The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details:
https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is $300 $250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
I should mention too that if there is something specific like that you are looking for to give me a call or contact me through a PM. Good deal on the Rodeo and thanks!
Kinda a funny story to relate. Back in post #727 I was detailing what I was wearing due to the cold. Ya know most folks think of California as palm trees and bikinis. Well....not this part. I had a friend that after five years here in Tehachapi moved back to Grand Junction CO cause she could never get warm here. I've cowboyed with several different guys at different times here that were from Montana and all of them said the coldest they ever were was here in Tehachapi. My daughter in law is from Burns Oregon and that's cold country. She and my son are there on a ranch outside of Burns right now. I remember one of the first times we met her we were going out to dinner here locally. It was 37 degrees. She and my son Logan were riding in the back seat of the truck. She asked if we could turn the heater up. I was kind of puzzled and asked her if Burns wasn't cold country. She said she'd run around town In a T-shirt and a hoodie when it was single digits and be comfortable. She said I'm freezing back here. I turned the heater up. I talked to my son two days ago, it was -22 with a felt temp of -33. Fine time to be cowboyin'. Anyhoo all that to say it gets COLD up here. The thermometer might not read super cold but it is. A few years back my daughter was in a holding pattern. She'd been applying to this nursing school but hadn't been accepted yet. It was a great school and so the program was impacted and they would award some slots by lottery. Sh'ed missed out the first couple three times she applied but she was determined and it was gonna and did happen. All she could do was wait and apply again next semester. Meanwhile she was working as an ER Tech in one of the largest hospitals in Bakersfield. Sometimes she wouldn't get all the hours she needed to make rent, so she'd come up here and work for me to make the extra $$ she needed. One of the things that I would have her do was cut out blades on the bandsaw and she was really good at that. Her favorite job though, was profiling the blades prior to heat treat on the grinders. So she was set to come up one day and work. She drove up and it was COLD. So cold that when she went in the house mom is doing all the mom things. You don't have to work baby it's too cold we'll give you the money. It's too cold out there yada yada yada, you don't have to work today. Here's the money but what did Alyssa our daughter say? And I quote: "I ain't no bitch!" She bundled up and we went outside. I found these pics from that day. She's profiling knives for me.
She toughed it out for a couple of hours. Tell the truth I was bout done too. I don't care how tough you are you can only hold on to freezing cold steel for so long! What brought this to mind? She flew into North Dakota to visit a friend yesterday. Mom had just made her one of our duffel bags. They're sized for airline overhead carry and so are just right for a trip like she was going on.
Now they all come with a shoulder strap but Alyssa decided to leave it home. She called us last night just to check in and said she should have brought the shoulder strap. Holding onto the bag while standing in line was hard on her hands. She said she's getting "bitch" hands living in the city! When it was a lil warmer:
She's pretty handy with the twine.
Windmills what windmills? My friend you hit er right on the head!
You are welcome, thanks and a great pic!
Wow.Thanks. Got that paper cutter at a yard sale for $5. It really works well for cutting up spacer and liner material.
No, I have not and there are lot of them out there.
You bet my friend!
Got some new ones heading to the website, maybe even tonight. I wanted to show the difference a lil buffing makes. Kinda a before and after deal. So we'll follow this pic in order from the top down:
First knife is a Sonoran Hunter in sheephorn:
Second down is a Ranchero in some really, really nice ironwood. The spacer on the hunter above was cut from this piece on the Ranchero:
Third is a Gordo in Ramshorn with a rosewood spacer:
Whadya think?
Wow quite a collection there! Great pics!
Are you talking the upper left oak carved sheath in Mendoman's pic?
Gotcha. The upper left is what I call a Vertical Pancake. The bottom right is a regular pancake. This one is set up for right hand behind the back draw or SOB wear as some call it.Upper left and bottom right. The other one looks pretty much pouch style too. I can see the merit in partial wet forming while leaving most of the body open, but personally speaking I've never warmed to wooden inserts on scandinavian sheaths or the kind of sheath that is molded completely flat to the knife because the tip of the knife catches on both and irrationally irritates me
Thanks, my wife Nichole does a great job on those. She's really liking the water buffalo leather for that project and is thinking of sticking with that as the only leather for that bag. I've got the first one, the prototype duffel bag and it's a different leather but she just likes the already broken in ness of the water buffalo. At the Grand Canyon bout a year ago:That duffel bag is great, Dave!! I'm so tempted!!
Great post as usual. What makes the 26C3 darken? Or is this batch just lighter compared to your other 26C3 knives? Thanks.So a while back I posted some about getting a batch of blades ready to sendoff to heat treat. Well they came back all done and here they are:
Inside the box.
Open this up and we have four packs of knives shrinked wrapped together. We had a total of 41 knives here.
These blades are all 26C3 high carbon that I've had clay coated during heat treat. if you look close ya can see where the clay was on each blade.
Also received this package from UPS too:
This heavy tube had metal ends sealing it. I know bandsaw:
Yep that worked. What's in the tube? Brass stock for bolsters:
Six 12" sticks of .25x.50 inches and one stick of .25x.75 inches. That's a $100 bill right there in brass. Use to give bout $2 to $3 for a stick. Been doing this knife making thing for a while now.
So I'd mentioned that our daughter was on a trip to North Dakota. She was heading back and I asked her to take some pics of her new duffel bag while traveling if she could. When you make stuff you are always looking for pics. So the morning she was getting ready to come back she'd planned to put the duffel on the back porch and take a pic as there was some new snow. But it was negative 28 so she said nope. However later it did warm up to about negative 8 below zero so why not:
Her flight got screwed around due to the weather and so instead of flying to Denver that morning and then to Bakersfield she flew to Denver that night and then to San Fran the next morning and then to Bakersfield getting there one hour before class started, so she made it just in time.
Going through screening:
De icing the plane:
Great sunrise in Denver.
Ever wonder what we do with our seconds? Here's a travel bag that we wouldn't sell. It lives in that Husky toolbag. The Husky's my "ranch" tool bag. I could do just bout anything with what I had in there. Fix plumbing issues gates etc. Fencing tools and wire were always in the trucks so no fencing stuff but could darn near fix bout anything else. Well the leather travel bag holds a set of impact sockets:
Ya can see here why Nichole wouldn't sell this bag after she made it:
But it does a great job of keeping those sockets together, zip er back up and back in the Husky again till needed. We'd bought a new disc harrow and it had its three point hitch inside out and backwards (basically) when it was packed up on those pallets for shipping. I had to change everything around and reassemble the hitch.
Went down and froze to death (that cold wind was blowing) talking with our farrier Alberto. We have one mare that is done every six weeks and all the other horses are every eight weeks. I made Alberto's shoeing chaps:
Thanks. In its finished state the 26C3 darkens because of an etch in diluted ferric chloride, a very mild acid. Where the blade has been clay coated the etch will be different than the lower part of the blade. This is what I call a working hamon. It can be enhanced one of two ways. Either the non hamon part be polished which is what I do leaving the hamon dark, or it can be done the other way by polishing the hamon area and leaving the rest of the blade dark. I choose the first way as it seems mosre durable and long lasting. This batch was cleaned further at the heat treaters so they came back ready to go.
It was kind of dicey there for a bit. She had a very small window at San Fransisco to catch her connecting flight but she made it.
