Just started a blog on knifemaking

Project #14 (full article) - Mounting an Aiiwatani natural stone (from JNS) on a wooden board. This was a relatively simple project, but had manny little 'first times' as I have not used Shellac before, nor did I ever mount a stone on a wooden support.

I used a simple but nice piece of plum wood, sanded it and coated with several layers of Shellac. The stone needed quite some work as it was very uneven from the bottom side. I think I spent about 2 hours flattening it with a diamond flattening plate.

The outcome looks like this. The knife in the photographs is 180 single bevel petty from Ittetsu (just for scale and because it looks so cool :) )

 
Project #15 (full article) making a WA handle for a 80mm Kato petty. This was (together with Project #16) my first 'custom job'. I have to admit that that did put the whole thing into very different perspective even though the owner of the knives and I found a special agreement on the risks involved (mainly me having still rather little experience).

Project #16 (full article) making a WA handle for a small Watanabe Mukimono. Here I was given pretty much a free card, just the handle was supposed to be a little more fancy.

The job was to make an ironwood handle with a brass ferrule - a handle type I did before just twice (and learned that I had to be super careful). The results was not as perfect as I would wish (in particular I managed to put some marks on the blade - lesson learned), but the finished handle does look nice (even if too long - something I may correct in the future if the need arises) and - more importantly - the customer was happy with the result too :)

Handle Materials:

Kato - brass and Ironwood
Watanabe: water buffalo horn, stabilised maple burl, nickel silver metal spacers (which had later be removed during the handle making)


Kato - The knife already had a custom (and rather nice) handle, but the owner wished for a different design and materials:



Mukimono - had the standard burned chestnut D-shape handle - here with selected handle materials



Finished handles









 
Project #12 (full article) - a 180 mm Niolox gyuto with WA handle. This knife was my first attempt to make a blade from Niolox. I have hear a lot about it and that all sounded to me a bit like 'spicy AEB-L' - finer grain, very good edge holding, relative ease of sharpening. On top of that it is a steel that I can get in Germany in all sizes I need and can have it heat treated by Jürgen Schanz who has a lot of experience with it.

As you can see from the Project number (12) - it took me quite a while to get it done - somehow once the blade was nearly finished I let it sit for quite a while.

This steel was interesting to work with - on one had relatively easi to cut and grind (OK, the stock was just 2 mm thick), but at the same time the sandpaper or belts would not last all that long - probably because of the high hardness Niolox carbides.

The knife is now being tested by a friend and a chef cook. He got 3 full working days of the the knife before it needed to be touched up and he has quite a heavy hand when cutting (lot's of banging), so I am happy with that. Sharpening was according to him much easier than with the D2 gyuto I did before.

Materials: 2mm thick Niolox, Bocote, Mora (ferrule) and yellow and black fibre for spacers.

The blade finish is far from perfect - but the steel does behave quite a bit differently than O1 and D2 I have used before it somehow polishes and scratches up at the same time. I need to find a way to finish it to a fine satin finish in the future. But hey - this is a testing blade.

Enough talk - here are a few photos:





 
Project #17 (full article) - mounting a a lovely Shiro-suita Aka Renge from Ohira on a wooden base. Since this is a 500€ stone (that belongs to my friend) I wanted to make a base that would match the beauty (and performance) of the stone better than a simple flat piece of wood.

After long search I have picked a piece of Bazilwood. The finish is with Shellac on the wood, but with a special, water soluble lacquer which I got off eBay (and which sadly is not available anymore) - before diluted with water (I used 1:2) looks like a little thicker milk with nearly no smell and is transparent once dry. Great stuff I would immediately buy more if I could.

This project turned out to be a lot more work than I anticipated - from shaping the base (and milling-in the shallow depression for the stone with a Proxxon) to flattening the stone from the bottom side with epoxy, but the result is really nice. I hope it will serve my friend for a long time

Now a few photos:

Next to a 150 mm Yoshikane petty:



Bottom side:



Here you can see the corner that was levelled with epoxy:



Next to off-cut (that I will use for handles later) before the stone was mounted on the base:

 
You can email me. And a quick note, that stone stand you made is not made of Brazilwood.

Brazilwood is a deep orange wood, Caesalpinia echinata. What you have there is brazilian tulipwood, a member of the rosewood family. Dalbergia decipularis
 
Greenberg Woods said:
You can email me. And a quick note, that stone stand you made is not made of Brazilwood.

Brazilwood is a deep orange wood, Caesalpinia echinata. What you have there is brazilian tulipwood, a member of the rosewood family. Dalbergia decipularis
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Thank you and thank you :) I will follow up on your offer shortly.
 
You know, I just discovered your blog and I found it to be very interesting for me. I have some space in my garage and I think I am going to create a knife workshop there. I remember when I was in Russia, Dagestan, there were are lot of knife workshops. People there were doing some incredible things and I loved it very much. I also have a blog, it is a culinary blog hosted by <spam link removed> So, I think I will impress my visitors with my new skills, but first of all I need to practice, because i don't want to remain without fingers haha.
 
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PeterQui said:
You know, I just discovered your blog and I found it to be very interesting for me.
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Good morning, Peter. And welcome. I'm going to suggest checking the date of the original post in any thread you find interesting before replying to said thread. This one is over 3 years old, and if you click on the original poster's name, you can see that it's been almost 2 years since he last logged on to this forum.
This is referred to as necroposting and is generally frowned upon.
If you find something from an old thread you want to bring up again, it's preferred that you start a new topic and put a link to the older thread as a reference.
 
It looks like the blog is stagnant as well. I'm sure it was a lot of work to keep up with.
 
weo said:
Good morning, Peter. And welcome. I'm going to suggest checking the date of the original post in any thread you find interesting before replying to said thread. This one is over 3 years old, and if you click on the original poster's name, you can see that it's been almost 2 years since he last logged on to this forum.
This is referred to as necroposting and is generally frowned upon.
If you find something from an old thread you want to bring up again, it's preferred that you start a new topic and put a link to the older thread as a reference.
Click to expand...

Oh I'm sorry, I missed this thing.
 
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