Tuesday, February 23, 2010

And progress was slow…

It’s always amazing to me how much time real life takes away from hobbies. Who knew that having a real job and a 50 mile commute, a baby, needing to eat and sleeping would take so much time? Throw in some shuttling for Roller Derby and attending the odd practice and where is all my time to spend in the shop? Add some primitive equipment, and you have a recipe for a very slow production time. Nonetheless, I do finish things. . . Occasionally.

I’d love to blame writing blog posts, but obviously that doesn’t have much to do with it. I think it’s been over a week. Sorry. Not that I think you folks are just falling over yourselves to read this. I’m just not that interesting.

The high priority projects at the moment are… a couple more kitchen knives, this time medium sized carving/boning knives, and a camp/hunting knife. The kitchen knives are a lot farther along, since they have already been quenched and tempered. I’ll temper them once more after finishing all of the grinding. I think they look pretty good so far. I haven’t decided if I want to make them a matched set yet. But probably not.

Here they are:

The camp knife is almost ready for quenching. This is a custom piece and I am enjoying it quite a bit. I’ll get around to showing pictures of the progress eventually.

It currently looks like this:

Naturally, I’ve started more than that, and there are the other unfinished pieces that I’ve been whining about for a while. Some of them may look (and be) familiar:

Not that I really need any more wood, but I ordered some over ebay from “Handlethese”. It’s a nice shop with some interesting stuff. Importantly, they had staghorn sumac, which was requested as the handle material for the custom camp knife. But I also picked up a Cherry burl, an interesting piece of cocobolo, and some spalted elm.

Just so you don’t feel too sorry for me, my forge has decided to heat up recently, a little modification of the fire box, and some additional refractory wool, and all of a sudden – hotness!

On the downside, I managed to scorch my hair:

2 comments:

NRJJ said...

Well, I've been tracking the blog for a little while - gives a good insight into the knifemaking process, as well as some food for thought on other knives I might want!


N

A. Ringia said...

Glad you are enjoying it NJJ :) I have a new belt sander now, so I'll be able to make forward progress when I have time again. Yay!