Pens and other small projects

Small projects are great, you can finish them quickly, have less time to get distracted, have less invested if things go wrong, and in the case of the small turning projects that I am talking about in particular here, are relatively safe and quiet and child-in-the-vicinity friendly compared to my normal hobbies.

As you may have noticed, I've been posting more not-knives than knives lately. Not because I don't enjoy working on knives anymore, but because I actually like to finish projects every once and a while.

It is amazingly satisfying to finish things, all day most days I work on projects that may take years or longer to finish. I am still finishing up projects that my predecessor started, and I've been at my job for about two years now. Coming home and adding an hour to a project that will take quite a few hour or multi-hour blocks is not very appealing most nights.

The inspiration for my small projects is the result of my friendship with Rocketpants and Bill.

Somehow I convinced them to let me teach them how to shave with a straight razor, and despite me spraying blood all over the bathroom (never wave a razor in one hand and wine glass in the other), they were game and now each has a razor and brush. Since I'm not ready (wrong set of tools) to try making the razors themselves, I decided to try shaving brushes, as seen in an earlier post (Bench and Brush).

Now Bill commented a couple times that I should try pens, since he likes fountain pens, so, because I needed more hobbies I started with some basic pens and a wine stopper (As the wood turns).

I thought they were pretty basic and realized that I preferred other types of pen, so I bought more.

I tried the POLARIS (like the rocket?) They look small but fit well in the hand, and take Parker style ink - which means that you can use gel refills - which I prefer to rollerballs. These are black titanium.

In Redwood Burl

In Maple Burl

I tried a heavy duty sketch pencil (5.6mm lead)

This is desert ironwood and chrome- the picture doesn't do the wood justice;

I tried a bullet pen (.30 caliber in this case) in black titanium...

This is the same block of desert iron wood - and doesn't do the wood justice either.

I tried a seam ripper...

In bloodwood, with copper powder inlay;

And finally I tried the fountain pen - first I tried Manzanita with turquoise inlay... and the wood tore off the barrel, then I tried Ancient Kauri, and the wood tore off the barrel, then I tried gabon ebony, and caught it and glued it before it tore off.

And I think it looks better than the other woods would have. I hadn't realized how much of the fittings were black. The shiny stuff is rhodium plated, and the tip is iridium.

Looks fancy! Writes well too.

Now all I have left to try from this batch is a walking stick - but I might need to buy some longer pieces of wood to pull this one off :)

And in closing, a gratuitous picture of Autumn:

Bye now!

A

Tales from the Mancave: Blackthorn Blade

Blackthorn Blade

The Blackthorn Blade is finally finished, complete with a show stand (made of ebony and holly), and a belt sheath (basswood liner, dyed 8oz cowhide back and loop, bison leather front). The concept and the blackthorn of the handle were provided by NRJJ.

Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa)is a tree with an interesting history, being used as the traditional Irish shillelagh, walking sticks, and sloe gin from the berries. I was intrigued by the idea, and had a blade that seemed appropriate, in a sgian dubh style, so, with some discussion we decided to go for it.

It’s been quite a process to get this knife to where it is today. I’ve posted a few pictures of the process, but thought it might be nice to put them all in one place.

The blade is hand forged of 1095 high carbon steel in my charcoal forge and quenched and heat treated by me as well.

I worked on the blade first and, keeping with the blackthorn concept, put some vine and thorns file-work on the spine of the blade. This was my first file-work of that type.

Next I added a stacked water buffalo horn and nickel-silver spacer, to blend from the blade to the handle.

NRJJ sent me a number of root and branch pieces of blackthorn to pick the right one for his knife. One of them stood out to me as the obvious choice, so I shaped the end knob on the sander.

The wood itself is pale for the most part, but this particular piece has some interesting coloration in the knob, which stands out pretty well, and contrasts nicely with the dark bark.

Unfortunately the wood was a little thin as soon as you got any distance from the knob. In order to match the spacer, and provide a sufficiently robust handle, I had to split the blackthorn horizontally, which left a big gap between the top and bottom. I put it together anyway, and smoothed out the transition between the spacer and the handle, exposing some of the pale wood.

We decided that a black material would be the best to fill that gap, and to contrast with the wood. It worked pretty well, but is a pretty messy process.

In cleaning off the excess, some more of the dark brown bark came off. So, I had a situation – how to blend the very pale wood, with the dark bark. I cut the bark near the knob so that it wouldn’t peel, and then started applying layer after layer of finish.

After putting it all together, I decided it needed something shiny to break up the black, so I filed a couple of stainless pins, and that worked out pretty well. After a few more layers of finish, it was about done.

I worked the blade to hair popping sharp, and had a finished knife – except for marking the blade, which fortunately I didn’t screw up either.

An idea popped into my head when I was looking at the knife and its contrasts in black and white. I thought – hey! Let’s turn a ball of ebony and holly. That would be fun. So I glued together some ebony and holly, and spun away. The leftovers became the sides of the stand, and the ball holds the blade. A little arty, but I like it.

Since that was a little odd, I decided to make a sheath as well. I think it turned out pretty well too, and is much more understated than the stand.

Final result: ~NRJJ~ II: 4" Blade, 11" Overall.

And that... is that.

Unusual, but fun.

Kateigaho

Fall 2009 Kateigaho Internation Edition

My dad gave me a copy of this magazine for Christmas – If you have any interest in sushi, knives, the fall, tea, pottery…or just japan in general, check it out. He bought it for me due to the knife aspect.

As a knife guy, Japanese swords have always been the pinnacle of the craft. I hadn’t really thought too much about what happened to the swordsmiths and technology after swords weren’t quite as necessary. Yes there are certainly a few who still make high quality katana. But what about the rest?

The answer is apparently kitchen knives.

The same excessive detail that went into crafting a katana now goes into a wide variety of special purpose kitchen knives, some specific to particular types of fish. Who knew?

Just like for swords, they use a combination of hard and soft steel, but unlike swords and unlike western kitchen knives, the majority of them are single ground (like a chisel). Apparently this allows finer slices, preventing damage to the meat of the fish.

And just like for the swords, the bladesmith gets the blade to its rough shape and then its up to the polisher to finish it up.

A little obsessive for my taste, but interesting none the less.

So check it out for something a little different.

Old knife made anew...

Hi, Adam here.....

A couple of weeks ago, my 5th cousin 17 times removed (or something like that) asked me if I could fix up an old boyscout knife that he had been given, when it was new, in 1942, when he was a boyscout. He wanted to give it to my 7th cousin 19 times removed (or something like that). So I said, "Sure, I'll see what I can do." Of course I forgot to take pictures first, so you can't really tell how much better it looks now, but take my word for it. There is a bit of an improvement.
The whole blade was rusty, the aluminum pommel was dull and oxidized, and the sheath was falling apart.
I was going to just restitch the sheath, but the leather and stitching really were falling apart, and I found out that there had been fringe along one side, so I made a new one, using the old as a pattern, and layering the tooled front on top. I think it turned out pretty well.

For the knife, i mostly just polished it up, and made it mostly pretty again, although a little bit of the rust was too deep to take out all the way. And of course, I sharpened it up nicely >:)