Cleaning & Degreasing Bone for Crafts

I've been doing a lot of research as I prepare to start using bone in my knife handles, and I thought I would condense it here. (Stop reading now if you aren't planning to do bone crafting).

Bone Sources:  The butcher.  Really.  My wife buys stew/dog bones are the grocery store for $2.  4"-8" long.  There's a real butcher near me, I'm going to go down and talk to them soon and see if I can get bigger bones.  Pet stores have bone too, but you don't know how they prepped it.  Look for white, clean bones - not the smoked/barbecued bones.

Meat & Tendon Removal:  This can happen lots of ways.

• I use the dog, mostly.  Give her the bone for a week or two and she strips it clean.  Then I trade her a new fresh bone for the cleaned one.
• You can simmer them in water for a few hours and then scrape.  I have heard warnings not to boil them or you will do bad things to the grease.  Just simmer.  You can add some ammonia or detergent to help the process  (I have not tried this, but seems fastest.)
• Put them in a bucket of water & cover.  Change the water once a week.  Apparently it takes quite a while (couple months) but is the easiest & least damaging to the bone (I have not tried this).
• Corpse beetles.  Yuck and too much work.  I didn't bother investigating this option.

Degreasing:  This is the tricky part, and I've read lots of opinions.  This article for luthiers is very good, but might be overkill for knife handles.  But it really comes down to using some kind of solvent to remove the grease unless you have a long timeline for your prep.  Here's my solvent summary:

• Bleach - don't use it.  While it is effective at removing grease & whitening it will break down the bone over the years.  Nothing like having the knife handle crumble to dust in a decade to piss off a customer.
• Detergents (Simple Green, Dawn, etc) - these seem to work, but take time.  I've been using Simple Green in water.  I changed the mix once a week and soaked for 6-8 weeks.  Slow but easy.  Also fits in well with dog-cleaning method.
• Coleman fuel (white gas):  It was recommended by a number of people.  No downsides I have heard of except it's explosive nature.  Soak times I've heard ranged from a day to 3 weeks.
• Acetone.  Not a lot of data available, other than people saying it works.  Downsides are nasty fumes and it's expensive.  **I have tried this a number of times now and it is my preferred methods.  I put the bone in a big mason jar full of acetone.  The acetone lasts over a number of bones, and the bones come out clean and don't stink like they do with kerosine.
• Kerosene.  This paper says it works as well as acetone and is one tenth the price.  It's the same idea as Coleman Fuel.  Light-weight petroleum distillates will dissolve grease into themselves and then evaporate quickly out of the bones.  **I have tried this method since I posted this.  It works and kerosine is cheaper than acetone, but the bone stinks of kerosine for a long time afterwards.

It also seems that putting the bone out in the sun or heating it gently will reveal the presence of grease.  The heated grease flows and stains the bone.

As a knife maker I think that the main factor that will determine how anal you are about preparing bone is how you are going to affix it.  If you are going to rivet scales onto a full tang handle, relying on epoxy only for gap filling, I'd say you don't have to be too fussy.  Making a bone inlay that will be glued into a wooden handle?  Get fussy ala the luthier article.

The bottom line for me is the some words of wisdom I heard Rick Furrer utter in relation to making your own steel  "Don't make what you can buy."  Unfortunately I haven't a source for nice, thick, professionally degreased bone for carving. Yet.

Dog Seax

I haven't posted in a while because I've been working on this:

It's a throw-caution-to-the-wind and do all the stuff I've been wanting to try project.  I call it the Dog Seax because I carved fighting dogs on the sheath, and names are handy for talking about stuff.  It's another seax (which is just a big medieval knife) in the Gotland style. It's 19" long with a 12" blade.  It stays fairly true to some historical examples, but I did go somewhat afield on a few things.

The most obvious departure is the blade carving.  Vikings didn't do this style of filework on their blades.  But seaxes have these nice long flat backs with almost no taper so they are just begging the have the back carved.  I've seen this pattern in art before, it's a fairly obvious one, but I haven't seen it on a blade spine so I decided to go for it.

 The handle is two intertwined serpents, and it was my first attempt to carve stabilized wood.  I was hoping that it would give me the best of both materials in terms of it's carving characteristics, but instead I got the worst. I still have to pay close attention to the grain direction of the wood, and the acrylic makes it harder to carve.  Also the vacuuming process to get the wood completely saturated with the acrylic removes a lot of the moisture, so the net result is a brittle, hard to carve substance with grain you have to pay careful attention to.  :-(
You can also see the second most obvious historical departure here - I put a bit of a guard on it.  The whole concept of having a perfectly straight handle that allows your hand to slide up onto the blade scares me.

One of the other things I've been meaning to try is embossing leather. This isn't the best picture, but these are the fighting dogs I named it for.  It was inspired by a viking carving, but the carving was a little too complex for my first try at leather so I did my own version of it.  It came out ok, but there's still a lot I have to learn. The coloring and shading is proving especially tricky.

Details for knife aficionados:  The blade was forged out of 1/4" 1084.  Flat grind, fully hardened.  There is basically no distal taper as you can probably tell from the photo.  I put it through 2 hour-long tempering sessions at 400 degrees.  The handle is stabilized maple with leather and brass washers.  The tang goes all the way to the end of the handle, and I fastened the tang on this and my previous seax by insetting a washer into the handle, tapping the tang, and putting a nut on it like this:

Whittle tangs are more authentic but I just can't bring myself to do that.  It's a weaker connection.  The washers and the butt plate are then nailed & epoxied onto the end of the handle.

All the metal fittings are brass, and the designs are either stamped or scraped into the sheet brass.  The leather is 8-10oz leather I got from Wickett & Craig in Pensylvania, and it's awesome.  It seems to work much better than the Tandy leather, and it's cheaper.  The only problem is they sell in whole hides, so you're buying in  25+ square feet increments.

Coffin Handled Bowie

This is the third knife I've been working on in the hunting season threesome, though it ended up there by chance - no one is going hunting with this one (yet).

This style of Bowie was made in the 1800s in the US, and I really like them.  This one has a 9 1/2 inch blade of 1084.  I forged it from 3/16s stock so it's a slim blade that should cut very well. Like the hunting knives in the previous post this was heat-treated in my new digital furnace, and I can tell the difference - they are just a bit harder.  They ring at a higher note when you tap them. The real test will be how long they hold an edge.  To quote Roman Landis (a knife-making engineer who spoke at the last conference I went to): "Geometry cuts.  Heat treat determines for how long."

This is a frame handled knife - meaning the steel you see around the edge of the handle is not part of the blade, but is a frame slipped over the tang.  I should have taken a picture - trying to explain it further will be futile.  Anyways, the frame, guard, and the ring behind the guard are all 316 stainless steel.  The handle body is black micarta (a paper and resin composite) held on by 14 nickel silver pins.  The main pin in the middle of the handle is a 'mosaic' pin.  It's a tube of nickel silver with other smaller tubes and dowels of various metals slipped down it to make a pattern.  I buy it in 6" pieces from a supply house and cut it to size myself.

One thing I hate about pictures of knives is that cameras just can't capture the finish on blades.  Reflective metal surfaces really need to be moved so you can see the light play off them.  I finished this blade down to 600grit by hand, and I love the surface but it just doesn't come across in pictures:

You can get an idea of what it looks like in person from this picture.  It's kind of satin-y, but you can also see the reflection of the camera and my hand in the blade if you look at the right side.
I'll probably put this one up on Etsy.
 Next project is finishing a 12" blade-carved seax, and then a sgian-dubh (Scottish sock knife).

Small Hunter

This is the second of the 3 knives I've been working on recently.  It's a small hunter for my second beta-tester.  He cleans lots of game every year and promises to give it a full workout.

The blade is 1084 carbon steel like all my recent knives.  This one also started as 3/16ths stock.  The blade is 3 inches long and a little over an inch at it's widest.  The handle is stabilized maple from my brothers wood pile again.  The sheath is only my second pouch sheath, and I ran into some odd problems dyeing it.  It must have gotten some contaminant on it, and so it looks weathered already.  Hopefully that will teach me to clean my work bench...

The Deer Hunter

I've started doing my knives in small batches of 2 or 3, which makes the construction a bit more efficient, but means that my postings will get more clustered.  So here's the first installment of the hunting season cluster:

This is a deer hunters knife for a good friend who is also one of my beta-testers.  It's a deer hunter because the blade is a longer and proportionately narrower than a typical hunter.  My tester tells me that will help with the infamous sphincter removal cut.
His job this year is to take this knife and use the crap out of it, and let me know what he thinks.  The blade is 6" hammered out of 3/16ths 1084.  I ground it in the medieval style without a ricasso at his request.  He like the edge going all the way up to the guard.  Last years model made it through 2 deer, 6 rabbits, and a drop on the cement floor before he asked for the edge to be touched-up ("It's still sharp, but not crazy-sharp like before.").  Last years was 1075 heat treated by eye.  This one is 1084 heat treated in my new DIGITAL HEAT TREAT FURNACE!!!  Wooooo!!

So I'm hoping it will perform even better.  The handle is stabilized tiger-stripe maple from my brother's woodpile.

I kinda screwed up cutting it because the tigerstripes show more on the top and bottom of the handle than on the sides.  :-\  My fit & finish  is getting better - the seam between the maple and the pommel is perfect.  Between the guard and maple it's very close, but not quite perfect.  Once i can get them all perfect I'll be ready for the ABS journeyman smith test.

Gotland Seax

Finally got another knife finished ( I have 6 in process -oi!).

It's a Gotland style seax - a knife that was popular around 600-1000 AD in northern Europe.  This one is similar to a couple others I've made, but is truer to the historical seaxes. The blade is just shy of 10" long.  It's 1/4" thick at the base and doesn't taper much to the tip.  Distal taper (tapering the thickness of the blade over it's length) is not a feature found on these types of knives.  It's forged from 1085 carbon steel.  The handle is 5 3/4" long and is made from stabilized curly maple and brass, with two leather disks.  Overall length is 16" including the pull ring.  It's a big knife.

The dark lines in the handles are bug/worm holes.  They ended up getting filled by the acrylic resin I use to stabilize the handles.  The slight concave area in the bottom of the handle is a feature I added.  To this day Scandinavian knives have straight handles and no guards.  That scares the crap out of me.  I asked a knife design expert at a conference about it.  He said it scares the crap out of him too, and the only explanation he could offer was superior knife skills.  In any case, I wanted something to let my hand know when it was approaching the blade.
The sheath is 10oz tooling leather with the archetypal brass work of the Gotland seaxes.  I'll probably put it up on Etsy once I get a nice pull chain for it.  

A Little Protection

Some friends and I decided to start hitting each other with practice swords again like we did when we were in college.  Being old farts we're downgrading the weapons to rubber LARP swords, but we decided we still need armor.  So here's my first attempt at a pseudo-viking helm in cuir bouilli leather.