop any nuts that fall in the nettle patch, or in the raspberries, or on the tarpaulin covering pool at the end of the sewage cleaning facility. After I pick them, my father cleans them, and in the evening when watching TV he and my mother crack and sort and peel them.

Yesterday most of these mixed-quality nuts were already down and what is falling now are mostly those where the husk cracks on the tree so the nut falls first and the husk eventually follows, so no additional cleaning is necessary. From experience, these are usually of a higher quality and when dried and stored properly, they last for years in their shells. However, I am a bit at a loss as to what to do with them. I no longer have colleagues to whom I could try and sell the excess, and it seems I will have more than enough to satisfy the whole family’s needs for years. Like I said, we still haven’t eaten all we had from two years ago.

I wish potatoes grew this way.

An Overabladeance

I have not made a knife for several months now, but that does not mean I was not working on knives. Below the fold is most of what I have done and also a bit about what I intend to do with it in the future.

BTW, I would appreciate it if you let me know something about your favorite knife if you have one. Almost everyone has, even when they are not “into” knives in particular.

[Read more…]

Women Artisans on YouTube – Woodworker – Ashley Harwood

I haven’t watched any other of her videos yet, and I must say that I do not like her choice of accompanying music very much*, but her handiwork is beautiful.

  • I do in fact enjoy woodturning videos most when they only have the sound of the lathe and the chisel crunching the wood. I do not know why.

Caliper Pin – New Knifemaking Tool

When grinding blades, it is important to have the ridges, fullers, and similar as symmetrical as possible, especially before quench. An asymmetrical blade has a much higher probability of warping or bending in the quench.

On an unhardened blade, one can scribe markings with a scribing needle and/or compass, but once the blade is hardened, that is no longer possible. And I still want my blades to be at least mostly, even though not perfectly, symmetrical too.

I used to measure the symmetry with a help of a folded piece of paper that I have cut with shears so that it has two perfectly aligned points. When folded over the blade, I could easily-ish check if the points align on the ridge on both sides and thus check where I shall grind more during the polishing to keep the symmetry.

But the pieces of paper get wet and manky in the process, and I kept of course losing them so I had to make new ones over and over every day and sometimes several times a day. And today I finally got an idea how to replace them with something much better and hopefully permanent. I took one wooden clothespin and I ground it in about 5 minutes to sort of mini-calipers that can be clipped onto a blade

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

This pin is made from softwood so I could not make the point too refined, but I do not need to. I want to make my blades mostly symmetrical, not perfectly symmetrical. And anyhoo, I shall, in the future, probably make a better and more precise one out of brass, this is just a proof of concept.

And it works well, here you can see it in use. It shows that the ridges on both sides are within few tenths of a mm apart, and that is good enuff for me, that is a difference that cannot be seen with the naked eye and is not easy to measure even with calipers.

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

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Mirror, Mirror…

I have finished the two fullered blades that I intended to mirror-polish for research purposes. It went reasonably well, I must say. The new jig helped a lot to smooth out and polish the fullers and although I had to resort on occasion to my old method of wrapping the abrasive around a bottle cork or popsicle stick, my fingers were spared or the worst of the worst. They are not perfect, but they are good enough for it to take some time to spot the irregularities and imperfections.

I think that next time I will do even a bit better because I did not have the jigs from the start for these, I have developed and tinkered with them during this project. One such tinkering that I forgot to mention in my previous post was to coat the idler wheels on my belt grinder with PVC flooring offcuts. That has reduced the chatter when grinding and polishing the fullers on the belt grinder, so I could actually use the belt grinder for polishing, and the handmade jig was subsequently only used to remove the perpendicular scratches and replace them with longitudinal ones. And because next time I will have all this equipment and the knowledge already, the results should, at least in theory, be better and with less work.

So here are some pictures containing the main things that I am writing about – blades, flowers, and insects.

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

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

The pumpkins are flowering nicely and there seem to be enough solitary bees around to pollinate them.

The blade on the left is the one that I have almost tossed. The fullers align well near the hand, but they diverge towards the tip quite noticeably, at least a few mm. Both fullers on both blades are a bit irregular.

I have a love-hate relationship with mirror-polished blades. They are very difficult to make, it is a lot of hard manual work that busts fingers and back so I hate doing it because I am tired and I do not recover as well as I should from physical exertion. But I also like doing it because it is very rewarding and satisfying to see the gradual change with each step as one progresses from 40 to 7000 grit and then to the buffing compound.

But they are never truly finished because the mirror polish exacerbates every minute irregularity to an absurdly high degree. A few microns deep divot will be seen at a certain angle. Also one thinks all scratches are removed and then, a few days later, you look at it at a very specific angle in a very specific light and suddenly you see that some gossamer-thin scratches are still there.

Then there is the practical side of course – although the steel is hardened, at mirror polish you can literally scratch it if you cut cardboard or office paper with it. They are very precious flowers indeed – basically, the wind blows a speck of dirt on the blade, you wipe it off and it leaves behind a scratch that will be visible in some light. That was one of the main reasons why I have decided to make a tumbled finish for my friends’ knife and why I am going to use it for most of my knives because that hides all but the most egregious scratches.

All in all, although these two blades are not perfect to a degree that I would be perfectly content with them, they are good enough that I shall go on and finish them with high-end fittings.

Fulleramajig & Joy and Depression of Knifemaking

My friend got the knife I conspired with his wife to make for his 40th birthday. He wasted no time and tested it on a BBQ that very day. Afterward, he called me and thanked me and sung praises of his new toy. I must admit that it made me happy for a moment because this is the main reason why I am making knives – to make the end recipient happy that they got something unique, beautiful, and useful as well. That is the good news out of the way, lets go to the somewhat miserable part now.

In my previous post about that knife, I commented that making the fuller was a pain in the fundament, to which Marcus helpfully replied by reminding me about an old video by Walter Sorrels in which he made a small handheld jig to polish fullers. That has inspired me to make my own jigs for making fullers.

First I made a semi-functional attachment for my belt grinder.

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The aluminum arm can freely swivel around the rusty screw along the right side of the upper idler wheel. It is held in position by an M8 screw on the back and the brass L- part is an end stop. When grinding, the screw on the back sets the maximum possible depth of the fuller and the brass end stop sets the distance of the fuller from the blade spine/edge depending on how I put the blade on the jig.

It works, somewhat. It does not allow me to make the fuller too deep by accident, which is a definitive plus. But it has the major disadvantage of being asymmetric, whereas blades are (mostly) symmetrical. When grinding one side, the back of the blade lays against the end stop, when doing the other side, it is the edge. That makes it difficult to make the start and finish at the same point on both sides of the blade – I have made two blades with it so far and whilst one is reasonably symmetrical, on the other the fuller is off by about 3 mm towards the tip. I wanted to toss the blade but my mother says I should finish it, so I will. Whether I will attempt to sell it, we shall see.

I intend to polish both of these blades to mirror polish, to see how much work that is and how it will look. And to polish the inside of the fuller I have made a small jig from an old furniture leg.

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

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

It is along the same general lines as the one by Walter Sorrels, only from cheaper materials and less precise. Putting the paper on is a bit fiddly and I will try and come up with a bit better system, but it does work. It is elbow-grease powered of course, so it is a lot of work, but it does allow me to apply the pressure with wrists/palms instead of fingers, so I can put my whole body weight behind it when needed. I got the fullers to 800 grit reasonably fast so I do think that I will manage to get mirror-polish without extreme suffering and pain.

And last update to my workshop is this.

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I would love to have the grinder in a separate room, but alas I cannot afford that. And the dust was getting on my nerves, as well as everywhere else. So I have bought ash vacuum particle separator for my shop-vac. The inlet is made from a piece of leftover sheet metal held with insane amount of ductape on an extendable tube recycled from another, defunct, vaccum cleaner. It works reasonably well and although it does not catch all of the dust, it does catch most of it. As a result my workshop is a lot cleaner and I need not vacuum every surface as often as before.

And now to the total misery.

I was happy to get my licence to actually sell my knives, but I feel miserable all the same. I need to buy and set up accounting software, set up a separate bank account, contact tax/accounting consultant and buy and set up a webshop. And I am procrastinating all of those things because that is the one actual part that I hate.

I have done almost all of the things above as part of my various previous jobs (exception is setting up webshop, but I do have experience with setting up and maintaining webpages), so the problem is not that I do not know what to do. The problem is that if I do not do anything, I cannot fail, whereas when I do all those things, I can. I know it is totally silly, I know that the only way to actually succeed is to do the things that need to be done, but subconsciously (and partly consciously – the odds are not in my favor) I am just expecting failure and I do not want to go through all the hard work just to toss it after a year or two and get emploeyed at some shitty deskjob again. I want to make knives and I would love to give them away for free. But if I did that, I would not be making them for much longer. Attempting selling them is the only way how I maybe can keep making them . And I hate, hate, hate that.

I am depressed. It is irrational, and I know it, but that does not help.

Look What I Have Cobbled Together

I have applied for concessions/licenses for several categories of non-protected trades. There are about 80 of those in CZ, knifemaking is only a part of one of them and the fee is the same whether one applies for one or for all of them. There are some really, really peculiar things in this system – knife-making is in the same category as welding and making of steel constructions, and knife-sharpening is in a different category that includes repairs of non-electrical house appliances. So in the course of applying for some of the crafts that I actually intend to do I also automatically will (hopefully) get a license to do a lot of other completely unrelated stuff that I do not intend to do. Shoemaking & repair is one of those things.

But even so, I was pretty fed-up with buying a pair of slippers every year (at most) because they start to fall apart and become actually dangerous to wear at home since I live on the first floor and have to walk the steps several times a day. Last week the approaching-end-of-usability slippers combined with other factors and I fell rather badly. So I have decided to at least once do some literal cobbling and make myself a pair of leather slippers.

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

It was a learnign experience and there is a lot that could be done better and/or faster. The stitching on the belts is needlesly fine for example and thus it took me forevah to make.

Unlike the cheap ones that I was wearing until now, these should hopefully last for many years and if the sole gets worn through, I will be able to re-sole them in a day or two at most. Based on my experience with leather goods, I think I shall die before that will be needed since they only will be worn indoors. And they are made from natural leather and wool-felt, so if they become unwearable and un repairable, they can be thrown on the compost heap. They feel comfy and pleasant even against naked skin and the natural leather sole does not slide on the floor more than rubber one, so I am very pleased with the result so far.

I had huge fun with this break from knifemaking so I shall make at least two more pairs for my parents. I expect those to take significantly less time than these did, although still not time that would make it potentialy profitable business – these took me a whole week, so if I were intending to sell them they would be ridiculously expensive, at least 30-40 times of what slippers typically cost. But my plan for next few years is not to make things in order to sell them – it is to sell things so I can continue making them so maybe I should consider them as an option for my repertoire if I could optimize the time to one-two days per pair, perhaps three with some fancy leather carving for decoration.

Unexpected (But Not Surprising) Benefit of Tumbling Blades in Sand

I just might tumble all blades from now on, even those that I will mirror-polish manually afterward. Because after two-three days of tumbling, an interesting phenomenon appears. Something that is not surprising when you think about it, but I did not in fact expect it upfront.

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

It is difficult to snap a picture of it, but here it is visible – the blade is all shiny except that triangular shadow at the tang. That is an area where the blade is not hardened.

In this specific case, this is OK. The tang should be soft and a soft piece of the spine, especially near the tang, also does not hurt. And because this blade will be blackened with oak extract, the visible difference in color should not be a problem.

However, there were two other blades, one from spring steel like this and one from N690, that had shown this discoloration in areas where soft steel definitively is not desirable – one about 2 cm at the tip and one ca 2 cm of the blade near the ricasso. Those were improperly hardened and I did not find out during the scratch test right after the quench, because most of the blade was OK.

That is quite useful and thus I really consider incorporating sand-tumbling not only as a cheap surface finish but also as cheap and easy quality control.

Not Tacticool, But Hopefully Cool

A friend tasked me with making a knife for their spouse. The spouse does not cook, so a kitchen knife was not an option. But they do occasionally go on a camping trip or a forest walk with the kids, so we eventually established that some sort of camping/bushcraft knife would be best.

The ideal material for a knife of this kind would be spring steel, but since it is unlikely that their life will depend on it, N690 should suffice and rust won’t be a problem. So I set to work and I have made this.

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

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

The blade is 160 mm long and 5 mm thick at the handle and tapers toward the tip. N690 steel, sand tumbled satin finish. The handle is made from rotten willow wood stabilized with green-dyed resin. It is a big boi – it weighs 300 g (and that is with the fullered blade and handle is lightened too by holes in the tang). A sharpening angle of 25° should guarantee that with occasional use, the blade will not need sharpening any time soon. Despite being thick, it is reasonably sharp and cuts well, because it has a flat grind all the way to the spine. It is balanced at the bolster, and it packs quite a punch, as a knife of this type should. And because the spine is so thick, it should withstand even some serious abuse should the owner decide to inflict it on the blade. Which I suspect they won’t.

The accessories are a ferrocerium rod and carbon steel striker as a fire starter (more for fun than real purpose, matches are better) and a sheath with a pouch for these. Theoretically the carbon steel striker is not necessary, but when testing it out, I got the subjective impression that carbon steel strikes better sparks from the ferrocerium rod. I might be wrong, I could not think up an objective test for that.

Making fullers by hand is very difficult, it will probably take several more blades before I get it right. I am currently wracking my head about how to make an accessory for my grinder that would make this difficult task just a tad easier. So far no success, just a few semi-functional, semi-failed attempts.

Sharpenatrix

Walter Sorrells has recently made a video about a sharpening tool for his belt grinder, which gave me an inspiration for finally making my own. I have been planning to do this for a long time, but watching that video helped me to solve the final piece of the puzzle.

Walter Sorrells is of course not only a much more experienced knifemaker than I am, but he is also much better equipped. So my project has all the hallmarks of my handmade tools – it is crude and made from scraps.

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

I have started with a very rough sketch of the jaws and I have also spent some time calculating trying to establish various proportions whilst finding a compromise between stability (shorter arm is better) and consistent angle across the blade (longer arm is better).

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Here you can see it in full when finished. Jaws for holding the blade are mounted on a ca 40 cm long 10 mm stick with a ball on the lower end. The ball goes into a socket at the end of an arm that can slide forward and back with regard to the belt, thus adjusting the angle at which the edge leans on it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

The 10 mm steel rod is recycled from our old heating oven. The plastic ball at the end is an old furniture handle. All the wood is recycled from an old bed.

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

The jaws are made from 4mm mild steel and lined with 0.25 mm bronze held in place by means of double-sided adhesive tape. Near the tip of the jaws are two 5 mm pins that are screwed into the smaller jaw and slide into holes in the bigger jaw. They provide an end-stop to rest the blade against in order to fix it easier into the jaws and they also prevent them from wobbling.  The upper screw tightens the jaws and the lower one sets the distance between them, so I can vary it according to the blade that is being sharpened.

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

Originally, I have planned to make the socket from wood and I expected it to take a lot of time. But I got a brilliant idea during the work to use a lid from a fabric softener bottle. It cracked during work, but I still could attach it to the arm with a  screw and a large washer. After that, I have covered the screw head with a piece of PVC flooring and after some consideration, I have also added two hard gaskets to keep the ball centered and to provide ever so slight resistance to movement.

The sliding arm can be fixed in position with a fastening screw salvaged from some defunct kitchen appliance from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away, from times when things were made to last.

When the weather allows it, I will give the thing a coating of grey paint so it looks slightly less amateurish and also to protect the wood from moisture. And I will mark a scale on the sliding arm so I do not need to bother with measuring the angle.

I do not expect this to save a lot of time. I already sharpen knives on the belt grinder and it does not take me more than about five-ten minutes per blade. But it will make the job a bit easier and the angle should definitively be more consistent, which is a plus. I am not one who is overly concerned with sharpening angle, I think that anything between 15° and 25° works just fine for most knives, but consistency does have an influence on the durability of the edge. For example, the N690 steel that I am using for most of my knives allegedly should not be sharpened at a too steep angle (below 15°) because then it tends to chip and break. With this tool, I can at least be definitively sure that I won’t go any lower than that.

We shall see how it works. I do have a lot of knives that need sharpening.

Kitchen Knives Set – Part 8: I Just Could Not Stand It

It is several months since the last update on this project, and there are reasons for that. Some have to do with the project itself, some do not. One of the reasons that are directly related to the project was that I had difficulty finishing the knife stands because in the cold weather the boat lacquer that I have decided to use for finish took an absolutely inordinate amount of time to harden properly. So prepare now for a really long post about how I made the wooden stands for these knives.

The original plan was to make all woodworks from jatoba and black locust, thus making the stands from massive hardwood. But since I have made the handles from the rather rare and precious applewood, I had a very limited supply. Especially when it came to the spalted wood. So I stood in front of a decision – should I try to make the stands match the handles or not. And I have decided to give it a try and make matching stands. Which means getting a lot out of a little.

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First I started by cutting the cores of the future stands out of some scrap spruce wood, of which I have an overabundance. Where I needed a thicker piece, I have simply layered and trimmed the thinner ones until I got the size that I wanted, with a generous amount of wood on both sides of each blade, especially for the stands where two blades were meant to be next to each other.

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This was the first time I have used expanding PU glue. PVA glue would have difficulty to set in my workshop, even with heating. This glue did harden within a few hours enough so I could safely take it indoors for the rest of the curing process.

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

After these cores were glued and cut to the final size, I have sanded all flat surfaces. Not very thoroughly, just enough that I do not get my hands full of splinters.

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

And since I had to do with what little of the precious wood I had, I have decided to use thin boards/veneers for finishing. I have cut approx 5 mm thick slices of the wood on my bandsaw and with a bit of luck, I did get enough of each of the three types of wood that I have used for the handles to cover the stands. Mostly. I could have cut even thinner veneers, like 2 mm, but 5 mm did save me a bit of work later on.

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Most veneers were cut with the grain, but I have also cut several pieces across the grain. Those I have glued on the end of the softwood cores and only after that I have cut the slits for blades. For each blade a cut just as deep as the blade is wide, so each knife has a slot fitted exactly to it. I took two passes on the circular saw for each slit since I have cut them about 1-2 mm wider than the blades are, so the knives come in and out really easily without scraping the sides. That way at least I hope the probability of something getting stuck to the mirror-polished blade and scratching it later on in the stand should be reduced. I could not of course make the slits too wide, because then the point could get stuck in them.

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Wherever veneers had to be put side-by-side, I had to carefully fit them together so the seams are as small as possible. In one case I also had to change the design of the stand since I did not have any veneers long enough and I did not want to link veneer strips lengthwise. Two strips beside each other do connect almost seamlessly and even when they are visible, they do not disturb. But a clear line across the grain or the pattern in the spalted wood would surely look at least odd.

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

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

To fit the veneers properly all around I had to first glue up two opposing sides, trim the excess, grind it to flat, and only then I could glue the other two sides. Trim and sand again and I got finished building blocks for the final products.

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There were some minor problems – the spalted wood was soft and got chipped – so I had to fill in some places with resin mixed with sawdust and/or offcuts.

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Then there was a lot of sanding. It made me glad to have a hand-held belt sander. I will probably have to buy an orbital sander too if I am going to make more of these.

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Since the resulting pieces had very sharp edges which would not look very well in combination with the rather rounded handles, I have decided to round them significantly. I did not use a router, although I do own one. Instead, I have just sanded all future edges down with 60 grit sandpaper over a soft sponge until they looked right, and then I have polished them.

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In one of the stands, the pieces were connected by big enough flat surfaces that I could reliably clamp it all together during curing, but int two of the pieces had to be connected by relatively small areas and at an odd angle, so I have used a piece of wood to drill holes for dowels to prevent the parts from shifting during the glue-up.

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And here they are, fixed to small boards for stability and handling during the paint job. I have decided to use boat lacquer for the stands because infusing such big pieces with resin would be very, very expensive. I did not expect it to take as long as it did though.

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After the first coat with highly diluted lacquer the grain and fungus patterns popped up on all pieces quite significantly. I have left it dry for two days and then gave it two more coats with diluted lacquer in two-days intervals to stabilize the soft and spongy wood as much as is possible. And after that, it was five-six more coats with undiluted lacquer, with a few days wait and thorough sanding between each coating. When the last coating was drying, I got tangled up for several weeks with other works, mainly in the garden, and only this last week did I get round to do the last hand sanding. I sanded the pieces in increasing grits up to 1000 and there I did stop because I wanted them to have the same satin finish as the handles.

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I have modified my buffing compound for the stands, but it is still perhaps a bit too hard. It did buff the pieces nicely though, so I cannot complain. Too much. I did achieve my goal, which was to make the stands reasonably similar to the knife handles. There is a bit of difference in color because the handles are thoroughly infused with resin, but I do not think it is a problem and neither does anyone who has seen it so far (about 7 people).

And this week I finally got to the last step in this rather long project – making the stands to actually, well, stand. Out of the three, only one was big and heavy enough to be stable – the one from mostly healthy wood. For the other two, I did not have enough material to make them with a wide enough base, so I had to fit them with legs. I have considered several options and I have decided to go with a 6 mm stainless steel pipe. Aluminum would look cheap and brass would clash with the visible stainless steel tangs on the knives.

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To drill the holes safely and at a proper angle, I have first made a little board that could be fixed to the stand at the angle I wanted it to be in one direction. In the depicted case, the board is at the angle the leg is supposed to be when viewed from above. Into that board I have drilled a hole at an angle it was supposed to go into the stand. Then I could fix this board to the stand by the simple method of copious amounts of paper masking tape and drill the hole safely and at the correct angle.

By the way, I did not do any measuring or sketching for this. The “correct” angle was established by eyeballing.

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With that, I was still not done with this piece of wood. I have trimmed one end of it at the angle the leg will touch the ground and used that as a guide to filing down the end of the pipe flat-ish.

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Gluing the legs with epoxy was pretty straightforward after that and they were already mostly – although not perfectly – flat against the plate.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

They did need a bit of sanding to get them perfectly flat, but not that much.

And that is the project almost finished. All that is left is to sharpen the knives and make pretty pictures. Hopefully sometime soon. You can see here that I have also already begun the next batch of knives. Yup, that is how long it took for the lacquer to harden, I have managed to grind and harden ten new blades in the meantime.

The next – and last – post in this series will be pure cutlery porn. This is one of those rare instances where I think I have done a good job.