Hi all. Not a knifemaker, but made one knife. (does one knife a knifemaker make?) And here it is.
About me, 25+ years as biomass R&D professionally, lots of mechanical processing stuff, biofuels, cellulosic structure, business and stuff like that. Have bamboo in my backyard...
And so the journey began. 200+ drawing designs of this function. Lots of trials with MDF and such. Which all means squat. Except that I'm clearly emotionally involved at this point and likely not capable of objective decision-making on it anymore....
100% function driven design. Except the choice of wood. Yeah.
Tried to optimize around getting a nice slicer and chopper on the same blade with synergies instead of catch-22's, and thankfully accept that the produced pointed end was pretty handy too. Ground the point (after a hand-drill artifact I found on the desert in Idaho once) to also function as a drill, which is pretty handy if you need a great big blade with a pointy end that could be used to drill. Sometime.
Handle is like a tennis racket, which when gripped kind of western (tennis speak), makes swinging it level easy, and it self-indexes too. Used talwar geometry to design the slicer side.
Two mod's to make: 1) forge-down a little flat spot on the knob that keeps the hand away from the slicer side; and 2) add in a little arc on the chopper side, centered at the center of percussion, to make chopping easier to visualize, and to allow easier rocking to detach if/when needed.
Hopefully these pics come through. Enjoy! All thoughts and comments welcome. I spent a lot of time on the phone with experts in steel, forging, water cutting, big blade making, farm machinery design, etc. Thanks so much!
Can add a lot more text but I've already accidentally deleted it once so will hold off for now.
https://imgur.com/a/DsT86no
About me, 25+ years as biomass R&D professionally, lots of mechanical processing stuff, biofuels, cellulosic structure, business and stuff like that. Have bamboo in my backyard...
And so the journey began. 200+ drawing designs of this function. Lots of trials with MDF and such. Which all means squat. Except that I'm clearly emotionally involved at this point and likely not capable of objective decision-making on it anymore....
100% function driven design. Except the choice of wood. Yeah.
Tried to optimize around getting a nice slicer and chopper on the same blade with synergies instead of catch-22's, and thankfully accept that the produced pointed end was pretty handy too. Ground the point (after a hand-drill artifact I found on the desert in Idaho once) to also function as a drill, which is pretty handy if you need a great big blade with a pointy end that could be used to drill. Sometime.
Handle is like a tennis racket, which when gripped kind of western (tennis speak), makes swinging it level easy, and it self-indexes too. Used talwar geometry to design the slicer side.
Two mod's to make: 1) forge-down a little flat spot on the knob that keeps the hand away from the slicer side; and 2) add in a little arc on the chopper side, centered at the center of percussion, to make chopping easier to visualize, and to allow easier rocking to detach if/when needed.
Hopefully these pics come through. Enjoy! All thoughts and comments welcome. I spent a lot of time on the phone with experts in steel, forging, water cutting, big blade making, farm machinery design, etc. Thanks so much!
Can add a lot more text but I've already accidentally deleted it once so will hold off for now.
https://imgur.com/a/DsT86no
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