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Hello: Been sorta busy around here with family stuff since we have a brand new granddaughter so this is something I whipped out real quick.. This one is welded from a mix of 1095, L-6 and a bit of meteoric iron thrown in ..8 1/4" Maiden Hair blade...Phosphor bronze mounts...Some of that bowling ball material for the fluted grip..This piece looks like a deep reddish maple burl! Turned out OK...at least I think so... The sheath is set with a 17.65 Ct star ruby.. cut this one myself.. All in all I think it didn't turn out too bad.. Hope the photos work... This one is website stock and is currently listed there... JPH

Finally got around to making my pastor a knife plus a sheath. The blade was forged out of a piece of 3/4" 60 grade rebar. Since he was in my shop when I forged the blade I thought I'd use the forging for his knife. Use a piece of curly maple that was saved out of the firewood rack and used some aluminum bronze that I aged. First sheath I made in several years and it turned out better than I expected. The knife is around 10" overall.

"He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

My goal with this was to make it look like a weapon from a museum, not a brand new one with a shiny blade. I dont know how well I succeeded in that. I'm guessing I am not fooling any curators any time soon. But overall, I like the look of it. The blade is mild steel with a spring steel edge. Somwhere between 55 and 60 rockwell according to my hardness testing files. I believe the haft is hickory, or maybe ash. Its from an old snow shovel. I stained the wood a deep ebony color, and the blade was given a very dirty sanding before antiquing it with a mix of strong vinegar and salt. I would have liked deeper pitting than I got, so I might redo the vinegar treatment later. I let it rust for about 4 days before lightly sanding the rust away. Total length: 168 cm or 66 inches. Blade length: 56 cm or 22 inches. Blade thickness: 4.8 mm, or 3/16 inches Haft length: 145 cm or 57 inches. Weight: 1930 grams or 4.25 lbs

I finally bowed to the peer pressure of a friend and made him a chef knife. It is 88 layers of 1080 and 15N20 laddered with a bronze bolster, black G10 spacer, and a pretty stabilized Redwood burl handle. Caleb Royer did the picture. Anyhow, here is it. Let me know what you think gentlemen.

So this was a first attempt, I see on Instagram that this type of knife is very popular so I wanted to take a crack at making one. its O1 tool steel with dyed and treated leather for a spacer and then gutted paracord for the crossover wrap and non gutted for the turks head knot. There are a few things I would do different with this one, the handle is a bit short, even for me, someone with larger hands would consider this a 3 finger type knife, and I narrowed the tang out a bit more then I should have considering I used gutted paracord for the main wrap portion so there is a thickness difference between the blade and the handle, but all in all I really like how it turned out, its nice and light in the hand, and falls perfectly into a reverse grip and feels like it was made to be used that way.

Now we’re cooking on gas Hit 1300’c/2370’f with only the back covered no problem.

Tree stuff! 2 handrails, they dont have the cap rails and labs tongues on yet, but I'll throw those on later today. They will bolt onto the side of a house and down a set of steps. The viney bits will get leaves tacked onto the ends to finish them off. I wanted to do a cooler design, but as always, the boss said it'd cost too much.

Hello!! First off I totally DETEST grinding..it's boring and monotonous and just un-fun.. So I run my grinders to the point where grind time is minimalised.. And the Frankengrinder cuts everything..it doesn't care..steel, iron, bronze. wood...meat ..bone or anything else that it gets to chew on it'll do it!! Just have to be careful.. besides just about everything in my studio can get ya..some to the point you are FUBAR... So best keep your mind on what you are doing.. On the feathering in of the bevels..these are done free hand..Pretty much everything I do is freehand ..besides I was "taught" to grind by my great friend the late Robert Egnath...he ground more blades in a day than most folks do in a year..His personal record was 193 if I remember correctly... I have ground so many that it is second nature to get that nice transition... It's all practice..just like most other things.. Here's another one with that really shows the feathered in grind...finished this one yesterday.. JPH

The customer on this one wants a Fairbairn/Sykes style dagger but has given me some artistic leeway on it. This being the case, I think that I will give it a damascus blade and probably a ribbed blackwood hilt with stainless fittings.

Guess its been at least 5 years ago I bought the smallest pair of diagonal cutters at HF. The main purpose for getting them was with the hopes that I could make the cutting head smaller and also make the cutting edges sharper to tackle the armor plated toenails that come during the aging process. I was able to make the adjustments with the belt grinder and for awhile the toenails clippings flew all over the place. Now since having right shoulder surgery and then getting my right wrist fused the grip in my right hand has changed and the factory made handles were just to small on my cutters. Finally got around to making the adjustment.Now to add a light and some magnification.

Last night I forged a hunting knife for my boss and ground it today. Made a template of the drawing he liked, then forged pretty close to shape. And I rehandled the chef knife I made in a class because it was off center from the blade.

Finished a small hunter, a small scramseax, and mostly forged out a short Messer in the vein of Pieter Bruegel's paintings. Normally I wouldn't forge in weather like what we've been having, but I volunteered to do demos at a summer festival

My recently completed Nordic knife: 97 mm Scandi ground blade, cocobolo and ebony handle and peened brass bolster.

spent a couple of days making jigs so I can do the box inserts to hold the knife, pistol and mag and had them all just right when the nlyon collar on the dewalt rounter base let go and I ruined one of the jigs, so am getting the engineer to make me one all in steel which will put me back a few more days on that side of things as I have asked him to make it with the collar only having a stand off of 4mm instead of the 15 that the dewalt nylon one had. This has necessitated making all new jigs which I have now got done with the primary insert cut out and will wait till I pick up the new collar on friday before I cut them for the stand off. Needing some way to hold the 7 rounds of 45 acp I cut and drilled these ammo blocks then duncked them in the BLO tin for ten minutes. They will sit at one end of the box and should look the part when it is all together. Only had 3 rounds but enough to show the easy grab eft above the block.

After making four different handles from blackwood and being dissatisfied with each of them and throwing each away, I finally made one from paper micarta tonight and finally got what I was after. Normally I'm not much on synthetics but as this knife is pure tactical, I think that it will be OK. The blade is in the tempering oven as I write this. I'll try to get a guard cut out & fitted tomorrow.

Finished the second knife and sharpened/etched it. VERY happy with these. Finally got to have some celebratory drinks while admiring the reflection!

*passes the popcorn to Clifford*

First of all, thank you gents....once again. My dad always said "met geweld kan jy jou vinger in jou hol af breek"......using force you can break off your finger in your a-hole So less force, chalk and the angle thing......that all worked. I'll still get RSI's, but my physiotherapist is a very pretty German girl, many others consider her a sadist, but I think she hurts good, so it all works out!

Made some more progress today with the jigs finallised and the first prototype sorted out. I had made a couple of boxes with mitered corners as it was quicker but will dovetail the actual boxes. I need to change the bearing from the 34 inch to 1/2 inch to suit my dovetail table. This is how it all needs to be done to get to the finished form. First I needed to decide how the items would fit in the box and to make it small enough to be practical while not making it too crowded. Draw onto thin board and cut out the patterns. From there I needed to transfer these marking to a jig board and add the stand off for the collar after checking that the cut out was still the right fit for the items. Because there had been a few failures with the jigs I ended up making a separate jig for each item although with the first collar having the 15mm standoff the cut outs ran into each other so it was necessary A few failures for the scrap bin And when it all came together I was abe to mock up the first box athough having to use a replica 1911 for now. I have made the cut out for the 1911 slightly oversize as it will have to accomadate most of the different makers offerings and I had to take this into account.

Doug, ive had theft out of our barn twice. I know who did it too, after i put head gaskets in their van for free no less, because like a dumbass, i felt bad for them. But now, different story. Been burned so many times, i have no sympathy. Youll find that in the dictionary between shit and syphallis (sp?). When i go to bed tonight i will say a prayer that when he got home with your anvil, he carries it to his garage filled with glee, and squishes his balls between it and the workbench. Then i hope it falls horn down on his foot. Im sorry im so bitter. People just piss me off sometimes. I hope you get it back!! Tom

There's a very good chance that the thieves have no intention of keeping & using the anvils so it would be a good idea to give a heads-up to anywhere that might purchase an anvil.

This are Cold Steel pipe hawks and a Spike hawk I remodeled with files seven years ago. I just saw this thread today and it has great info. I made stars out of the screw holes and filled them with pewter. The last picture has a couple of CS Trail hawks. All work was done with files. 1 r

Well put Gary..................

Life is all about ASS, you are always Covering it Kicking it Kissing it Busting it Trying to get a piece of it Or, just plain acting like it !!!!!! ......................................

Alan: I am starting to really like the stuff..It is different I will say that. Here is one I finished today that is going up on my site tonight..got to get some lucre PDQ..all God's Childin' gotta eats! I forget what this colour combination is called...something like molten lava? JPH

The paper isn't visible like the cloth is.

Chas: This was ground on a 14" serrated wheel at a SFM of 7200. I do that "feathering in" on all my double edged pieces..I think it looks a lot better than just having them abruptly come together..It just looks "right" that way. JPH

Looks good! Too bad about the router base collar. I hate when an otherwise decent tool is crippled by corporate greed.

Looks like a winner already, how else! This knife has never done much for me, I'm sure your rendition will change that Gary.

It's in the shop now. But I'm only going to be able to work on it at night until I get my excavation done.

I know. The octagonal shanks and the little relief cuts are quite elegant g

Ok so some clarification. The customs broker paid duties on my behalf so I was able to pass through without any issues. This was something I was unaware of. I guess I should have asked more questions so I knew exactly what I was doing. I kind of just winged it. Now i know what to do for the next ones.

Haven't seen one of those for a long time, your take will no doubt be interesting !!!.................

Looks excellent!

I've always thought of the F/S as the archetype of the word "dagger." I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

I wouldn't drink it. Only had one 1/2 semester of chemistry in junior high. Yay Public School. But I believe It's just Iron and Chlorine. Spoon fulls of either wouldn't be good. But I don't believe is toxic, at least not in the sense of "OMG It touched me, I'm gonna Die!". Hopefully some of the more knowledgeable around here will chime in. But I've always believed it to be safer than Muriatic or Sulfuric acid others have used for etching. Keep some baking soda around anyways. .02

That said @Joshua States, I'm a complete stick/hidden tang convert.

I got the wooden handle roughed out today. The blade is still much too large. I haven't decided if I will forge it smaller or simply grind it to size. The Fairbairn/Sykes knife was made in different styles by multiple countries. Most versions had a 7" dagger style blade. The hilt was sometimes solid metal and sometime a combination of hardwood & brass. The customer on this one gave me some leeway so I'm using some blackwood with 416 hardware.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the name Fairbairn/Sykes, this knife was created for the British SAS troops who were probably the first special forces. There have been many small changes in the knife over the years since WWII. It has even been adopted by many different countries including the US.

I bought a new 10" contact wheel, but needed to make a new spindle to bolt it to the work arm.

Same basic concept, grinding deeper at the distal end, just that is a 2-step process. Let's assume for a moment that you have a center line scribing tool or jig of some sort that you use when grinding the edge of the blade. Use the same tool to mark the center line of the tang. now you have reference line when grinding the distal taper. If you set the scribing jig to be a few thousandths off center, you will end up with two lines running down the tang for reference. If you wanted to get really technical, do the math. Let's say you have a tang that is roughly uniform in thickness at 6,5 mm. You want the tang to taper from 6,5mm to half that at the distal end. Set the scribe at a little over 1,5 mm and scribe two lines (one with each side down) on each edge of the tang. You now have a visual reference to grind to.

This is a very cool project. Following.

Survived HT and temper. Post HT clean-up on the grinder. On to hand sanding...

Thanks buddy! Sorry to keep adding pics, but this shows the handle at its final finish

The tang should be tapered in both height and thickness.Height is easy to do on the 2x72 or with an angle grinder. Just scribe a line and grind to it. Thickness is where it gets tricky, but the only real "trick" is either dragging it slowly across the platen and slowing down as you go, or using the disc and dragging it across the face. Either of these two methods will grind heavier at the distal end of the tang than at the shoulders. The distal taper in the blade only happens by default if the spine of the blade angles down toward the edge. Even so, the taper will only begin where the spine starts to drop. The rest of the blade remains a constant thickness. This is not always desirable. If the spine is straight, and uniform, it will remain that way unless you manually put the taper in. This can be done in the forging, or in the grinding.

Picked up the rest of the discs and tags today so this will be a set for one box. While I was picking up some more wood for the boxes I saw this piece of fiddleback and just had to have it for knife handles athough not for this project as they will be ebony.

This is the weekend I pick up my hammer. I have booked a hotel in London Ontario. The hotel is an old armory converted into a hotel. Hopefully there is some iron work left inside to check out.

Good to see you around again, man! Can't help with the question, but it looks nifty. Are you going to embed the burner in refractory, or see how it holds up to the heat alone?

It seems Brian and I both had the idea to follow Steve Culver's instruction book on how to built a slipjoint folder without making patterns first. Like Brian, I know this is not going to be my last one! This one is bound for Knife in the Hat, and I will use what I learned making it to make the next one even better. Specs: Blade and backspring, 3/32" precision ground O-1 flat bar Brass liners with Nickel Silver bolsters and pins. Jigged bone scales from Culpepper & Co., Amber dyed, Catalina pattern. Open length 5 7/8" / 147mm, blade length 2 5/8" / 66mm. Closed length 3 1/4" / 82mm Maximum thickness 3/8" / 11mm I made two changes from Culver's design. I omitted the scale pin near the peak of the liners because I thought it was unnecessary and distracting, and I rounded the tang because I've never liked a knife with a half-stop. It just seems ridiculous to me and serves no purpose except to break your thumbnail if the spring is too strong. Speaking of which, I am really happy with the spring. It isn't too heavy, and the knife snaps open and closed with authority. The judge of how strong to make the spring is my wife, if she thinks it's too strong, back to the grinder! It feels much like any good factory knife of its size, spring strength-wise. And now for the pics! The problems I had with this one: 1. The pivot pin is not invisible on one side. 2. The blade is not dead center when closed. 3. A minor slip at the grinder moved the left-hand plunge line back into the kick. 4. While soldering the bolsters, the scribed line on the right bolster was not where I thought it was, resulting in a mismatch between the two sides. Much colorful language and careful filing followed. There has been a bit more cleanup on it after these pics were taken, mostly to remove that facet on the underside of the bolsters. I also engraved that spot with my initials since I forgot to do the blade prior to hardening...