Faye

The third annual His Cavvy silent auction knife. 52100 steel, brass, giraffe bone, and KOA wood. Blade length: 2 1/2" Handle length: 3 3/4" OAL: 6 1/4" The sheath has my second attempt at tooling. Boring as far as tooling goes, I know, but hopefully more interesting than basket stamp.

While I was waiting for the kiln to cool off for tempering, I started cleaning up an old hammer head found in a dark corner of the new shop. It has all the appearances of a hand forged hammer, and an interesting makers mark. Like anyone who finds something old that looks hand made, I'm using all of my google-fu to find something about it from the makers mark. No luck yet cause I'm not even sure what to call the makers mark, but it will make a nice addition to my hammer rack anyway.

My sister's Christmas present to me was to send the dark handled kitchen knife to Sharp By Coop. I got the pictures today and as expected they turned out fantastic. I don't think this is probably my best knife ever, but it's certainly in the top 5, and having a knife professionally photographed has been something I've wanted to do for a long time.

I've been practicing scratching up steel on purpose... I have one of Ron smiths scroll work books and that has helped tremendously with my designs. Shading lines are still hard for me to get my head around though. These are both with a hammer and three different gravers. I bought a used graver max machine and made a couple cuts with it before it started smoking and making an awful noise. Good news is I got a very good deal on it and it came with a lot of other good tools, and I might be able to fix it. Until then, back to the hand tools.

I do know the actual paying customer well enough, but she gifted it to her son whom I don't know that well. The edge on the thin one has a very slight curve to it, so I'm not sure it's worthy of to much comparison, though I admit I don't notice the warp affecting the cutting ability so far.

Thank you. It cuts alright. I haven't used it much, but it will dice an onion like a hot knife through butter. Thank you. The one I'm keeping has brass, resin, and Brazilian Ebony. The customers is sheep horn, and cedar from an old fence post. The barbwire was burned into the handle by Mike Draper. The customer works at a museum and is apparently somewhat of a barbwire historian, hence the choice in handle material.

This is the knife I made to fill the order. It's never my first choice, but I did do this one by stock removal from the 1/8" by 2" bar stock. It turned out as a much nicer blade and the customer is very happy with it.

Here is this ultra thin knife finished. It will live in my kitchen for the remainder of its life. Interestingly, the balance point is just infront of the makers mark and the weight is very comfortable. It's not particularly impressive, but so far quite functional.

That's wicked, and very stunning.

Spending some quality time on the stiching horse today. Ran to town to mail a knife this morning and the truck thermometer read a balmy -20 degrees Fahrenheit and it's supposed to drop to -70ish tomorrow with wind-chill. I live in the middle of nowhere it's true, but I promise it's not actually Antarctica. With no heat in my shop I'm going to be taking a few days off.

The super thin one is still on my bench, I will finish that one next week after I get all the Christmas orders shipped out. I did get a brass guard fitted to it and that seems to help the feel of it considerably.

These knives are forged from a billet of 480 layer random damascus. The one has spalted beachwood on the handle and the other has dyed maple burl, while both have stainless steel fittings. I made these for a dream order. The customer gave me full artistic license to do whatever I wanted so long as they were larger damascus kitchen knives. I took the opprotunity to try a few new things, and for the most part I'm very pleased with these blades. The splated beach was not my first wood choice for the one knife, but I ground through to the tang on the beautiful piece of masur birch I first selected (because when you save a piece of wood for a few years to use on the perfect knife what else would happen!). The maple burl is dyed blue, but after some oil it turned nearly black, which was kind of disappointing. However, the pattern in the damascus more than makes up for the sad handles. Blade specs are: Splated beach 5 7/8" blade 4 1/4" handle 2" heel 0.113 spine 0.008 behind the edge Maple Burl 6" blade 4 1/2" handle 1 7/8" heel 0.113 spine 0.007 behind the edge

I had to repaired a handle on a knife I made a little over a year ago. The spalted maple was maybe not the best choice, but to make up for it I replaced it with some ironwood. That was an embarassing phone call, but thankfully the customer was not really upset, just matter of fact.

You are right. I would not like to see it down the road, so I did opt to make a new knife for the customer. I am going to finish this one for my own kitchen though and see how it works.

This one is a commissioned piece for a benefit auction put on by the His Cavvy Foundation. Material is 52100, brass and desert Ironwood. Blade length is 2 7/8" handle is 3 3/4". I made a right handed cross draw sheath for it, as they are very popular in the cowboy world, and I made the knife handle very slender so it will fit close to the body and not be in the way of elbows, saddle horns or chaps. Originally, I made three blades of this design for three different orders. One broke when I tried to stamped it, the other broke when I tried to beat the guard on, and naturally the only survivor had the ugly stuttered stamp on it. With a hard fast deadline of next week and not quite enough material to comfortable grind it out and restamp, I'll have to live with that flaw. Other than that though, I'm very happy with how this knife came out.