Gary Mulkey

I spent the majority of the day today in my home shop and managed to get all of the components for my Joseph Rodgers knife roughed out. I wasn't satisfied with the original guard & handle spacer so I replaced them and then got the rest of then components roughed out. This should give me plenty to work on for a while in my public shop tomorrow.

Having had the last two days off, one of my goals for this time is to rough out components in order to have something to do while in my public shop. Here are most of the components for my next. This will be styled after a Joseph Rodgers knife with some of my own additions. The blade is W1. The handle is desert ironwood. The fittings are 416.

I've sent the knife to Jim Cooper for photography. I'll post a professional photo when available.

After looking around my shop for a project to keep me busy I ran across an old W1 blade that I had forged months ago. It had laid around long enough to build a good layer of rust and was quite ugly. I decided that it might be worth saving though and after giving it a rough grind to remove the rust I decided to go with it and to give it a traditional Joseph Rodgers & Sons type hilt.

With a few more coats of finish to the oak burl and a final polish to the handle fittings, I should be ready for final glue up:

I've yet to do some fine tuning but most of the hilt is complete:

I've taken a brief sabbatical from this one in order to restock my supply of hunters for my show case. As I finished the last of them today, it's time to do some more Bowie work. I got the remainder of the hilt components roughed out tonight in order to have something to work on in my pubic shop tomorrow. The inner piece of the butt cap (416) once profiled will get file worked to match the guard. The outer piece is of some antique bridge hardware (wrought iron) and will get thinned, ground convex, polished & hot blued.

I wanted to remove the heat from the foil so that the press quench would be that much quicker.

Yes. The blade was actually press quenched. I dunked the packet (w/blade) just long enough to cool the foil.

When I was doing stock removal and using S30V (similar) I used to quench the packet until it showed no color and then quickly into a plate quench which seemed to work well.

After a rough grind & a quick etch I got my first look at the pattern. I'm sure that it will show more detail after H/T.

I got canister #2 welded & forged into a blade shaped object today. Once again when I removed it from the canister it had some vertical cracks. Once I got them welded to my satisfaction, I let the billet soak at welding temp for 20 minutes and did all of the bladesmithing @ welding temp just to be sure of not having problems. This seemed to do the trick as there are no flaws visible now. While bladesmithing this one I got a chance to use my new Ed Caffrey angle peen hammer which worked like a champ.

This sounds a lot like an author who has done a little research but not enough to fully understand what he is writing about. It's articles like this that confuse people.

8"