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Morning guys, here's some pics of this latest hunter off the bench. It's a bit of an unusual one for me. It has an L-3 (52100) blade, 120mm long, 4mm thick on the spine, overall length 255mm, brute de forge finger choil, Macassar ebony scales, inlayed with two bone escutcheons, with red liners held by two S/S Corbies, wet formed deep pouch sheath, dyed golden brown with a Moran style smiling moon in nickel silver.The reason for the Bill Moran theme is the pieces of bone were bought by the client from the shop sale after Bill Moran passed away so these with the forged finger choil and moon were added as a homage to him. All questions and comments greatly appreciated. Steve

Hi !! These time I want to show you my latest project in collaboration with "CICHY Knives". My job was to make forgewelding. The razor will be a reward in the shaving tournament in Poland (https://www.najlepszypolskigolibroda.com/) Hope you will enjoy

I just love how my name got translated to Spanish......

Legal To Carry More sarcasm, my banana republic celebrates its birthday today, they recently, without any qualms, dusted off a law from bad old days of 1956 concerning the length of blade you may carry. Believe these miss by 1mm because Up the System O1 tool steel blades, one with green jelly roll micarta, the other black Hessian, sheaths by my dad. These are for a father and son, family friends, and the last knives I'll finish for a while.

This began life as a leaf spring and then was repurposed for an American style tanto but got to be too thin, 2mm at widest, and as I don't know anyone who fishes and would use a fillet knife I turned it into a very slicey kitchen knife. The wood is oak and the pins brass. I tried to do a mustard patina on it, my first time attempting one, but I did it before I buffed it so it's barely there anymore. Overall length is 9", with 5" of blade and 4" of handle. Thank you for looking, critiques and advise are more than welcome.

Latest Tommi puukko sheath. Bison leather and urethane sealed wooden insert.

I had the day off and after domestic chores and a bunch of errands, I had a few hours of shop time to make some dust. I am working of a group of 6 knives all at the same time. I'm seeing if I can make a group more efficiently by working in stages. So once I get my tooling set up to do one step, I do all six. Today was starting the finish grind. The little full tang job got to 400 grit on the 2x72 (flats and bevels) the rest are at 220 on the flats, 150 on the bevels. Still a lot of dust to make.

Thanks Charlez, moonshine from plum.

My second knife is coming along waaaayy faster than the first, I quenched it this evening, and its currently tempering at 400 for an hour and a half twice.

Near the end of page 6 off this thread are two ingots cut in half...I just found them while cleaning up around my charcoal forge. These slices are pretty rough and will be forged only to test the forging sequence I am practicing for a couple of really good ingots ( I will show them when I forge them ) . Here is a picture of the inner surface of one of the slices as we proceed to start forging....the dark areas will be bright and the lighter areas will become dark ( black I hope )

Got the blade forged and rough ground and the scales are ready to be cut out.

@Charles du Preez I will have to get a lot better, a lot faster.......but for today it seems I need to choose between this and a J-O-B......got an offer today that would mean pressing pause for the foreseeable future..... Neighbour Mike is the hand model.....needed to catch the last light.....

I don't put the cutler's rivets in until after the epoxy because unlike a corby bolt, you don't have much room to sand into the head of the rivet. Therefore the surface of the scale has to be pretty close to the final dimension before they go in. I felt the rivets I had in stock were either too small or to large for this handle so I took some of the larger ones, and turned the heads down to 1/4". Then it was just a lot of rasping, filing, and sanding to get the final handle shape. Here is a quick snapshot of the mostly finished knife. I need to do a few touch-ups, and get some glamor shots done.

I love those designs. Sadly I don't have the money to purchase one!

So i’ve recently had the itch to make a knife makers vise. Yesterday I finally made a trip to the steel yard and found some suitable pipe. I got some plans rough sketched, the pipe rough cut and the ends trued up on the lathe.

Thatsa good lookin knife! I'm completely out of steel but as soon as I get more, I'm making a Nakiri...

Thanks for the Aaron. I haven't made the knife yet as I have had other projects that were more motivating. However, I will get back to this in the fall when I start making sausage again. The last couple of shoulders I took apart, I used an old 6" fillet knife I inherited from my dad. It worked pretty well, but has a very narrow blade. I'll probably make something similar, but with a bit more width.

Saturday afternoon was experimentation time, wanted to forge a blacksmith's knife in search of something cheaper I can market. I started with half a large bearing race, flattened I started with 180mm. Drawing out the tang was relatively easy, cheated and user a grinder to fix the plunge a bit, but didn't struggle too much with the rest....took about 2 hours. My neighbor Mike joined about halfway through and started the same process on a halfround file. We had a laugh because while he uses technique, I just use brute force Due to lack of practice I switch from brute force to technique once I start getting tired, and the stupidity of this will probably hit the day I injure myself...... My knife has a few issues.... The handle is too small for me, which means it should be okay for most people. The blade on the other hand is a bit of a monster, probably still around 180mm even after forging out the tang. First lesson learned, start with 1/3 of a bearing race. Secondly, I have a few great ideas for pimping the handle a bit, but the idea is to make something cheaper, so I need to apply the KISS-principle. Which brings me to the blade.........nothing I can't fix and make look very nice on the grinder. Problem with that is do more than grind in a basic bevel and leave the rest, you have to do all the normal F&F...... This is a real struggle for me because my instincts tell me making cheaper knives is not the way to go.....

Glad to contribute I’m not really sure if your really sure about this? Haha Thanks! I worked on the second knife for a bit this afternoon, went a little more detailed. I like how it turned out Might get some more time tonight. Adam

I would love to make a feather one day. It will require that I make some special dies for my Uncle Al press before I can though. As is, my press doesn't open wide enough for feather dies. Ron Newton showed me one time how to overcome this. I just haven't taken the time to build the custom dies for it. I'm thinking about maybe taking Andrew's idea of a jelly roll and going one step further and doing a jelly roll out of a multi bar "W" pattern billet and then stacking it 4 x 4 with every other piece rotated. I need to ruminate on it for a while though.

Here are three of them! Horn handles, as per the early Anglo-Saxon period originals on which they're based.

First time I have ever killed and gutted a trout! Fishing in Nampa Idaho. Two of the fish were small but the other one was probably 12-14 inches. Dinner will be good tonight!

What I look like when squatting 325 for 5. If you can't do the face, you'll never get strong :-)

Thanks Alan. I just finished the handle today. i start by grinding the pins down flush with the wood. now I start rough shaping the handle on a 60 grit belt. This part goes pretty fast if you use the corner of the belt to dig in. As you can see I’ve hit the tang, I do this in a couple of spots to make sure I’m close. after that I can clean up the rest with a finer 180 grit belt. I have to clean up this side by hand, because I don’t have an exposed contact wheel on my belt sander. now every thing is nice and clean. I start rounding with 120 grit. once the edges are rounded over I take it off the vise and finish rounding by hand. next I go to 220 grit. Making sure I get the tang and spine as well. Then repeat this step with 320 and then 400. After that, I wrap some 400 grit around a file and make sure the tang and spine have a nice straight grain. now I sand to 600, 800, and then finish with 1000 Now it’s ready for the first coat of boiled linseed oil. I usually do a total of 3-4, making sure it’s dry between coats. And there it is! It just needs a sheath and to be sharpened, I probably won’t include that in this WIP. I will post some more professional pics once I finish the sheath. thanks for the kind words everybody! Mason

I decided to try my hand at a pipe wrench knife over the weekend. I know a lot of these have been made, but it I enjoyed the process. I’m thinking of making one or two more. Maybe a dagger. What do you all think?