Well, Thanksgiving approaches, and I find myself back home in Humboldt County. I brought my little miniature forge back to work with while I'm here, so I fired it up today, and messed around with an old rasp I found at the junk yard. The piece I started out with was about 3 inches long, 2 inches wide, and about a quarter inch thick. It was a piece of a broken rasp, and I couldn't read the name on the bottom of it.
I threw it in the forge, and proceeded to work down the handle until it was about the right size, if rough, then I moved onto the blade.
At first I thought I was just going to do a traditional chef's knife, but then the steel in the area of the broken section started to crack, so I cut it off, and decided to make a santoku. In the process of working down the edge, the blade started to bulge back out again, and I decided to let it in order to see what I ended up with. I kind of like how it turned out. It feels good in the hand, and I think that if I put a hamon line in it, and really polish it up it will look really nice. It's going to be a birthday present for my mother. At this point, I think I'll use ebony for the handle, and use stainless steel pins.
Having a functional anvil again was like a dream come true. I hadn't realized how much easier it is to move the metal with a proper anvil until I came back to this beast. I've been using a vice in Berkeley for about 3 months now, and the difference is unbelievable. Also, I've been swinging a 4 lb mini-sledge at a vice that is much too tall for me, so I've built up an incredible amount of strength this semester that really helped.
0 comments:
Post a Comment