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.