Random updates from my shop

tryppyr

tryppyr

Joined
Feb 5, 2010
Messages
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Since finishing the talon knife project (which, by the way, was well received by my sister), I have been working on two kitchen knives for my wife... a paring knife and a small chef's knife. The intolerable heat has kept me out of the shop except for a few short spurts of work in the morning before the sun bakes me out. I've also made a couple more kydex sheaths, including one for the ivory handled dagger I completed a couple of months ago and one for the musk ox handled frame-handled bowie I made a few years ago. I still suck at making kydex sheaths (insert random excuses here), but at least the blades now have coverage and could be carried if I had a mind to do so.

I'd post pictures of the kitchen knives, but I haven't taken any yet and probably won't until I get them heat treated. Right now I'm just working on getting the bevels flat before I take them to HT.

Hope you all are enjoying the holiday weekend.
 
Kydex has a lot of little things that add up to end up with a good sheath. It takes time, equipment and technique that makes the difference.

I hate making sheaths but have learned over time.

It takes from start to finish about 2 hours for me to make a good kydex sheath.

Keep it up, while I hate making sheaths, I do prefer kydex over leather for working blades.
 
So until today I have done all my grinding free hand.

But after a couple of visits to Stan's shop, and seeing how his grinder was set up, I decided to make a tool rest for my grinder today.

ToolRest.png
 
looks nice and sturdy. beware of the blade getting sucked into the space between the grinder and belt :p . the toolrest really helps because i can push harder and the belt does not yank the blade downward. especially with wheels.
 
The steel used was cut from something that could best be described as a computer server rack stabilizer. It was a big heavy piece of steel attached to the bottom of a server rack to keep it from tipping over when the servers were slid in and out on their rails. I rescued it from a scrap pule because I often find uses for pieces of steel others consider trash. More than once something like that has been turned into guards or pommels for my knives. This time it served a more utilitarian purpose.

I also used some of the same material to make my half sized kydex press.
 
Here's a pic of the kitchen knives I'm working on (as the heat permits) for my wife. There have been some challenges already. For example, getting the holes drilled in the tangs. On both blades there was a hard spot that burned out several drill bits. I eventually used some diamond dusted Dremel bits to finish the job. You might also note that I've begun stamping the type of steel into the tang so I can tell whoever does the heat treatment what they are treating. In this case I'm using CPM S35VN.

The handle material is PolyPearl. I cut all the scales from a single block and now have two book matched pairs, but I'm not sure that matters, since the gold coloration didn't get thoroughly infused in the purple. We'll see.

KitchenDuo01s.jpg
 
Those look good.

You may want to consider stamping or etching the steel on the tang after you get it perfectly flat for the scales, otherwise you will end up grinding it off .
 
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