'Twas a Productive Day

Lots got done today. Let's have a look, shall we!

Two pairs of Outdoor knives...ready for the band saw. I like to drill the handle holes before sawing, also, I like to add a bunch of relief holes to assist in sawing the inside curves. If I was going to name a least favorite part of this process, it would be sawing.

I also started on a new design. I'm going to call this the Slim Tacti-Hunter. It bears elements from both hunting and tactical knives. In the past, I've drawn the design on a thin piece of wood and shaped that into my initial template. It saves me a lot of trouble if I don't like it. This time around I spray glued my paper drawing directly to the tool steel and went all-in. I hope it works out, it would be an expensive mistake otherwise. I should probably pick up some more thin wood pieces so I don't have to do it this way again!!

Five blades roughed out. Only four will get their bevels today.

The Tacti-Hunter. I'm going to sit on this for a few days, just to make sure that I actually like it. It feels good in the hand, and has quite a nice weight. It's 3/16" thick. The blade is approximately 5" long with about 9" OA. If I like this, then I will heat treat this one as is and use it as a template for another one.

One thing I figured out early on with the flat grinding jig is that I need to mark the centerline of the blade before grinding. Some blue dye along the edge...

And then using the height gauge to scribe the line. Some makers use a gauge similar to a woodworker's marking gauge. I might go that route eventually. As for now, this is just about as accurate as you could get. I measure the thickness of the blank, then set the height gauge to half that. Bam, no fuss, no muss.

All marked.

I didn't remember to take a shot of this until I was on the fourth blade. Here, the grinding is half done. The idea is to grind close to, but not past, the centerline. We'll take care of getting that final bit during final grinding.

All done!

These are all ground to 50 grit at this point. I'll take care of the finer grits after they are heat treated. The centerline really helped with keeping the bevels even. I hope to get them into the kiln on Tuesday evening.