California Custom Knives: Gentleman's Tanto dressed in antique linen Micarta & Nichols Damascus

Friday, May 11, 2012

Gentleman's Tanto dressed in antique linen Micarta & Nichols Damascus

This represents two firsts for me.

#1 the first knife I have finished out of Damascus steel. This is Chad Nichols High Layer Twist of 1095 & 15N20.

#2 the first knife I have ever made using man made handle materials.
This with some nice old Westinghouse Antique Linen Micarta with black inlay of some material that was sent to me that they make pool-cues with...I forget exactly what it is.....basically a plastic I think.
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Thanks to my Mentor Tai Goo for the blade-shape inspiration.
Thanks to Nick Rossi for helping me out on some process questions I had.
Thanks to Chad for the sweet piece of Damascus.
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OAL on this sweet little-nasty is a hair over 9.5" with a 5.25" blade that is 1.50" wide.
The knife feels really sweet in the hand and I think is a very cool and useful blade-style. I have some integral versions of this one that will appear at G4 on my table this year.

The tanto still needs the final sharpening. I plan to have the bevel at the front-cutting-edge to a high polished state after that is done.

Now for the images. I hope you all enjoy them.

-DON:)

This is the second piece of Chads Damascus I have forged from a single bar I bought from him at G3.
.....AND to illustrate why I love forging all my knives, I have included this shot of this knife next to the first blade still waiting to be finished.
Each of these was forged from essentially the same size piece of material.
The bar in the second shot shows the top portion used to make both of these knives.
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IF you take a close look at the two blades below you will see that on the slicing knife the twist pattern got drawn-out as I forged-in the distal taper,
...and on the little tanto I did the exact opposite, in that, I had to upset the bar to get that width to make this shape, thus compressing the ladder pattern together even more tightly.

I thought that was pretty cool & certainly shows some of the neat stuff that happens when forging a piece of pattern welded steel to shape.

And finally, going backwards in time to my original concept sketch with a shot of the blade just off the anvil. Thanks for looking:)

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Perfection and Beauty

What is a Hand Made Knife?

I specialize in making Heirloom Quality Knives.
They are made by hand.
This means that, while I do now own a few power tools compared to the first 7-years when I had virtually little to speak of, other than a hand drill and then a drill press; I now own a grinder and a power hammer; and yet, the knives are still created with hand-held practices, using fairly simple tools for the most part.
All of my knives are designed and created by me. I am creating some stock reduction knives, but other than that....
Each blade is forged hot on an anvil to 90% of the shape that it will be when finished. This takes Skill and lots of attention to accomplish. Adding in a TW-90 grinder helped with post stock reduction heat treatment, a process that has allowed me to refine the edge geometry on my chef knives to a place where I am very pleased with the results.
Then each knife is tested for edge-flex and toughness. Some of the testing phase can be seen in the banner image above, where after the edge-flex test I chop on very hard wood.
If the knives still shave hair after this testing then they are good to go!
Both of the two chef knives in that banner image passed with flying colors and will be cleaned-up and have handles placed on them. And eventually go into the kitchens or campsites of the new owners.
Knives made my hand are beautiful!