Yet another newbie enters the fray.

S

SturmMonkey

Joined
Mar 29, 2012
Messages
8
Well I have been lurking here for a while and hopefully I have absorbed enough information to make a go at building my first knife. I now know why Aldo has a logo of a guy leaning back in in a chair smoking a cigar. He has all of you guys handling his advertising;) So I have my Craftsman grinder and my steel is on it's way! I plan on outsourcing the HT to someone so I can hopefully just concentrate on getting my knives the way I want them.

I have some blades drawn out free hand and I was wondering if there is program that works well to render your designs digitally so that they can be manipulated and/or posted here for feedback?

There is a huge wealth of talent here that you guys freely share, and I would like to say thank you to all of you that share your art, and knowledge without it I never would have attempted to try this on my own.
 
Woohooo, now I have company :D

On a more serious note, I agree, the amount of helpful information on this forum is incredible. I certainly have learned a lot from my time here.

For designing, I use Inkscape, it's a free vector graphics creation program. You could use it or any 2d or 3d CAD system.

Cheers
 
SturmMonkey said:
Well I have been lurking here for a while and hopefully I have absorbed enough information to make a go at building my first knife. I now know why Aldo has a logo of a guy leaning back in in a chair smoking a cigar. He has all of you guys handling his advertising;) So I have my Craftsman grinder and my steel is on it's way! I plan on outsourcing the HT to someone so I can hopefully just concentrate on getting my knives the way I want them.

I have some blades drawn out free hand and I was wondering if there is program that works well to render your designs digitally so that they can be manipulated and/or posted here for feedback?

There is a huge wealth of talent here that you guys freely share, and I would like to say thank you to all of you that share your art, and knowledge without it I never would have attempted to try this on my own.
Click to expand...

I find drawing on 1/4" graph paper helps.

If you do that, just take a photo or scan of it and post it.
(you will have to use photobucket or some other service)
 
I use the free version of google sketchup. My wife has some experience with it since she works for her dad (an architect). If you've used autocad then sketchup should be easy. When I need to send drawings to the waterjet contractor I get my wife to convert the file to an autocad format at her office.
 
This might not be of any use to you, but any student (and I believe any educator as well) gets free access to all of Autodesks design software. I use AutoCAD, and I was blown away by how easy it was to throw together a design, especially because I like using a lot of curves in mine.
 
Regarding CAD, there are plenty of free 2D CAD models you can use, and a few 3D. 2D is mostly sufficient for getting the shape down and seeing what it would look like if you lengthened the blade half an inch, or dropped the point a quarter inch, etc. You can also use it to print out templates and for sending to a waterjet cutter. Draftsight is a pretty good one from what I can tell.

I have access to Autodesk Inventor (competitor to SolidWorks) and currently I'm using it to make parametric 3D models. Making a 3D model of a knife is pretty involved but it does allow you to calculate things like the total weight and location of the balance point, and how changing the grind or the stock thickness, etc., affects that. The nice thing about parametric models is that you can change any of the parameters (blade thickness, handle length, belly curvature, any dimension of the knife) and all of the others will follow along according to how you've defined the relationships between them. If you were making a custom design for a client you could send them very realisitic looking renderings and then tweak the model based on their feedback. But as I said, making the initial model is a lot of work and there's a steep learning curve with the software if you've never done 3D modeling before (you need to be very good with geometry).

I'm sure there are free 3D modelers available, but I don't know much about them. I believe you can get 30 day free trials of 3D modeling programs like SolidEdge. If you go to a college you can get student licenses for some very nice programs, too.
 
I use GIMP, its similar to photoshop but free. You're of course limited to 2d and I probably only use it because I'm so used to drawing pictures in it. I LOVE the smudge tool in both photoshop and gimp. Its like pushing around modeling clay. I've done some fairly detailed work with that tool alone (lil drawing from a slow friday at work http://i46.tinypic.com/b8w8wm.jpg )
For example, here is the template for the simple knife I'm working on now. I usually set the canvas size to be the same as my stock and then print to scale. Then I can just cut it out, get it a tiny bit wet, stick it to the steel, and spray paint it all and peel off the paper when the paint is about half way dry.

168ako9.jpg
 
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I use inkscape. It's like a free software version of Illustrator. It works with vectors, rather than bitmaps (gimp). That means if you draw a line, you can adjust the curve, position, size, etc. afterwards. That lets you play around with lots of variations easily. You can also export to DXF, so it can be useful if you want to get parts cut by water jet. The learning curve is a little steep, though.
 
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