Criticizing Your Own Hand Work - a Knife in this case

[D_W]

I'm not a knife maker. I suppose I could probably refer to myself as a toolmaker at this point with capability to make a lot of those reasonably well.

Several years ago, I was experimenting with making knives, but not seriously. I was making small knives and marking knives to use as utility knives and throw in a drawer. I would occasionally fix something for someone and send back a "dump knife" in the box -steel that would have just gone to the dump, but heat treated to be better quality than something like a hirsch or two cherries knife. The part about this that's obnoxious is that it wasn't much effort to make a better marking knife than you can buy. I don't know why.

I sent a sliver "dump knife" to someone when sending a chinese plane iron to get lab analysis - he wanted to know what they were and I had several of the same thing, and he also had the means to get the analysis done. He sent me an email asking why the dump knife held an edge and sharpened so much better than the typical fodder and I gave him an explanation and eventually he asked if I would make two knives that he already had, but was dissatisfied. I think the way he put it was "I'll pay you any amount of money to make two knives in a pattern that will sharpen like the marking knife". I made one and misunderstood the pattern on the second, like a petty knife, and ended up putting the edge on the wrong side of the knife. In fairness, I misunderstood the pattern, but he marked the wrong side of the blade. Some of the consumer knives are weird and if you didn't have the edge marked you can't really tell which side of a knife blank would be destined to have the edge. I just followed his mark.

When i started grinding chisels, I suddenly had the means to finish grind a hardened knife without burning it, and have been intermittently off to the races experimenting with geometry that makes a better knife than anything commercially made. Along with hardness to go with it and a practical way to get dangerous to use knives - it's a little different than chisels.

The offshoot of this (he does call the slicing knife I sent him "the best knife ever made" and talks about cutting tough meat with it when needed, or frozen meat. the knife that he has is about 7 1/2 inches long, it's ground as thing as I could reasonably make it with a near flat grind, a little over an inch tall and the spine is only about .07" thick at the thickest point. That combination of things is what makes it better than a commercial knife - because I don't care if he breaks it and he shouldn't either.

Commercial knives, from what i can tell, including expensive commercial knives, are made to prevent people from being able to break them and return them either soon or years later. The combination that you get with them is a shoulder behind the edge and a concession on hardness so that if someone abuses them, they will usually bend. You would be embarrassed to send a knife back that you were stupid enough to bend, but if you broke it, you would feel free to claim that it was too fragile and needs to be replaced. A knife industry insider told me this is in fact the case - the biggest problem with buyers is that if they break a knife, it doesn't matter how long they've had it, they will call it defective.

.............

So, how did I get to this point? Well, the grinding and the heat treatment is mostly settled. I've made a few stainless knives heat treated in an open forge, which is a supposed no-no, and I make a small concession here and there, but usability isn't one of them. Terminal hardness may be one, but not necessarily in a way that will count because we have the buffer to finish the apex, and when I make a concession to hardness, I'm still ending up at lower tool hardness with a knife that is too hard to steel.

By grinding freehand edges and not burning them instead of leaving a knife in a jig, etc, I can create an ultra thin taper like a wedge razor where the knife bevel itself can be sharpened as one because the edge isn't thick enough to have much of a shoulder. And then that shoulder isn't there to cut things - so for uninitiated, the knife can be a little bit dangerous - it can get through things faster than you'd expect.

All of this, I'm super pleased with.....

.......but..

I haven't got a clue what makes a good knife handle. And that is a huge problem making things. You cannot make something nice if you don't know what it will be and you can't know what it will be without either having the same thing in hand and copying or making some things that you think might be nice and then criticizing them to make them better. The result isn't always what you expected from the start.

Commercial knives aren't a great source because they often have large bulky handles with a big bob on the back end and something to protect fingers. Nature of the beast.

I want something that disappears in the hand, and I like either cigar shaped handles or handles tapered with the butt fatter and front not.

So this was attempt #1 with a new parer - and the guy mentioned above is partially responsible. I wouldn't have guessed to make a knife of this pattern - it's kind of short and fat compared to the small farberware type paring knives that are little and thin, but it's not fat in the spine - just the height. At its thickest point, it's about 1/16th of an inch thick. A bulky handle is a no go.

and that left me yesterday in two uncomfortable places. Freehand making a handle on an already sharp knife that its totaled if a belt touches anything ahead of the handle and no real clue of proportions I'd go for and nothing in hand or pictures to really copy.

what do you do. You scheme an idea, make it and then see what you don't like about it and fix it. Eventually you'll get what you want. All the while, now that I'm going to start making a few knives, my feelers are out for what will make a better handle in use.

This is try #1 after the first round of finishing (a poor man's french polish variant with BLO and shellac, and I will probably put a coat of some type of urethane, but thin, over the whole thing).

Crticism in the next post. by the time I'm done, it'll be water resistant and the scale from heat treatment in front of the handle will be gone.

You can make out the odd pattern of the blade in front under the tape. I'm not done grinding until the blade is sharp and the bevel is extremely tiny and even, so the handling is done with a knife that's sharp enough to shave with. Tape is enough along with some care about things that would catch the handle and snap the knife into you hard enough for it to push through the tape.

Eventually, I'll make a small fixture to pinch blades between metal.

 

[D_W]

So, here's the criticism so far;
1) it's not bulky enough in the hand. I wouldn't have guessed this. It has to be felt, yet one more thing where there is no substitute of having vs. pondering about. I realize this whole thing of experience and feel is not popular on the internet these days.
2) The front angle of the handle is intentional - the leading edge. I didn't think about the rear - it either needs to contrast the angle at the front or match it. I think it looks bad
3) I would love to keep crisp edges on the fingernail shape in the front, but the reality is if that's finished, the finish will chip off right at that transition. I hate sanding over crisp lines, so I'm in limbo about that. On the next one, I will probably leave it crisp and then file an accurate crisp chamfer and see if I like that.

when the finish is done here, any unevenness will be long gone.

There is more that I won't like but I don't know what it is. Handle #2 will be better, but that might expose other things to find out.

I'll think about aesthetic improvements that will fit along with the functional improvements.

 

[D_W]

I think there are two things that prevent people from making nice things. And a side comment here as the "grimsdale" method post above led me to another blog that I don't read. The blogger offers classes. They seem like an endless list of potential hypothetical things ,a whole bunch of really clean tools and benches (what's being made? I don't get it), no discussion of design outcome in the courses and no proof that anything can be used to make nice stuff. Just a lot of pine and poplar.

Maybe I'm seeing it wrong, but a major steepening of the trajectory for me was when someone lit a fire under my butt and said "you can do better", and then when I found out that I was capable of thinking more about things other than methods, everything changed from learning more and more methods to learning how to make better things.

So, here's the two problems, along with a third:
1) you cannot make anything nice until you have something nice that you want to make and you're willing to suffer through figuring it out. That will always include design elements even though that's hard to figure out and people are highly sensitive to design criticism or any criticism
2) the money in teaching things to people is not in teaching them to make nice things. It's in giving them a break from every day life teaching them a whole bunch of methods and demonstrating things so that they can imagine they could make something nice

#2 results in going home, copying what you saw in "class", setting up a shop and continuing to set it up and then doing nothing because you hit a wall as soon as you:
1) are confronted with making something you didn't get the steps for
2) are all coked up and high on classes to make dovetails, buy handsaws, use metal planes for dimensioning, whatever else - none in the context of making things, and you have no idea what you want to make well

This is where the discussion on a forum can't advance, because everyone wants to bob around in this safe world of no self obligation and reaffirmation that you can't really be expected to figure anything out or that you won't fine joy in doing it. George Wilson was the person who told me that I had more potential and I didn't like the obligation at the time and I thought he was rude for suggesting I could do it.

But in talking to him over the years, I noticed that he is not lax on details about much of anything other than the method to get the results. He is focused on the results. I'm not striving to be George Wilson. George is world class by any definition. I'm striving to learn from the things that make him world class and hopefully I can be neighborhood class.

I think we're destined to fail at this online because we're stuck talking about "grimsdale methods" and not the outcomes we're looking for. Everyone wants to keep packing in the bag of "maybe I could" and stuff off taking the reigns later. When I encounter something like making this handle, I just initially want someone to tell me what's good, but I don't know who that would be and the reality is, I won't remember it. There's no ownership. I expect that the resulting most practical outcome might be boring. For chisels, the most practical and comfortable handle ended up being one of the most boring types. I had a professional maker in my shop a few weeks ago and he's seen the chisels I posted online. I have some nicer handles that I have probably posted, too, and he picked them up and said "you made this chisel?" in several cases. Yes, I wanted the pretty handles to be the ones that won, but they don't.

And then I said something to George, who I didn't mention chisels to for over a year, and of course George does as he usually does "send me pictures". and I request that he doesn't say anything nice because I can't learn from that - he is objective, but once someone is a friend, you never know if they'll sugarcoat stuff. And he asked if I would make him a set of chisels. And he also said that he found the best handles just to be of the marples carver types.

And I think I can finally say I can make a good chisel (these have been seen before), even though practically no aspect of them is what I thought would make a good chisel 10 years ago when getting a fascination with tools.


The knife handles will probably take fewer attempts than the chisels. The knives themselves have taken fewer attempts because of things learned along the way.

 

[D_W]

Lastly, the finishing method that some may find useful.

The handle in this case is macassar ebony, but that doesn't really matter.

- sand to 400 grit or so
- sand in linseed oil to that grit until there is a cake and the wood is uniformly dark
- add a drop of shellac to the sandpaper a couple of times (just regular paper) and work it into the oil the oil will cake, the shellac will cake with it a little bit but start to stick to the wood and then the shellac will stick to itself. This is just expedited french polish. It won't work well on furniture because you'll have a cake layer on the surface of the furniture that you need to sand off later, especially on clear furniture.
- As the shellac builds, wipe off any cakey stuff and turn the sandpaper over - at this point, the shellac is building on itself and the linseed oil is staying on the surface. Don't wipe so hard that you're pulling off finish though. Just a plain paper towel is fine. Turning the sandpaper over, you're going to apply more shellac and burnish the surface with the paper side - there's enough oil left on the surface of the finish to lubricate burnishing things. When the whole deal gets shiny and the pores are generally filled, you're to the point that I am in this picture.
- Wipe off any excess oil once the handle has dried a little or you'll get stuck with gooey BLO on the surface.

You can also do this with mineral oil and then you can be indifferent about the drying because it won't dry. You can just let the handle dry and rag off the mineral oil later, but for some reason, I like the idea of an oil that will dry. There's no way there's enough mineral oil for it to matter - it'll never soak through the handle and cause the glue and pins to let go.

If you have very porous wood on furniture, you can use this process to fill pores, but it's not as fast as a couple of rounds of pore fillers and to make sure there's no thin film of dusty cakey stuff on the surface, you really have to sand the top layer off back to only the pore fill and then continue on. I don't think there's any savings of time if not using a pore filler vs. just french polishing if the surface needs to be clear.

 

[TRITON]

You're always critical of your own makings, its part and parcel of slapping yourself about and putting your own skills down. I doubt theres a maker of anything who doesnt end up in a deep depression at one time or another over the quality of their workmanship.

But to combat this all you need to do is look at the comments sections of you tube where some poorly constructed piece is getting rave reviews from the great unwashed.

 

[D_W]

You're always critical of your own makings, its part and parcel of slapping yourself about and putting your own skills down. I doubt theres a maker of anything who doesnt end up in a deep depression at one time or another over the quality of their workmanship.

But to combat this all you need to do is look at the comments sections of you tube where some poorly constructed piece is getting rave reviews from the great unwashed.

That's true, and it does then become a matter of what's your objective. Is it to make things and really take on the satisfaction of making them well - or the pleasure of figuring it out - or is it adulation. Or selling along with adulation.

I think the actual makers of things are busy making or they talk in smaller circles where they can kind of pick up things from each other. I live in a maker desert, so it's a challenge to figure out where you can have a substantive discussion and find people willing to criticize what you're doing so that you can at least consider it.

I guess there are people who get a lot of fulfilment from preaching to beginners, too, without ever having a profit motive - and if they do, that's fine. They tend to get really upset if you make suggestions to them, though. Sort of like how Paul Sellers has his comments curated on his blog to remove anything that could suggest he's in the weeds - but he also has the profit motive, of course.

 

[Jameshow]

D_W

You should try no being accomplished at anything! That really sucks trust me I know.

Your lucky You have a perfectionist streak that drives you to persevere and achieve!

 

[essexalan]

I like Wa style handles on kitchen knives, octagonal in cross section but slimmer in width than height. More taper towards the front with extra clearance underneath. Tang can be relatively simple as you are using an interference fit, epoxy and no rivets. I have some cut and drilled but am still fine tuning the prototype to fit my hand. You can use a mixture of woods for decorative purposes. Knife blanks are nothing special, I just stripped the old handles off.

 

[D_W]

I like Wa style handles on kitchen knives, octagonal in cross section but slimmer in width than height. More taper towards the front with extra clearance underneath. Tang can be relatively simple as you are using an interference fit, epoxy and no rivets. I have some cut and drilled but am still fine tuning the prototype to fit my hand. You can use a mixture of woods for decorative purposes. Knife blanks are nothing special, I just stripped the old handles off.

I have made that type and like those, too. In this case, the stock is dead thin and I think (not sure), I've generally used the way style handle when grinding or hammering (usually grinding) stock thinner so that the tang still has appropriate thickness

For the benefit of folks who may not follow that, figure that instead of starting with stock about .068", I could just start with stock at 0.11 or 0.125 or something and grind a taper coming out of the tang into the back of the blade, trying for some neatness in the taper view, and then continue a distal taper out so that the middle of the spine at the top is still something like .068". We'll see over time if this tang causes a problem even though it's through tang, it's only hardened near full hardness for the first inch or so.

It's a contest to make the knife sharp enough so that it doesn't ever encounter much force, and scary enough that nobody would even think of doing things like cutting rings off of drink jugs with it.

I thought I posted this earlier, but did not.





back of the blade behind the heel still has file marks in it here (yes, people still use files rather than CNC machines and 4 separate $4000 belt grinders!). But I tend not to finish stuff for me as well as I would if it's for someone else. My own parers don't look nearly as good as the ones above who were made for someone with good taste.

You mention that knife blanks are nothing special - I've found over time that geometry and ideal hardness are both about neck and neck for making a woodworking tool as well as possible. For knives, I think geometry trumps hardness, but hardness is still important. Translation, if someone even gets you close to 60 with good geometry, you can make a knife that's a word beater by keeping the angle thin and adjusting the apex.

The stick cutting thin knife above is slightly below hardness target as if there's any problem with relatively clean stainless heat treating in the open atmosphere, it's getting quick high heat.

I don't touch the really complicated steels, only relatively simple stainless steels that are chromium types and not the vanadium types.

if a slightly underhard knife can cut through sticks and dry poplar without significantly deflecting or chipping, it's good enough for my uses.

 

[D_W]

D_W

You should try no being accomplished at anything! That really sucks trust me I know.

Your lucky You have a perfectionist streak that drives you to persevere and achieve!

I wish it was a perfectionist streak! I'm disorganized, poor memory, strong spatial skills and tinkery. So O-2 on the first/second, 1-1 on the third, but I can get confused pretty easily, and then the tinkery part is what comes in here. I figure the drive to make things is strong enough to make up for the others, but as mentioned either in this thread or the norris thread, I have to make a concession - and that's pretty much any other leisure activity. When work gets busy or family stuff is busy, i'll disappear from the forum first, then from making (which if it lasts long, I don't like) and hopefully never cutting the family for long for work. I get anxious now if watching TV - I was pretty good at it when I was young!!

No facebook, instagram or any of that stuff, either.

I kind of wonder as the default idle mode as a kid was TV or video games if most of us would be more content if we assumed that we didn't need any TV and spent the idle mode on feet in the shop or online looking for info to support shop stuff.

Lastly, I've learned from a hobby perspective, if everything is new all the time, the shop can get to be pretty disappointing. The message from woodworking instruction is sort of "build one of these, and then build this, then build something else". It leads to slow building, no rhythm, no real refinement that can be seen or pondered other than stuff that ties together, and I'd bet, burnout.

I always have a go-to in the shop for something that I have done a lot of (making chisels or planes, whatever it may be) where I can just walk into the shop and do it by feel and do it well. that gets boring by itself, too - I still look for little things that make chisel making better and faster, but if they are only as good as prior efforts and I don't come up with something, no problem.

 

[D_W]

I think the finish for these handles in the end is going to be lacquer. Which I don't have on hand (nitrocellulose brushing lacquer).

Polyurethane looks good. Waiting for it to dry is agonizing and very dependent on temperature. So the shop being at 70F overnight and only warm on a really hot day just leads to really slow drying finish.

A chemist told me that urethanes are so temperature dependent after initial flash off that you can get a very significant crosslink (the finish curing permanently and not just drying) in hours and at 20 degrees cooler, it could be days.

I'm too spoiled by shellac and crosslinked WB sprayable finishes.

A built up CA finish is also a possibility but I have done that to pore fill handles - the cocobolo chisel handles above are thin CA pore filled - but it's unpleasant to the eyes.

I guess the phone isn't convinced that anyone would want to focus on something that has glare. It seems to be confused by the handle, just as it will always try to avoid showing a crisply planed bright wood face. As that may be a pain for showing work, it probably comes in handy getting pictures of people and things that are clearer and with less glare than reality.

 

[D_W]

I have two boning knives to make handles for now, and thought yesterday it would be interesting to show dropping a banana on them as it should fall two feet under its own weight and be severed by either of these knives.

However, the thin height of a boning knife allows the banana to cut itself in a curve and it goes about halfway through and turns up the length. I ate the evidence.

I don't know how much I'll ever use this parer - it'll be banned from the kitchen with near certainty, but the boning knife will be useful for trimming bone-in hams. I'm copying or not totally, but close, a knife sold in the US by "lamson" who has probably just copied someone else's pattern.

https://lamsonproducts.com/products/6-vintage-boning-knife
These sell on amazon for about $50. I've never heard of the brand but they claim to be made in the US and have been for a long time? I can only guess that they've done a good job of automating what is a pretty elegant handle shape for a mid priced knife.

The finish on the blade reminds me a of a Buck knife - which is ground in a machine that takes a blank in one end and the whole operation is done automatically as the blade goes around a wheel. The operator adds a blade and takes off the finished blade as the wheel returns. buck has factory labor that looks over the knives and buffs them a little bit. And they probably use the term hand finished, too.

It costs me about $5-$10 to make a nice knife, but I sure wouldn't want to try to make them and sell them for $50 and deal with returns and retailer markup.

 

[essexalan]

I have made that type and like those, too. In this case, the stock is dead thin and I think (not sure), I've generally used the way style handle when grinding or hammering (usually grinding) stock thinner so that the tang still has appropriate thickness

For the benefit of folks who may not follow that, figure that instead of starting with stock about .068", I could just start with stock at 0.11 or 0.125 or something and grind a taper coming out of the tang into the back of the blade, trying for some neatness in the taper view, and then continue a distal taper out so that the middle of the spine at the top is still something like .068". We'll see over time if this tang causes a problem even though it's through tang, it's only hardened near full hardness for the first inch or so.

It's a contest to make the knife sharp enough so that it doesn't ever encounter much force, and scary enough that nobody would even think of doing things like cutting rings off of drink jugs with it.

I thought I posted this earlier, but did not.





back of the blade behind the heel still has file marks in it here (yes, people still use files rather than CNC machines and 4 separate $4000 belt grinders!). But I tend not to finish stuff for me as well as I would if it's for someone else. My own parers don't look nearly as good as the ones above who were made for someone with good taste.

You mention that knife blanks are nothing special - I've found over time that geometry and ideal hardness are both about neck and neck for making a woodworking tool as well as possible. For knives, I think geometry trumps hardness, but hardness is still important. Translation, if someone even gets you close to 60 with good geometry, you can make a knife that's a word beater by keeping the angle thin and adjusting the apex.

The stick cutting thin knife above is slightly below hardness target as if there's any problem with relatively clean stainless heat treating in the open atmosphere, it's getting quick high heat.

I don't touch the really complicated steels, only relatively simple stainless steels that are chromium types and not the vanadium types.

if a slightly underhard knife can cut through sticks and dry poplar without significantly deflecting or chipping, it's good enough for my uses.

The knife in your a original post looks much like a Honesuki, boning and jointing knife.
Often have to clean up the area on the back of the blade on shop bought knives, my forefinger ends up there on both kitchen and wood carving knives.
Favourite knife of mine is a Takamura in R-2 steel, only 1.6 mm thick and very thin behind the edge, about 20 degrees included angle. It won't be seeing any twigs but plenty of veg.
I can't see the blanks I have being anything special they would need too much thinning but they sharpen up well enough so I will sort the handles and give them to my daughters. More knives to sharpen when I visit.
If you have a Tojiro lurking around then do a back to back comparison with your steel at cutting sticks.
I was recommended Liberon oil for finishing handles it sets quite hard.

 

[D_W]

The knife in your a original post looks much like a Honesuki, boning and jointing knife.
Often have to clean up the area on the back of the blade on shop bought knives, my forefinger ends up there on both kitchen and wood carving knives.
Favourite knife of mine is a Takamura in R-2 steel, only 1.6 mm thick and very thin behind the edge, about 20 degrees included angle. It won't be seeing any twigs but plenty of veg.
I can't see the blanks I have being anything special they would need too much thinning but they sharpen up well enough so I will sort the handles and give them to my daughters. More knives to sharpen when I visit.
If you have a Tojiro lurking around then do a back to back comparison with your steel at cutting sticks.
I was recommended Liberon oil for finishing handles it sets quite hard.

tojiro is the chef's knife that I have upstairs. The spine is about as thin as my knives, but the area above the bevel is more rounded. I think it needs to be on a commercial knife. I think they are excellent knives and have taken a little heat for suggesting that the difference between them and a handmade knife claimed to be 65 hardness is generally trouble with a user.

As far as the profiles, there's a lot more wedging with tojiro's knives, so it would be difficult to get them through the stick and they are a little less breezy through slicing things thin without a wedging bias, but nothing that really matters.

With the chef's knife that I showed, if you're used to something like tojiro's pattern, you can get in a little trouble cutting something where you expect resistance, but you get used to it. The gap between something like a henckels and tojiro chef's knife is about 2x as big as the gap between tojiro and the chef's knife that cut the stick, but it's pretty easy to notice.

It's also not really a matter of practical anything, just playing to see how slick a knife can get without having a non-durable edge, especially in regard to pushing the bevels ever thinner and steep just at the tip with buffer treatment. On these knives, the steep part of the bevel that's finished with a ceramic steel and then buffed is a few thousandths long. sounds fiddly...

....until you figure out that you can sharpen them about once every two months with 10 strokes on a ceramic rod and then five passes per side on a buffer.

Back on the knife does need some attention, though - both aesthetics, and to get rid of the crisp grind edge. It's abrupt feeling straight off of the grind, as I think you're pointing to (but there are some grind marks to hand lap out of it, too.

I like a not so traditional hand finish along the length of the blade with 220 grit paper. It's quick and easy to refresh if the sides start to look bad and on a one-piece knife hand finishing with a soft felt and paper, the scratches are pretty shallow. On a clad knife, the scratches would be too deep.

 

[D_W]

knife 2, cocobolo...slightly different handle.

Learning that starting from slab sided handles that if you think the sides are way too fat, then you're at risk of maybe rounding them and having a handle too small. If you think they're so fat that you couldn't possibly get them to a good result, then they'll end up about round.

This handle needs to be thinner at the front or fatter at the back to look good, but it's try #2 and I'm also getting a feel for making a handle entirely with a belt and spinning drum and hand sanding. I don't usually "grind wood", just metal, and love to make chisel handles turning or cutting.

same as the prior blade, once the finish is done, I will cover the handle and finish the aesthetics of the blade.

This boning knife is AEB-L, which is hard to get hard enough in the open atmosphere and without liquid nitrogen, though that's to be caveated. It's hard enough, and harder than a buck knife, but AEB-L with a liquid nitrogen end to the quench can be 62/63 easy and still have OK toughness. I would guess this knife is 58/59. i can get it a point or two harder but that's it.

Because of the thin bevel, the ceramic steel and the buffer, it doesn't matter. It'll still sharpen fine and cut things without deflecting.

From top view, the whole shape is boring, but looking at lines, the curvature at the tail doesn't look right. Look at the last inch and you can see the curve sort of breaks at a point - it's subtle but that's no bueno. Curves are curves and that's a mistake from trying to round the tail so that it is symmetrical. i didn't see that in front of me, but I see it looking here. I know to make the back fatter next time and be careful there. That'll be an improvement. May not be great, but it'll be an improvement.

Front comb angle of the cheeks of the handle could (should, would look better) be steeper, too. The big mismatch between the beginning of the blade cut in and the angle at the front comb doesn't look very good.

This is just the first round with shellac, not pore filled. Contemplating more pore fill and won't use polyurethane on a handle again. This one can stay shellac, I guess, but the rest will be nitro lacquer for the reparability and ease of shellac, but better water and solvent resistance.

 

[D_W]

not sure why the blade is so filthy, some of that is epoxy, etc. all of that will come off when the blade's surface finish is completed.

 

[--Tom--]

Don’t forget texture is your friend with handles, especially for butchery where you want a good grip. I ended up dimpling the ones I made for my butcher with a carbide burr

Depends who you’re making for and what you’re aiming for though.

I’ve made a lot of kitchen knives and there are nuances which make more of a difference than you’d think between high performing and nice

 

[WideningGyre]

Zen butchery:



Love watching this guy work.

 

[D_W]

Don’t forget texture is your friend with handles, especially for butchery where you want a good grip. I ended up dimpling the ones I made for my butcher with a carbide burr

Depends who you’re making for and what you’re aiming for though.

I’ve made a lot of kitchen knives and there are nuances which make more of a difference than you’d think between high performing and nice

I've made maybe 6 knives for other people. In each case that I sent one with a handle, I described how it should be held and sent a picture.

guess what people don't do. Now I get why so many knives have a big slab sided handle with a drop on the back. When I sent the picture of the boning knife (a different one) to someone and mentioned the handle would be a bit small, he sent me his grip back. His index finger is on top of the knife well into the blade and the handle is only in the back of his hand.

I wouldn't have guessed that with this one.

I received a pretty solid cut from the boning knife earlier, almost cut the tip of my finger off, but glued it back in place (not the first time - just a little fillet, not like half of the finger past the knuckle, but also remembered something that I have that helps to final finish the blades a lot faster - bag full of little machinists finger stones that are intended for surface conditioning. Far better than sandpaper. Will consider getting a fillet glove for the hand with the stone in it, though.

This knife will only cut already butchered meat and maybe fruit, but I get what you're saying. Even the smallest amount of ham fat all the way around a handle leads to slickness.

the boning knife that I received a picture of to copy with "make the handle smaller" as the comment is victorinox or something. The handle is a gigantic rubber handle that I'm guessing is made in case people are using it with a glove on in the winter.

 

[Ttrees]

I have two boning knives to make handles for now, and thought yesterday it would be interesting to show dropping a banana on them as it should fall two feet under its own weight and be severed by either of these knives.

However, the thin height of a boning knife allows the banana to cut itself in a curve and it goes about halfway through and turns up the length. I ate the evidence.

.

Be a bit like the film?