I ordered this Hock Paring Knife Kit from Hock Tools. The 3.5 inch paring knife kit consists of a wonderful Hock blade and the necessary pins. The kit is Model #KP350.
This knife is for my brother, Tom. It will have handle scales from hard maple. For the most part, all of the steps in this process are identical to the first knife. The entire knife 1 build process can be seen here.
Info about knife kits is available at Hock site
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The #KP350 blade is made from high-carbon tool steel. It was forged in France and sharpened by Ron in California. |
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The final cuts on the blanks were done by hand saw with the Bad Axe Stilleto. |
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The inner faces of the blanks were cleaned up with a paring chisels... |
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The blade was covered in tape for protection. The blade comes incredibly sharp. |
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The inside surfaces of the scales and the tang of the blade were sanded to 150x to provide a better adhesion surface. Then the mating surfaces and the pins were cleaned with acetone. |
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I chose a strong, water-resitant epoxy adhesive, Devcon 2 Ton® Epoxy...comes in two 4.5 oz. bottles. |
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To mix...equal dollops of the resin and the hardener were squeezed out. |
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then mixed... |
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The adhesive was then spread on to one side of the tang... |
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Tang, pins, and one scale epoxied... |
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All put together with epoxy... |
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...then the knife tang and scales are clamped overnight with Bessys. |
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After glue-up...to be rough shaped... |
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Done on the bandsaw...ready for grinding... |
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After glue up and roughing out the shape, the next phase was the grinding of the wood and the metal was done on a belt sander with 80x paper. I try to avoid dust so I ran both shop air filter systems and wore a protective mask.
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Here is the knife after the grind down. |
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Normally I prep the wood scales at the blade end before I glue up...I experimented during this #10 build and #9 build. In the image above the scales are still square at the end. On the bocote unit I freehanded the end using a Auriou rasp. On this maple scale I drew out very precise angles and used a chisel to make the cuts. |
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Angles cut with a chisel and fininshed off with a carving blade. |
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Ready for sanding phase...shown here with the bocote number 9 knife. |
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Secondary grinding the pins was done on the 1 x 30 belt sander with 80x paper. Further removal of metal and wood was done with the Rotex 90 sander with 40x paper. |
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After all the metal and wood was taken down to proper size, the grits were progressed on the Rotex 90 from 40x-80x-120x-220x-320x-400x. |
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The finishing cycle consisted of multiple coats of Waterlox wiping varnish. Each coat was saturated and then dried using wet/dry sandpaper. Two saturations and rub-ins were done at 400x and 600x and then single saturations at 800x, 1000x and 1500x.
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All of the sanding and finishing is completed in this image. The finish was extremely smooth. |
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