This is the story of the pair of knives I made to send to MaFe, with the plan that he would pick one of the knives for himself, and then send me a sheath for the other knife in return. As I wasn't sure of the size of his hands, I made the knives similar in size, sized more for my large hands than his, but figuring he could always remove some of the bark to make a smaller handle, which he did.

The knives start, as in the pictures above, stacking birch bark on the tang of the knife, plus a brass bolster I set on the tang. The knife blank comes from Morakniv and I like their 106 and 120 blanks. The birch bark comes from Russia, and there are a number of vendors on eBay who sell stacks of birch bark. I've found that the Russian vendors tend to have the best price (even including shipping) for prepared bark. Buying birch bark stacks from the US, I end up with a lot more waste, because the bark hasn't been scraped as well.

SPRAD comes from Mads reading my description, and noticing that the blades came from Sweden, me, from Poland, the birch-bark from Russia, and the knives moved from America to Denmark. Truly international!

I punch the holes in the bark using a leather punch, making a line of one, two, or three holes, depending on which portion of the tang the piece of bark is going on. I also use a shop made tool to compress the bark as I work, making sure the layers are stacked as tightly as I can. I also thread the tail end of the tang at this point. Due to the square tang, what I usually do is thread it first with a 10-32 die, then thread it again with an 8-32. I want about a quarter inch of threads to work with. I'm sure there are metric sizes that will work well, but having the pair of dies with the same threads means I can do this as a two-step process, rather than having to anneal the last bit of tang so I could thread it in one step.

Once I have nearly enough layers on, I compress the handle further using a shop-made vise, and I put the handles into the toaster oven at 225F (105C) for a few hours. This will soften the pitch in the bark, and will somewhat “weld” the handle together. This step isn't absolutely necessary, but I've found that I get a better handle by doing it. I can also tighten the vise down a little more after the handle has been baked, further compressing the bark.

Some will put the handles into boiling water at this point, but I think that's hard on the steel. Others will compress the bark in a stack, boil it, and then drill a hole for the tang of the knife. But as with most woodworking, there's more than one way to do it.

After the handles have been baked, I'll add a few more layers of bark, then cap that off with a few washers, then an 8-32 nut. I try not to crank this down too tightly, and if there's room, I'll add more layers of bark to fill the space so the end of the tang barely protrudes from the nut as in the picture above. I've also used a piece of brass for a bolster, but the stack of washers is quick and easy, and looks good to my eye.

That will leave me with the very rough handle. I will rough that in using the bandsaw (very messy) or a carving knife (less messy, but slower)

Then I move to the belt sander. Make sure to wear a dust mask at this point, as the birch bark may contain fungi or other things that will be bad for your lungs. I work to a square first, then add a taper as in the picture above. The rectangular bolster serves as a reference for me at this point.

Then I octagonalize the handle, maintaining the taper. This is when I will sand down the nut and washers if I want to make them look less like they came from a hardware store. My “look” is still evolving, and I'm not sure what I like best. Then work to round the handle last. This is a fairly slow process, with lots of pauses to check my work along the way. In the case of these knives, Mads had said he preferred an octagonal handle, so I stopped without making his handle round.

And that gets us to picture 1 which is the pair of knives that I sent from America to Denmark to put the AD on the knives. There, Mads shaped the handle on his knife to suit his hands, and then made sheaths for both knives and sent my knife back to me.

I received the knife before we moved to Santa Fe, but after most of out stuff had been taken by the movers, so the knife became part of my “truck kit” of woodworking tools, which I used to make small repairs around the house before selling it.

The most notable was the back entrance of the house, where the threshold had a spot worn in it from years of people going in and out of the door, which I patched one afternoon with the truck kit of tools and a scrap of wood.

#woodworking #toolmaking #project

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For this year's BeerBBQ swap I decided to make a briefcase for holding beer or BBQ fixings or whatever. But since I had already done a BBQ Briefcase back in 2020, I wanted to make this one more beer specific, as well as upping my game a bit.

I started with some butternut I had on hand, resawing it to about 3/8 thick. When I did that, I discovered that it had some bug tracks inside, so I filled those with turquoise powder and epoxy.

I also had some sapele from another project that I had resawed to a quarter-inch thick, and that looked like it would make a pretty top and bottom for the case.

I had a chunk of yellowheart remaining in Earl's Shorts (thanks again, Earl!) that looked like it would make a good handle, so I cut out a rough handle-shape, then turned nice smooth ends on it, and smoothed out the handle.

I found a scrap of granadillo I had leftover from a spokeshave a couple years back, and drilled a couple holes in that. It took two or three tries before I got a clean hole without splitting the wood with my bit, but I eventually got there by clamping the wood in the vise while drilling it.

With the hole drilled, I shaped the wood on the bandsaw, then the belt-sander, and then finally resawed it in half to make a matching pair of hinges for the handle.

With the handle done, I dovetailed the case together and put in the top and bottom, then sawed it open.

Hinges and latches were next.

Then the handle, screwing the hinges into the case from the inside.

With everything together, it was time to start finishing. I decided to use Tried and True Varnish Oil on this, since I had plenty of time. I ended up putting on eight coats, with each coat going on, let it soak in for a half-hour, wipe off the excess, let it cure overnight, then burnish it with 0000 steel wool before putting on the next coat. It's pretty easy, but not the most exciting finishing regimen.

The inside of the case got a couple coats of BLO. I thought about using tung oil for better waterproofing, but adding another three or four days of watching oil dry didn't seem all that exciting to me for some reason. Plus I hurt my back and was out of the shop for a while, so I wrapped it up and shipped early.

Before shipping I cut some closed-cell foam I had on hand to fit four 12-oz beer cans and two 16-oz tallboys. To make sure I got things right, I made wooden templates I'll be able to reuse down the road.

With the foam cut, I also found a cold-pack that would fit inside the case to help keep the beer cold. No point in carrying warm beer around, now is there?

Next time, maybe I'll get a handcuff with a chain to further secure the beercase to the wearer. Some things just need high security.

#woodworking #project

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Another knife that came out of the shop during the recent flurry of knife-making. This one has a handle of cholla with red and green resin which was poured by a friend of mine in Texas in exchange for me sending him a box of cholla canes. Seems like a good trade to me.

The blade is a 6 inch white ceramic santoku which used to be sold by WoodCraft, but was discontinued a few years back (before we moved to New Mexico, so three or four years ago). When I saw the bright colors of the handle, I remembered I had the white blade and thought it would be a good-looking combination. There are also layers or red and brown micarta between the scales and the knife tang to build up the thickness a little. It feels pretty good in the hand to me.

The handle was rough-cut on the bandsaw, then shaped with rasps and files. It was hand sanded with 80, 120, 180, 220, and 400 grit sandpaper, and a coat of tung oil applied before buffing it with the Beall Wood Buffing system. I’m pretty pleased with this one, and think I’ll be giving it to a friend as an early Christmas present.

#woodworking #KnifeMaking #project

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On Lumberjocks, we periodically do swaps, in which each person in the swap makes an item and sends it to another person. Everybody makes one, sends ones, and receives one. It’s a lot of fun, and I always try to do something a little beyond what I’ve done in the past.

This swap was a knife swap, and I wanted to make a folding knife. I got the mechanism from Santa Fe Stoneworks and dug out some stabilized birch I have left from Minnesota. It originally came from some wind-downed trees at Timber Bay Lodge, where we stayed on vacation back when we lived in Minnesota.

The folding knife came out ok, but there was a small chip in the birch on one side which I felt bad about. It still looks good, but it’s not great. I decided since I had a little more of the birch left, I would make a pair of cooking knives to make up for the blemished pocket knife.

I used blades from Hock Tools, specifically their paring knife and 5 inch chef knife. The paring knife got the more sedate grain from a straighter piece of wood, and as the wood was thinner than idea for knife scales, I sandwiched in some brown micarta.

I think the paring knife came out relatively well.

The chef knife got red (aka “fire”) micarta and some birch with some fairly crazy grain. It was from a crotch in the tree, and most of the grain ran the wrong direction for the strongest knife scales, but it looked pretty great visually, and the micarta and the metal tang of the knife would provide plenty of strength.

The chef knife came out pretty good, too. There’s a couple cracks in the handle that opened up when I was epoxying them to the micarta, but I filled them with sawdust and CA glue.

Finally, I made a couple boxes to hold the knives. By this time I knew who I was sending the knives to, and my guess was that the guy would get the folding knife, and his wife would get the cooking knives, so I wanted a separate box for each.

The cooking knives went into a box made of ash and walnut, with the walnut inlaid into the ash. I thought it looked pretty neat, and it’s a technique I’ll try again (probably to better result). I also made an insert to hold the knives securely in the box and to carry the care directions.

The pocket knife went into a foam insert inside a hinged box made of white oak and sapele, along with the description of the blade.

#woodworking #knife #project

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I made a carving knife for myself recently. The handle is apple from a tree growing in my front yard in Minneapolis, with red Micarta, ash, and a brass pin to hold everything together.

The blade is a Morakniv 120 LC laminated carbon steel blade with the tang running full length through the handle.

The ash veneer matches the thickness of the tang, which makes construction easier. The pieces of apple I had were thin enough that I though some extra thickness from the Micarta would feel good and would also offer some contrast.

Once I had chosen red Micarta, I decided the sheath needed to match, so I ordered some red dye. The sheath is constructed in the traditional Scandinavian manner taught to me by my friend MaFe, with a wooden insert cemented into the leather to protect the leather from being cut if you insert the blade carelessly.

I’m happy with the knife and it will probably become my primary carving knife for a while.

#woodworking #knife #project

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Been organizing my shop, and I no longer needed my old chisel till so I knocked out the existing rack within it, added a bar at the bottom and a board at the top, et voilá.

Some day I’ll clean up those square corners and get a coat of oil on the new parts, but for now, my dovetail saws are off the bench.

#woodworking #project #shopFurniture

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This is a small box I made to resemble a Dutch Tool Chest. It was designed to hold a smoothing plane I had refurbished and was sending to another guy on Lumberjocks as part of our Hand Planes of Your Dreams Secret Santa exchange for 2022.

Nothing too special about the box. It’s a dovetailed box with a slanted top. The top has two small strap hinges and a black latch. It’s hard to find black iron screws in the small sizes.

The box is about 4 x 6 x 9 inches. The box is made of ½ inch pine, with some ¼ inch sapele for the lid. The battens on the lid are ash, and the skirt on the bottom of the box is white oak.

The box was painted with three colors of Real Milk Paint. Black Iron first (three coats if I remember right), followed by two coats of Terra Cotta, and finishing with a coat of Persimmon. Then I brushed the paint with a brass brush, selectively removing some of the paint and letting the colors underneath show through.

Once I had that done, I coated it with a few (four or five, maybe?) coats of tung oil. This should waterproof it and lock in the paint.

Overall, it was a fun project, and I learned about distressing milk paint to get an aged look. I need to work on burnishing a piece next to apply more lessons from The Belligerent Finisher but it’s fun trying out new techniques.

#woodworking #milkpaint #finishing #project

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