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 sister-in-law, Pam. It will have handle scales from redheart. 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
|
|
The #KP350 blade is made from high-carbon tool steel. It was forged in France and sharpened by Ron Hock in California. |
 |
|
|
Wood selection: Redheart, Chakte Kok Erythroxylum spp. and Simira spp. Mexico, Central and South America More info about redheart here. |
 |
The redheart blanks for the scales. |
 |
This knife is part of a group of six that are all concurrent builds. The scales will be from cocobolo, purpleheart and redheart. |
 |
The blade was covered in tape for protection. The blade comes incredibly sharp. |
 |
Blades wrapped for safety and the scales are assisgned. |
 |
The blade was covered in tape for protection. The blade comes incredibly sharp. |
|
After drilling holes in the scales for the pins and rounding the front ends...the blank is ready to be ripped at the bandsaw. |
 |
...ripped roughly in half. |
 |
Dry fit of the scale blanks and the pins...ready for epoxy. |
 |
|
|
|
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. |
 |
I chose a strong, water-resitant epoxy adhesive, Devcon 2 Ton® Epoxy...comes in two 4.5 oz. bottles. |
 |
To mix...equal dollops of the resin and the hardener were squeezed out. |
 |
then mixed... |
 |
The adhesive was then spread on to one side of the tang...then the knife tang and scales are clamped. Rapid dry in 15 minutes, reaches functional strength in 1 hour. |
 |
Tang, pins, and scales epoxied...Clamped up with Bessy hand clamps... |
 |
Out of the clamps...ready for grinding... |
 |
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.
|
 |
Here is the knife after the grind down. |
 |
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. |
 |
|
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. |
 |
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.
|
 |
All of the sanding and finishing is completed in this image. |
 |
The finish was extremely smooth. |
 |
