Here you can see what will never again be seen. The balance of a knife is one of its most important characteristics, and figuring that out beforehand is always a bit of a crapshoot. Hopefully, your guesstimate pans out and you end up with a knife that handles like it should, (no pun intended).
As you can see Magnus' hole plan depends on where the handle components are located, and there they are, (with extra room, just in case);
Handle components have been profiled, and as you can see here, aren't flush with the steel profile. Magnus asked me what I thought of the steel standing proud, and I didn't like the idea. To him, doing this was a little truer to his artistic vision, and after assuring me that he could both fulfill his vision, and not cause me hotspots, I acquiesced.
This particular feature is a reason that tapering the handle tang material was avoided. In retrospect, removing any more material from the handle would have been the wrong thing to do anyway, as the knife would be far too front heavy, but I think that an increasingly thinner tang that also stood proud would've been a problem for the ole meat hooks. The thicker stock has enough surface area that doesn't encourage blisters.
Also, the fasteners have now all been filed, and I think thy look mighty nice.
You can see the beginnings of the handle contouring take shape, (again, no pun intended).
I had taken very careful measurements of my hands for the first knife Magnus made for me, but really dialed it in for this one. I knew where I wanted curves and where I wanted straight lines. I won't go into all the measurements here, because you are mostly Americans and therefore don't understand the metric system, which by the way the rest of the world uses
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More to come later in the day...
). Listening to Magnus thinking through design is partially hearing art being formed and engineering design considerations. It was an honor and really cool. I hope you and Magnus get to meet in person someday.
