After an exhausting week last week chock full of some minor bug or another, the family and I went out to Nowhere, Middle of to visit my dad for father’s day. Good times, kids playing with doggo and running around in the woods, flying kites, local state park beaches, lots of fun. While I was there, I also hit up my dad the wood worker for some nice bits of wood he had laying around that could be cut into handles for knives.
We also spent about two hours with my little foundry trying to melt some brass to cast a hilt, but entirely failed to get it burning and hot enough. I fear they might take my Pyromania Association membership card from me.
Still, now that I am home it was time to get those handles done, custom cast brass or no. I was excited, partly because I had a new knife blade that I had hammered out while waiting for the axe head to properly heat. I didn’t take pictures at the time because I was… not well pleased with how it came out of the forge. I almost scrapped it directly, but after a few hours on the belt sander I worked it out to this:
A pretty passable little seax blade, albeit a little thin. (The blade is 8.25” tip to tang.)
So, now I was excited to take these little blocks of wood, shape them up a bit, epoxy the bastards to the tangs, then belt sand the ever loving shit out of them until they were shaped nicely.
So excited, I neglected to take any “before” pictures.
But after!
Not too bad! The handles are comfy, at make the blades look like hell due to calling out all the hammer marks, and I am not thrilled that I messed up two of the rivets, but… well yea I need to go back over the blades to polish a bit more because I think I scuffed them a bit while doing the handles… but still, not too bad for the first two knives I ever made from scratch I think.
I think the best advice I could give about wood working is this: start out with really nice materials, then try not to mess them up too badly. The handle on the top knife is cherry, made from two sliced scales. The bottom knife’s handle is solid maple with a cherry end cap. I say solid maple because I started with a 1.5x1.5x9” block of maple, mangled a hole through it for the tang, then belt sanded forever to get that shape. I can see why wood workers wind up with huge workshops, because I cam really close to stopping halfway through to shop for a drill press and than then again for a lathe. Do I know how to use a lathe? Nope, but buying one and learning suddenly seemed a lot faster than taking down all that maple.
Why do I hate woodworking? Well, see, there was supposed to be a cherry hilt cap too on the seax to match the butt cap. I spent what seemed like an hour cutting it out, chiseling the little hole to fit nice and snug and all. Then when I was putting the handle on I tapped just a little too hard and snapped the damned thing into three pieces, of which I only found two. I might have had enough cherry left over to make a replacement, but at that point I had had enough. Stupid wood and its stupid splitting and its stupid grain and stupid me stupidly not accounting for that when I carved the piece out…
Still, I really like that two toned wood look… I think I am going to have to do something similar again. Just, you know, better this time. Without so much oops. In fact, if I had been really clever, instead of spending forever digging out a 5.5” long rectangular hole in a solid block of maple, I should have cut the maple in half, put in some thin cherry slices, then drilled the holes and put the whole thing back together. I could even have used some purple heart I have…
Now I hate this handle.
Anyway, now I need to make sheaths for these damned things. And after dealing with handles and sheaths, my next projects are going to be a big bearded ax and maybe a socketed leaf spear. Hell with all this pretty wood working crap. Time to get back to METAL!
Thanks for reading!