Dinosaur Bone handled 5 knife Kitchen set update - April 2012

I occasionally do kitchen knife sets and I have started a 3 knife set that I am doing with Dinosaur Bone scales. These are really tough sets to do as I use Viking Professional Cutlery and they are hardened steel. The handles are molded on at the factory over firescale covered forged steel and I need to file the tangs flat and even the bolsters need to be hand worked. I do everything with just hand tools, rotary Dremel wheels and hand files.

So, I end up having to fit hand cut stone to hand filed hardened steel surfaces. It is really challenging to get a good fit when doing both the metal and stone with just eye hand co-ordination.

Here are the pictures of the knives with some of the file work already done and the Dinosaur Bone I am using for the scales.

 

Here are a couple of photos of the firescale and rough surface of the forgings that I start with. The toothpick points to a "bump" in the middle of the casting that runs up the bolster and down onto what shold be the flat tang and a 2nd forged in ridge that runs along the spine.

The hardened steel is just brutal to file and literally destroys even my special order hardened files so I try to do as much of the heavy removal with the dremel and sanding drums.

 

Once I get the tang and bolsters as straight as I can with my hand work I start the fitting of the stone. It just takes a very long time as I fit each end and slowly remove stone while test fitting dozens of times on each scale.

I do not usually put the scale and knife in a vise to check the fit but I only have two hands and I would need a third to take the photo.

 

This is how the final fit of a scale looks before adhering it to the knife. It all looks very good for two hand fit surfaces at this point. The one huge potential problem remains in doing the adhesion stage. With the tight fit it is very possible for a scale to 'hang" up on something and I cannot see it through the adhesive. In fact I really never know until I am doing the fine sanding stages if my eyes and hands were as good as I want them to be....

 

Here are the knives with the scales adhered to the tangs. They all look pretty much perfect but as you can see it is impossible to really see through the adhesive that is squeezed out in the final fitting. So right now I think they all have really good straight fit lines.

The arrow drawn on the one scale is my fit mark. On any scale that has a really close fitting spot I mark where that point is so that I can check it in the 30 seconds I have from the time the stone meets the tang until the adhesive "grabs". When it grabs - it is grab the hammer time as it just will not let go.

The really bad thing is that if one fit line is wrong I need to order a new knife and cut a new set of scales or take a hammer and chisle to the bad scale. The adhesive is so strong I have found no way to remove a scale without breaking it into small pieces. I would probably rather use the poor fit knife in our kitchen than to take a hammer to it but I hope I do not need to do any more than chat about it as a "what if" possibility.

Of course there is the usual risk of running into a hidden blemish in the stone too, which would require doing another knife for the set.

Why does my mind alway want to wander into all of the possible dramatic potential for failure in my works???? Heck if I know....

 

I have finished the grinding of the stone and bolsters to very near the finished dimensions and "whew" the lines all look fine so far.

 

Wow.... These kitchen knives were a lot more difficult to do than I remembered! This set is designed for the many small tasks for knives and should cover about 80% of Kitchen duties. A small 5 inch Chef's knife for most tasks; a paring knife for utility cutting and a steak/utility knife with a bit of serrations on the end for the occasional steak and a lot of the slicing duties for pickles, tomatoes, onions and just enough bite in the serrations to slice the sandwich too. Both the steak knife and paring knife can be used for a dinner for two meat cutting duty.

It took about 30 hours to do this set and those who have been to my shop know I am extremely efficient in my work. This set is built to use so I do hope the buyer sees this as I do - Art to show off on a counter or bar and Art built to use. I am going to list them on my website at $1,200. for the set with the Kapoosh holder for the set and if you are interested I will consider all offers - but do remember I used nearly a week of time in my shop to make this set and the total out of pocket costs will be $425. with knives, shop supplies, Dinosaur Bone, shipping and PayPal fees, if bought that way.

I should mention that sales of Redrummd Knive and all Art In Stone works are allowed in this Forum so if any of you want to sell, buy or trade you can start a thread.

Here are the knives laid out for the file photos -

 

This knife set fits great into the smallest knife Kapoosh which will be going with the set unless the buyer wants to add a custom designed wood board and knife holder. I have worked with a knife block designer to have a custom holder and board design made. I will post the pictures hopefully in a few days as I just got the final details set today.

So here are the knives in the Kapoosh knife block. As there is no white in the shots to give the camera the needed white balance the color is a bit "warm". Yes, I know that there are all kinds of things to see in the background. I do not use any sort of a light box for any of my knife photos. I just put the knives on the workbench turn on two shop lights and start taking photos. Think of this as my low tech (low cost) method to help keep my costs low and the time used for taking photos to be as short a time as possible. I would rather be cutting stone. Some think I may be a bit obsessive/compulsive but it all seems perfectly "normal" to me.....

 

Jerad,

Thanks for the kind words on my works.

I have decided to add two more to the set in the group I am currently doing. I am adding a 2nd matching steak knife and a flexible blade boning knife so it will really be a full duty knife five knife set.

 

Okay, I decided that three knives was not difficult enough so I decided to add two more. I added a 5 inch flexible bladed boning knife and a 2nd utility/steak knife. I figure that would round out this as a small set for a kitchen for two with a knife for just about all the tasks necessary including for dinner for two with knives for cutting meat at the table.

 

Dennis,

I am really glad that you are actually using the knives as the Kitchen sets really are designed for daily use.

The Jade West company bought the 3 knife Jade set so there are no kitchen sets available currently and I probably do less than one set a year on average. They take about 10 hours per knife and the knives are hardened 440C steel making them brutal to file things like the tangs flat. I totally wear out a top end file or two on each set!