There's a difference between "I'm happy with it", and "I'm stopping with what I have".
This is the second one.
I wish the patina was a little bit more even, but this is my second go at it. I want to tighten the cord wrap, but I've done it three times, now. I wanted the bevels to be more symmetrical. I used it to open a watermelon, and it pushes to the left, which means the presentation side bevel is more convex. But it's been heat treated, so changing that would be nearly impossible.
Cord wrap grips like G-10 or Micarta that's been bead-blasted by somebody who knows what they're doing. It also makes it almost impossible to have really sharp corners on a handle, which leads to your second question. But first, some pictures.
The glare really shows the curve in the bevel:
I've used it to cut up quite a lot of cardboard. I consider corrugated to be the benchmark of cutting performance for EDC knives, since it's thick, fibrous stuff.
This diminutive little knife does not hurt my hand, even when the edge starts to go away, and I have to saw a little to get through a cut. I was concerned that the little corner at the bottom/back of the handle would start to dig, but it does not.
The reason for this has as much to do with the convex edge as it does with whatever knowledge and experience informed my original design. I didn't think it would make much difference: I did convex edges because they're easier than concave or flats.
Now that I've experienced how easily it cuts, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Last Edit: Jun 5, 2016 11:33:49 GMT -8 by Shorttime: What the hell, spelling?
When I think concave, I think axes and splitting knives. Glad for your happy mistake.
Yah, me too!
Every production knife has concave bevels. When I started considering making knives to (eventually) sell, I looked at production knives as a starting point for features that I might want to include on my own stuff.
That idea died a quick and silent death, as I noticed that most of the features on production knives serve no discernible purpose, or make the knife harder to use.
I tossed around the idea of trying hollow ground bevels, because some makers do. Now? Never gonna happen.
I want to sell off some of the knife-shaped objects that are fully done, before I start shaping more steel. But in the meantime, paper is cheap!
Something I've been messing with for a while. IMO, not the most useful blade shape, but this is a design exercise.
I got to where I needed a smaller french curve (yes, I have actual drafting tools), and a smaller pencil.
Left to right is a 4H "regular" pencil, then my 0.7mm, 0.5mm, and 0.3mm, for size comparison. The 0.5 is what I usually use, but this time I went down to the 0.3.
It needs a lighter touch, or the graphite just breaks, so there is a learning curve to using such a fine-tipped pencil. It took a while to get the hang of it.
Well, it may sound daft, but there are times when a piece of steel tells me what to do with it.
This one told me to try a tapered tang. For once, I had some idea that I was biting off a little more than I can chew, but I'm a masochist, and I enjoy feeling that I haven't met my own expectations.
I checked it, and it's within 1/16 of an inch of symmetrical. I'm going to call it good.
Got the bevel set on one side, but I have to do the other. The balance point should end up about 1" behind the ricasso.
The second pic might give a better idea of what happened. Or rather, what the end result was. I'm not sure exactly what happened to get to this point. I'm usually very careful about the bevel shoulders, because Mister Loveless said they were easy to mess up. There I was, smugly filing away, thinking because I was going slowly, that I had some kind of magic protection against fuck-ups.
The Universe seems to disagree.
Instead of tossing this in the "I'll get back to it" pile, I'm going to try an experiment.
Before picture (so I know where I started):
Same side, different angle.
That side is much nicer than the other, and it's the side I can't keep, because the other shoulder runs back further into the ricasso, and you can't put the steel back on. Well, you can, kind of, but it's not that easy.....
There are expectations of knives, and at least some of it is built on complete balderdash. Every knife is a compromise between cutting performance, strength, and the real wildcard, ease of manufacture. I don't have to tell you that the first two get compromised pretty regularly in favor of the third, but unless you reverse-engineer each knife design, it's probably impossible to tell what got fudged to make it work with the tools at hand.
"Knife culture" has it's own oar to stick in. We've been conditioned to believe that "crisp, even, symmetrical transition lines, between bevel and flat, are one of the hallmarks of a professional knife maker." But then, in a different discussion, people acknowledge the "saber grind", as one of the strongest blade shapes, and also one of the best at cutting, if it's done properly, yadda yadda yadda.
I have no intention of trying to make everybody in the knife-making industry get their stories straight, because there are smaller, easier-to-climb hills, that I could choose to die on. I'm just glad that the Internet makes it easier to find a target audience.
Huh. Maybe "target" isn't the right word to use.....
This fast-looking piece has a bit of a story. The drawing has been hanging around for a while, and I never seriously intended to transfer it to metal. Mostly, I don't do these kinds of knives, because I don't understand enough about the "real world" use of "fighting knives", and I hate trying to do symmetrical bevel grinds. Stuff like this, with complicated bevels, is a design exercise for me.
But, there's this girl. Yeah, it's one of those stories.
Kind of.
I've known her for quite a while, and she's trouble in an attractively curvy package. She knows about my hobby, and one day she stated that she would like me to make a knife for her, the kind she can "stab people with".
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
I could rattle on about the Twenty-one foot drill, legal decisions revolving around disparity of force, and half a dozen other subjects surrounding why "stabbing someone" is a really bad idea, but she's not the sort of person to know, or care, about knife combatives, or the finer legal points of self defense.
She is the sort who would get mad at ME, if she "stabbed someone" with a knife I made, and had to go to jail.
Still, the idea of trying a dagger grind to test my skill, wouldn't leave me alone. I rummaged, and found the design, but I didn't think I had any flat stock in the right size. I figured I would go down, take inventory, and when I found I didn't have anything wide enough, that would be it.
Except that I did. So, figuring that whatever force drives these things was pointing me in the direction of further masochism, I cut the stock to length, traced it out in Sharpie (works better than Dykem, IMO), and started hogging steel.
The piece left over is 6 3/4", by the way, exactly right for something with a more conventional profile. That's when I knew this was going to work.
There's still a lot of detail work to chew through. I have to do the choils by hand, and then all the narrow flats have to be trued, and the blade has to be sanded to 220 so I can scribe the bevel lines. I'm going to do a symmetrical bevel, instead of a chisel grind. Then, we'll see.
If she really wants to just "stab people", I'm going to recommend she get an insulation knife, and some training. She's going to be horrified at the price I quote her for this beast, anyway.
Post by Shorttime on Sept 14, 2018 17:06:40 GMT -8
All I can do lately is these stabby daggers. The design process is all stream of consciousness, and I usually can't make myself go in a different direction. I just have to try different iterations of the same design, until I find something I'm satisfied with. And I will re-visit the same several times, so I just keep wrapping back around to the same concepts, and hopefully getting better at expressing the design, each time.
To be honest, I'm scared of trying these fancy grinds, so I may as well post a couple iterations, to illustrate how this recursive design process works, and because I'm bored AF.
The top four are probably three months old. They've just been sitting in my binder, and I want to do the wharncliffe-looking thing, but I don't have the right width of stock.
That series of drawings gradually became this, which was the design I showed off, a couple days ago.
I figured I would try the handle design from the earlier set, on the dagger blade.
I read about the design process behind the Fairbarn-Sykes dagger years ago, and remembered something about the way the handle is set up being important for keeping the blade pointed in the right direction.
I liked what I had, but I wanted to modify it a little.
Which brought us to this.
It's a subtle difference. The handle is longer, which is mainly an aesthetic choice, but I know it affects the center of rotation for the knife, and you don't want it to be half a gram heavy on the front.
For reference, the squares on the graph paper are 1/4" on each side. It makes it so much easier, because I don't have to do a lot of the set up that I would need if I was using clean paper.
Post by Shorttime on Sept 15, 2018 18:46:26 GMT -8
Time to brag to the Internet?
I tried to do some point-on shots, but the autofocus tries to capture the background, even on super-macro. I don't get it.
This was all the further I was willing to push my luck, for the day. I guess I'll wind up the angle grinder tomorrow, and keep trying to not screw it up.
Post by Shorttime on Sept 23, 2018 15:02:11 GMT -8
Here's some shitty, poorly lit, out of focus shots. I've got the bevels set, and I'm moving on to the other side.
The hardest part(s) of this is going to be keeping the point lined up, and keeping the shoulders symmetrical.
I posted about this in a Facebook group about knifemaking. I was asking for alternatives to the standard dagger/bevel grind, and I got half a dozen suggestions to "use a bevel jig!", and one fella who just posted a picture of his double bevel grinder.
It seems like there are a lot of knifemakers who spend most of their time building tools, instead of making knives.
Figuring that they didn't know shit, I went looking on my own. Somebody out there must have tried something different from the conventional double-edge dagger, and I found Bo Randall's "Gambler" knife.
If it was good enough for him, I can find a way to make it work.
This was a long process, and there is another sketch that I like better.
One of the things I've decided to do with this hobby is go off in different directions, on purpose. Some of it is because of what I like, but a lot of it is because of stuff that I either don't like doing, or don't have the equipment to do efficiently. So this is going to be the only time I do one that looks like this. It looks cool, but there are other ways to get to the same result, and there are dozens of companies cranking out stuff that "looks cool" every day, for prices that I can never hope to match.
I'm not sure if that's a classic dagger shape or whatever, but I kinda like that it's all 'fat' on both sides. It kinda makes me think of an old Native American stone knife with the shape. So that's kinda neat.
Full emergency power to the engines. Ram the Blade Ship.
I guess when most people think of the "classic" dagger shape, they're thinking of the Fairbairn-Sykes dagger from WWII.
I read a lot about the F/S dagger, and I forgot most of it. There were some concerns about the relatively fine tip on the F/S. I don't know if any ever broke, but it was enough motivation for Mr. Fairbairn to collaborate with Rex Applegate on a second version, with more steel at the tip.
Just the tip, though.
This second version is what I was aiming for, in a general kind of way.