Update

A little update for the knives I have been working on. As you can see the filet knife has been heat treated. Have to grind a little more off to clean it up and get the handles going. I believe I'm going to use my jade green G11 material for this knife.

In the other picture are non profit works.

The largest of the three is my personal EDC knife. It's made from 1/8" 52100 ball bearing steel. This blade was triple quenched before tempering. Handle material is some beautiful unknown burl wood with a clear Danish oil finish. The sheath will be made of kydex and will be able to be worn in 3 configurations...Neck, Belt Upright and Belt Horizontal.

The middle knife is a gift. It's made from 1095 and the handle is my homemade psychedelic micarta. It will also have a kydex sheath.

The tiny little knife is for my wonderful wife. It is actually my P.A.T. knife with burl handles on. I hope folks like the plain version because it still takes as much work to handle one of these as it does a large knife. So I won't really be offering this on my tables.

Besides these knives I have about 14 on the bench and more off to the side. I'm going to try to finish 6-10 of them for my first show of the year...Blooming Arts Festival. Keep you posted.

So I try to check out other blogs and found TheBackyardPioneer.blogspot.com. Mike there posts stuff almost every day with reviews of books, links to other blogs and general articles about homesteading. He had a drawing a few weeks ago and I won a book on how to make money from your garden. Hoping to glean some wisdom from it to help offset the seed costs every year. Thanks Mike for the Giveaway! It is appreciated.

Not only did I check his blog out, but he also checked mine out. He first inquired about a custom knife and I think he may someday purchase one from me. Anyway...He wants to interview me for his blog. He says he does a 5 question interview. I am looking forward to answering his questions, as long as they aren't about the late 70's. Hopefully I can put the link here so y'all can check it out. Talk at ya!

Up And Running

Took my 100# propane tank in to be checked out because I thought it leaked at the valve. Turns out NO leak and a fill and my forge is up and running.

First chance I had I hooked it up to the forge and fired that muther up. She was hissing and spittin' fire in an instant and took a few minutes to heat up. I had some rough cut 1084 blanks that need to be fired cuz they tear up my equipment. It was nice to forge the distal taper and bevels in. That alone will reduce my grinding by 50%. (middle pic) After forging, the blades were normalized 3 times each to reduce stresses in the steel.

Before I cut the gas off to the forge, in went a neck knife for yours truly made from 52100 ball bearing steel. When it reached about 1525 degrees I quickly quenched it in McMaster Carr 11 second quenching oil by dunking it straight in. This process will be done two more times for a total of three quenches, at which time it will go into the oven to temper. (no pic)

I am making this knife as an overall heat treat comparison to the knife blade (top pic, middle blade) I sent to Peters for heat treating.

The knife blade in the bottom pic is a special order, kinda looks like a filet knife huh, for a special guy on his birthday. It was cut out of 8 inch wide band saw blade and is .o75" thick. This will give it lots of flex Can't wait to see how this one turns out.

The very top knife is a chopper that is almost 5/16" thick and weighs like 10 pounds. Not really but it needs a bunch of weight taken off to make it more user friendly. More about this one later.

See Y'all

Red Eye

A horrible thing happened to my little red dog. At the end of the first week in January Leslie and I noticed Red’s right eye was fogging up. Took her in to the vet and he gave her some antibiotic ointment to put in her eye. Well about a week later we noticed it get worse so I took her back to see the vet. Another medication. This time he added a powerful dilater to put in with the ointment. Not sure how well it’s working because her eye is still glazed over. It’s just not quite as bad a before.

One Friday, Leslie said her right eye was blurry. When I looked I noticed it was totally dilated. We kind of freaked and called a local eye doctor and asked if he could look at her eye. When he found out that the drops she put in the dogs eye had a red cap he walked her out of the office and said that she must have rubbed a little bit into her eye. She should be fine in a couple days, and she was.

After more than 3 weeks putting meds in the dogs eye, I’m thinking that it isn’t going to get better and she might be blind in one eye. It stinks but she can still see and I’ll be taking her with me to my camp soon enough.