Kitchen Knives

OK, I promised some pictures of the things that I was working on in the garage, and since projects are always ongoing, I thought that I would post a variety - but then I wrote too much, so if you want to see more visit hangedmandesigns.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I am working on about seven knives right now, four are getting pretty close, and one is almost done.

We’ll talk about that one and its friend.

The original idea was to make a Santuku style kitchen knife. The only steel big enough was a piece of heavy duty Jeep leaf spring that my neighbor two or three houses ago gave to me. So it started as a big thick curved bar of steel.

I thought I should make a little paring knife to go with it, and I still had a piece of O-1 round stock to work with for that one.

With a lot of fire and hammering and a little cleaning up on the belt grinder they made it to this stage.

And then this stage.

And then this stage, ready to quench.

So I quenched, and then things went wrong. I’d hammered and ground the blade to thin on the big knife, and something was a little off on the other. As a result I had a curved paring knife, and a wavy edged Santuku. After some heat on the spine of the paring knife, apparently not enough, I snapped it in half. The big knife took some grinding, and another quench, and isn’t quite the intimidating cleaver that it was before.

The Santuku is the third from the left (it still needed straightening), the paring knife is now a scalpel (top right, next to the dagger).

Now the Santuku carving knife is polished all shiny, and stamped, and has a pretty tulipwood handle, with brass pins. After it is finished, I’ll post a couple more pictures.

And I think that is long enough for now.