Rolling with Failure

I just finished  a knife this weekend, and it's journey is interesting to me philosophically (WARNING!!!   Impending Bullshit!  Impending Bullshit!).
So I made this kitchen knife for my beta-tester Scotty:

It seemed like a good knife.  He took it home and cut a chicken in half like it was nothing.  But then the knife went dull - ack!  At first I thought I'd blown the heat-treat and it was soft, but that wasn't the case.  I had used a sharpening guide, and with the wide blade it had given the edge too steep an angle for kitchen use.  It might have been good on a scalpel, but the edge rolled over in the kitchen.

• Failure lesson #1 - the angle of the edge really does matter, down to a few degrees.

So Scotty took it back and while the edge was fine now, the blade itself was simply too thick to be useful in the kitchen.  It kept getting stuck in food before it went all the way through.

• Failure lesson #2 - the thickness of the blade down to the 1/16th really does matter a lot.

So not wanting to waste this blade that was a failure as a kitchen knife, I decide to make it into a bowie where the thickness would be a good thing.

This gave me an opportunity to try a frame handle and bone as a handle material.  The knife came out OK  but I learned more lessons:

• #3 - bone is brittle.  When you are hammering that decorative pin through to anchor the handle on and it sticks at little - don't hit it a little harder!  I chipped out a chunk the size of my thumb pad.
• #4 - don't leave the knife on the bench when you are staining the sheath.. You will flick black stain on the nice white bone and be forced to stain it too, resulting in a not-so-great look.

I've decided to boil the philosophy down to it's most pure form, the fortune cookie saying:

Failure is opportunity in disguise.

It might be the opportunity to fail a whole lot more, but if you brain is turned on you'll learn a shit-load.

Humidor

This is a first attempt at a humidor for my lumber-jerking partner Scotty.  He never wants the wood, he just likes to make boards (go figure).

So with the exception of the Spanish cedar liner, this humidor was made entirely from trees Scotty and I cut and processed.  The main body is black cherry and the edging is black walnut.

It came out ok for a first attempt, but I'm definitely not a professional furniture maker.  If you got to inspect it up close you'd see why.  Now Scotty will have to test it and see how well it functions as a humidor (fingers crossed).

Prom Dagger

I finished this dagger the night of my daughters prom, and so it became known as the Prom Dagger because of that and the fact that it went so well with my daughters dress.  This is probably the most 'delicate' blade I've made.

The blade is 9 1/2" long and made from W1.  Fittings are brass and the handle & sheath are made from cocobolo.

The fitting came out ok.  One of the more interesting and challenging parts of being a knife maker is that you really have to master a number of skill areas.  In the case of fitting like this you are doing the work that used to be done by jewelers.  I've got a long way to go when it comes to being a jeweler...

Long Bow

This is what I generally shoot my arrows out of:

It's a...   well, it's a 6 foot recurve-decurve flatbow.  What does that mean?  It means that the arms of the bow have flat cross-section like most bows you've seen, that the arms curve back away from the handle but then bend forward again at the tips.  And at 6' long it's definitely a long bow.  It's made of bamboo on the front and ipe (the dark wood) on the back and handle.  Ipe is a super hard tropical wood used mostly for decks, but it also makes great bows.  The pull weight is 48 lbs, so it can toss an arrow fairly hard, and that's about all I can comfortably shoot - though I am working on a 55lb pull bow so I can slowly man-up.

The other design feature of this bow is that it has a somewhat static recurve - meaning it doesn't bend much.  If you look at this picture of the front you'll notice the limbs get very thin in width about 2/3rds of the way to the tip.  They also thicken up, which you can see in the first shot.  This helps the bow throw the arrow faster than if it flexed all the way out to the tip.

My favorite part of this bow is the handle.  The shape is very comfortable to use, and nice to look at.

Odd Bodkins

And now for something completely different...

Some pseudo-medieval arrows.  I say pseudo because the actual bodkin-tipped arrows used in medieval times were much bigger.  The arrows recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose have shaft diameters of 1/2" near the tip.  These are built on modern arrows standards which are just under 3/8ths.

So anyways, these are made of commercial bodkin tips I bought (bodkins are pyramidal shaped points designed to pierce armor), black walnut shafts I cut myself from lumber I cut from a tree I felled.

The fletching is commercial feathers that I cut to shape.  I would have liked to process my own feathers but first I have to make friends with some goose hunters.  The feathers are glued on and then wrapped with silk string.  The nocks are carved into the shaft by hand, and the dark strips are inserts of buffalo horn to keep the nocks from splitting.  These ones are overly thick, but they work.

I used these arrows in the great battle against the Hippie Scoobie-Doo, and between the hard-wood shafts and the bodkin tips they really out-did the target arrows in setting Scoobie back on his ass:

A Grey Blade

I made this knife about a year ago.  It's another case of an accidental hamon from differential hardening - only part of the blade was above the critical temperature to form truly hard steel.

The lighter colored section toward the back of the blade is softer than the rest of the blade.  I left the blade etched grey like this because I thought the patterns in it were really interesting.

The blade is 8" long and made from 1/4" thick 1075.  The fittings are 416 stainless steel, and the handle is carved micarta (resin & paper).

Vine Knife

I made this knife about 18 months ago.  It started out as a chunk of metal to test a friend's home made powerhammer, and ended up as an interesting knife.

It has an accidental hamon due to me not getting the blade quite hot enough except on the edge.  I also took the opportunity to cut my first vine pattern down the spine.  The vine is a classic file-work pattern.

Marking Knives

I made my smallest knife so far this weekend:

They're marking knives for woodworking.  The blade edge is less than 3/4th of an inch on both.  When you are making furniture even the finest pencil lines are too wide and imprecise.  So you draw with very sharp knives.  They are sharpened like a chisel with the bevel only on one side so you can get the blade right up against the ruler or piece of wood you are marking from.

Both of these are made from scrap.  The blades are old files, the handles are from a piece of firewood, and the rivets are scraps of 10ga electrical wire.  One is for me, and one is is for a friend