First knives - 18 years in the making....
About 18 years ago, when I discovered the lab we had just opened had a heat-treat oven in it, I decided to indulge in a long-term wish of making knives. Preferring high-carbon blades for my kitchen knives, I obtained some O1 from a local steel mill, and profiled out this blade. I cut a lot of vegetables, and cleavers I could buy were inferior quality, too long&heavy, or too wide. The intent here was to make the blade just wide enough to allow my hand to not hit the board when scooping, the blade not too long, and curved (not square) on the end so as to reduce weight, but not so much as to unduly reduce the "scooping surface". (yes, the middle rivet hole is out-of-line - stupidly did not use a pilot hole...)
Anyway, I then discovered that the heat treat oven did not have the depth to handle this blade ... and services on-line were restricted to only doing HT on air-hardening alloys. and so that effort, and the stock I bought, went on the shelf (well, workbench surface) for the last 18 years..... Now, thanks to JT, I can move forward (I was incredibly pleased to discover that JT can handle O1 - I have continued to search on-line and that capability just does not pop out of the search engines)
Second blade - also designed 18 years ago ... and because I had left over stock from the bigger blade. Sometimes I am just doing a small job, and still like to "scoop" from board into bowl ... but the big guy above is just too much. Hence the design below - basically a "paring" knife, but with a widened blade so as to allow for scooping of small quantities of food:
I had an additional piece of 1" stock from that long-ago purchase .... and in the intervening years have grown to understand and really, really like the Japanese approach to knife design and usage. I feel the "petty" style is typically to short to really facilitate long enough "slicing" motion - hence the blade below that is meant to be a somewhat elongated Petty (handle intended to be a Wa - style handle ... hence my recent posts on obtaining and drying wood....
Last piece of left-over stock: a long piece of 1 1/2" wide O1. Thought I would take a try at a Sujihiki - again destined for a Wa handle. The tip profile is a little funkier than I meant it to be ... should have kept the blade flatter ... but I wanted to avoid the long-slow curve in the spine that the "Petty" had.
Bevel grinding: on the first three blades, I did try initial bevel grinding (on the first big-one did that 18 years ago - no tutorials available :-( ). these are what gave rise to my questions on doing a clean bevel grind on thin stock (the stock is 0.07". Though not clear, that last Sujihiki is not bevel ground - will try that after HT, at which point I should have my 2X72 grinder up and running (will also try to clean up the bevels on the other blades). All the work above was done with hacksaw, hand drill, file, and a HF 1X30" sander.
These blades are ready to send off to JT. Hopefully the thin stock will not be too bad in terms of warp, and I can continue practicing my handle work (both western and Wa). (aside, I do have a V10/ w/"damascus" outer layers (I am forgetting the terminology for this construction :-( ) that I put a handle on, but am not showing here.)
