California Custom Knives: "The Special Ladies" ~ French Knives

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

"The Special Ladies" ~ French Knives

I forged and Heat Treated these blades about 18-months ago & they have been waiting to be finished all that time! I stared out to make two sets of three knives, a paring, this medium size French/Utility Knife and a full-size Chef knife.........well as I was making the others they just kept getting bought out of the studio before I could ever finalize a whole set...but these two blades remained.

So here they are & I am glad I waited as I adapted a different style handle to these borrowed from the Shallot Knife design. I created two beautiful slicing knives recently with a similar style handle & these were the follow up to those two knives. I think they came out really nice.

These Special Lady French knives are 11" OAL with 6.25" blades of 1095 with beautifully polished blades revealing Gunome Hamon.

Both are desert ironwood with ironwood inlay and detail carving.

I hope you enjoy the images.

-DON

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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!