Hey Guys, there have been a lot of people asking to see my knives, so here is one I finished up yesterday, a 7.5 inch long W2 santoku. The hamon is not great "I am improving," handle is made from marbled cocobolo.
I actually meant to post this sooner, but the knife I had planned on doing may or may not have cracked in the water quench "Oh the hubris!"
These chunks of marbled cocobolo came from a high end cabinet maker, he used them for his knobs. The marbled stuff is about 15 perecent heavier than normal figure
I really like the lines of your knife - clean and nice. Looks like it would really work good in kitchen.
Did you just sand the cocobolo to a high grit with no finish oil? Do I see some small open pores on the wood? Sometimes it works nicely to fill with CA, then sand ALL the CA finish off leaving only the pores filled with CA and they just disappear.
No oil finish. This one was sanded to 1000 grit and hand buffed. Despite all the fancy burls and wood I have, I still prefer more subtle woods like Cocobolo and kingwood to any crazy burls, at least for my personal knives.
Good work. Now the bad news. You will become addicted and will also have to figure out a whole bunch of new things like what is the perfect shape for a kitchen knife handle, what is the best weird compound grind you can figure out and how do you "hide' the plug lines on such a wide blade? We haven't even mentioned how to sharpen th darned things. You have at least three three homework assignments. There will be more when you finish those unless you want more now.
Edit. You are much earlier in the process that i was when I finished and sold my first kitchen knife, I did the same thing that I did with damascus, which was to wait, probably too long, to do the hard stuff. i didn'tmake my first damascus ballet and blade until I had been poundng out knive shaped objects for maybe 4 years. I didn't attempt my first kitchen knife until maybe 6 1/2-7 years in and even then, I spent 6 months reading stuff and listing to makers and users who knew a LOT about high end lichen knives before I ever sold one. With that one, I used a wa handle made by a pro. If you calculate the time I put into that one and what I netted on the sale, I didn't even make minimum wage. the good news is that it gets better.
I have a few gyutos to grind out of 52100. I think I will do more of the same kind of style. Simple knives with organic curves. I was thinking of doing some African blackwood wa handles with Rosewood burl bolsters.
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