Custom orders are cool!

In my last post I showed you the nice kitchen knife with tulipwood handle that I had just finished. It sold already! Pretty exciting! On top of that I have had a couple of custom orders. Two of antler handled letter openers, and then a friend of mine asked me to reproduce a knife that his mom loves. The letter openers are finished and in the hands of their new owner. You can see them over at acrylicandsteel. The custom kitchen chopper – quite an unusual design- is still in the getting hammered on stage, so no pictures yet.

I think I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I had ordered some metal. Well, it all arrived. I thought that I had ordered CPM 154 but it turns out I just ordered ordinary CM154. What’s the difference? The P stands for Powdered – so it is put together with powdered metal with a very even grain structure. The difference to me though is that when I heated it up and hit the first piece the un-powdered version broke in half, while I had no trouble hammering and forming the CPM. Let that be a lesson to me. That was an expensive lesson to learn.

The wrought iron that I picked up (from an 1800’s grain tower in Lake Superior) is really cool. It will be featured in a hunting knife that is almost done.

OK, it WAS almost done. Now it has moved back a couple phases. It was pretty much finished, and I really just didn’t like the way that it had turned out. It didn’t really look like one of my knives, too boxy, not organic enough. So I changed it, and now it has a little bit of finish work to go again. Of course I didn’t take a picture of it before I changed it.

I’ve also almost finished a paring knife made from an old file. It still needs a little work on the handle.

Someday, I’ll remember to attach pictures to everything. But not today.