A couple new ones

[mnavarro]

Here are a couple new knives I've been working on recently. Tell me what you all think?

This one is in Aldo's 1084. It has brass pins and the scales are desert ironwood.

[/URL][/IMG]

[/URL][/IMG]

[/URL][/IMG]

This next one is in 1075. It has stainless pins and has stabilized buckeye burl.

[/URL][/IMG]

[/URL][/IMG]

The las one is a little guy in 1095. It has mosaic pins and black canvass micarta.

[/URL][/IMG]

[/URL][/IMG]

Thanks for looking.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Nice work.


My one suggestion would be to work on the shape of the spine. You are using the straight bar edge as its reference. Try and add a tiny curve. Take #3 for example, The handle bottom and blade edge are all curves, but the top is straight as a ruler. A minute curve and some drop to the tip would go a long way to making it look less "stiff". Look at some knife photos in The Gallery and see what looks best to your eye.

 

[mnavarro]

Thanks I appreciate all the feed back, especially since I have not met any makers in my area. I'm going to work on curving the spine more. I made three blanks of # 3 so I will drop the tip and add more of a curve on the spine. As soon as I make those changes I will post the pics. Thank you.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Sounds good.

One common new maker problem is trying to fit as much knife as they can into the bar of steel they already bought. The better way is to use as much bar as is needed to fit the knife. Draw the knife on plain paper (without the bar size drawn on it). Then draw parallel lines for the top and bottom of a bar. Measure that and order the appropriate size bar stock. If it is a close fit for an available bar size, sometimes a little tweaking of the knife size or blade width will solve the problem. I find it a bit easier to buy the next size wider bar and have some working room.

The main point is that trying to save the extra steel on the bar from the waste bucket is a foolish way to design knives. No one will care how economic the knife was on the steel if it isn't attractive.

My standard advice is choose and use your steel and abrasives as if they were free ( within reason). Neither is where to try to stretch the dollar if you want a first class knife.
My other advice to new makers is to spend all the time you need to design the knife before you start shaping it in steel. Once the shape is right on paper, it will come out right in steel.

 

[AVigil]

If you are in Santa Maria take a trip to Solvang and go to Nordic Knives. You will see some of the best work in knifemaking in the world there

 

[Hengelo_77]

I like the top one best. I would have preferred smaller pins