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:

Kitchen Style

TheKitchen...this is really the place that people use knives the most, so I've made some knives appropriate for the location.

My dad said that I should switch to entirely stainless steel, because its sooooo much easier to take care of. So I made one. But I made one with Crucibles Cru Forge V steel too. Which isn't stainless. Stainless is a pain to forge, and I like forging knives a lot better than just grinding them to shape.

I'm pretty happy with how both of them turned out. And hope you like them too. They'll probably go up on etsy for sale soon, after Erica takes better and more pictures of each one.

One of these days I plan on having a makers stamp made, but these are still stamped in my primitive style.

So, without further ado, let me introduce AR36 and SS3:

AR36 - Chefs Knife - 6 1/8" blade, 10 1/2" Overall, Hand Forged Cru Forge V steel chefs blade, full tang, Coccobolo with brass pin and tubes.



and SS3 - Japanese style kitchen Chopper - 4 1/2" Blade, 9 1/4" Overall, Ground CM 154 Stainless Steel blade, Black Palm bolster, Birdseye Maple handle, Brass Tubing accents/pins, full tang, leather thong.



Let me know what you think :)

A

Groundhogs Day Blues

Happy Groundhog Day. Can’t say that I think about it that much, but I do enjoy the movie every few years. I guess that Phil saw his shadow, and winter is supposed to hang around. Doesn’t much bother me either way. Hmm. I sound like I’m in a funk. Very blah. Let’s see if I can do a little better….

Erica is home and healing quickly, which is awesome. Things are moving along at work and Friday is payday…that’s always good. Autumn appears to be cutting a few more teeth which is both good and bad. She has been a little fussy over the last few days. But she sure is cute!

I haven’t had much chance to work in the shop, but of course there are some projects on the bench. I haven’t been too inspired on jewelry lately, so it is all knives at the moment, and mostly kitchen knives at that. Not that there aren’t some older unfinished projects, the same kukri and two daggers that have been there for a long time, but back to the kitchen knives. I’ve got a chef’s knife, a Japanese style chopper, and two carving/steak knives going right now. The first two are about ready for handles to be put on. The second two need some more forging and grinding.

This is what those two look like after the first forging and first grinding session.

I’ll probably draw out the blades just a touch more, and the handles need some drawing and shaping. Hopefully I’ll get to that sometime soon. Need more charcoal for the forge first though. I ran out again. Oh, and I need time, ran out of that again too…

Have a merry, happy, Groundhogs day!

And I’ll try to do better J