Knife Build #6

 

I ordered this Hock carving knife blade from Hock Tools.

It is model CKXB1025, a one and one quarter inch detail knife blade made from high carbon steel and hardend to Rc62. This detail knife will be used in my shop.

It will have handle scales from a piece of cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa) that my brother, Tom, left me when he moved to California.

For the most part, all of the steps in this process are identical to the knife build #5, a carving knife.

Details of that #5 build are shown in greater detail here.

Info about knife blades is available at Hock site

 

A major difference in this knife is that I did not want the spine of the tang to be coplanar with the top of the knife handle.

I tired out a lot of different configurations.

 

I decide that I wanted the detail knife blade to be be more centrally located...similar to the Flexcut carving knife image on the right...

Here it is lined up on the pattern.
Here is the marked out recess on the inner side of the scale.
After glue up the blank looked like this...
At the last second...I decided that wanted this knife to have a handle that could be used something like holding a pencil...so I grabbed a tool that I really like, my striking knife from Vesper Tools...and drew out the pattern.
And then cut out that shape on the bandsaw...and later worked it with rasps.
After the desired shape was acheived, further removal of wood was done with the Rotex 90 sander...the grits were progressed 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 each grit from 400x-600x-800x and then a single saturation at 1000x and 1500x.

All of the sanding and finishing

The finish was extremely smooth.

The finished product after a couple of final coats of Waterlox©

 

 

 

 

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