Whinge, Knives, Whinge

It took me four months to finish the batch of knives that I started in July. I have documented every hour that I have worked on knives, and the results are not good. I have only managed to work about 20 hours a week. Plus some hours that I have not counted, like when I was making new tools, repairing or improving them, etc.

Please allow me to whine a bit about the causes of that.

I either have chronic fatigue or I am a chronic hypochondriac. I am reluctant to go to a physician right now, partly because of the ongoing pandemic and partly because of last year when after several months of pain, I never got a conclusive diagnosis – and the pain only subsided after a course of steroids that I got for a really bad but unrelated virus (possibly flu) that snuck up on me right before Covid hit Europe. So I am not all too optimistic about our GP being able to help me with this.

I have been more or less tired ever since that possible flu. You remember that short walk in the forest in August when I brought home two full shopping bags of ‘shrooms? It took me three days to get over that, and one of those days my legs hurt so much I was barely able to go to the loo. After just several hours of hand-sanding knife handles my back and hands hurt for two days. Etc. etc. ad nauseam. Add to that the necessity to spend time carting my parents to/from doctors, stacking firewood to the cellar, caring for my trees, and the result is that I do a lot less work than I want to.

I have never seen the point of exercise because my body never reacted to it the way other people’s bodies seem to. I did get stronger, but only in relation to my starting point. In high school, when I could exercise under professional supervision free of charge, after months of work I was barely getting just below the level where my schoolmates have started. This year is that – only worse. I am not going exactly downhill, but just barely. Plus my hands started to hurt again two weeks ago. With the sun gone, I have at least looked at what safe dose of Vitamin D I can take in supplements and I am taking that because it seems to help a bit.

Whining over. I hope it gets better. At least it is not getting worse.

The last knives I have finished are four universal kitchen knives from a batch of five blades. One of those blades was not suitably hardened after all- near the tang was about 2 cm soft part. I do not need to toss it, but I do need to try and quench it again with the next project.

These are a bit heavier and thicker (3mm) than my previous knives of this type because they are made from what was left over from the slabs for chef knives. I have also changed the geometry of the handle a bit – instead of a rounded rectangular profile it has a rounded trapezoid profile. They are also about 2-4 mm thinner overall and 5 mm thinner and shorter at the front to better allow a choked-up grip with thumb and index finger on the blade. And they are pointy this time.

One knife has the handle from apricot wood and I have tried tubular pins filled with the same wood. I think it looks good and I will use that idea in the future again.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Two knives have the handles from pickled black locust. It is perfidious wood, in the future, I have to be more careful – the scales were probably not fully dried when I ground them to final size and they shrunk on me a tiny bit when I was finishing the surface with resin. So the tang does exceed the handles a tiny bit. That can happen due to a bad shaping job too, but that was not this case – they were perfectly flush originally, I swear. Lesson learned I have to put this wood in the oven for an hour or so before glue-up and grinding the outline. Now I can forget the lesson before finishing the next batch.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And last was fitted with padauk wood that I have again got for free with steel shipment. A prime example that there really is no need to use tropical woods, it does not look that much better than the black locust.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Knives are a bugger to shoot, I will have to build myself some better lighting system. Either the blade is over-exposed, or the handle is under-exposed, or the colors are off, or all three.

If you are interested in knife making, on Sunday I will start a detailed series about my next knife-making project. Not because I am qualified, but because I want to.

Brass Chisel

I made a new tool. I do not know whether someone else is already using it in a knife-making context, I would not be surprised if it were so. But I never heard anyone talk about it – a small chisel made from brass. I think it is a very good addition to my toolbox, well worth the ten minutes or so that I have spent making it. The inspiration were tools that I was using in my previous job to clean burnt plastic off of various testing devices.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This may sound like a joke tool, akin to the inflatable dartboard, chocolate kettle, or ceramic rivets, but it is not. But why would anyone make a chisel out of a soft material like brass, that will not hold an edge?

I am glad you asked.

When making knives with the use of epoxy glues and resin, an inevitable problem arises – epoxy stuck to places it should not be stuck to. I am always doing my best to clean any rogue epoxy from the bolster/blade boundary etc before it hardens with a towel soaked in denatured alcohol, but the epoxy tends to flow and bleed over during curing too, plus there is often some contamination on the blade where I fail to spot it in time. That needs to be scraped off, very carefully, without damaging the blade surface.

With my last batch of knives, I have used with great success a square piece of brass, so for the last few pieces, I ground it roughly into a chisel shape and fixed it to a handle. And it works great, exactly as it is supposed to work.

There are several reasons for using brass and not other materials like alluminium or mild steel:

  1. Brass is harder than epoxy, resin or wood, but softer than even unhardened steel. So it can be used to scrape the glue off steel not only on the blade but also on the tang, without damaging the polished surfaces.
  2. Unlike alluminium, Brass does not come with a hard-oxide layer from the shop, neither does it form one over time. It forms a patina, but that patina is not hard enough to scratch steel. Alluminium does scratch steel, partly due to the oxide layer, partly due to galling. Ditto mild steel.
  3. Brass is one of several so-called non-galling alloys, but alluminium is a strongly galling metal. That means that brass does not lead to wear and tear when it slides on a steel surface, whereas alluminium will tend to contaminate, even if not necessarily scratch (if you remove the oxide layer beforehand thoroughly), steel on contact.

And thats all, folks. If you need to scrape glue off of polished surfaces, a brass chisel might be just the tool for you.

 

Serenity

©Giliell, all rights reserved

It’s something that became popular during the first wave of the pandemic: paint pebbles and leave them in parks, along trails… People see them, sometimes take them home (treasures for kids!), leave their own, arrange them in patterns. A way to feel connected with each other without actually being together. Just like the internet, but with pebbles…

Behind the Iron Curtain part 36 – Revolutions

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give a perfect and objective evaluation of anything but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty-eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

We were taught at school that Marx got one thing in his philosophy wrong and that it had to be corrected by Lenin – the idea of gradual societal progress over time. A violent revolution, we were told, is necessary to defeat the evils of capitalism and institute socialism, just as it happened in Tzarist Russia after WWI and in our country after WWII. After that glorious revolution, we can go back to gradual societal progress over time and the glorious, completely fair, and egalitarian communism will come. Eventually.

When communism did not come any closer after nearly one generation, people became restless. It was not exactly an attempt at revolution, there was no violence, and no attempt at actually overthrowing the regime, only an attempt at reforming it and making it better. But this cry for humanizing the regime that was supposed to care about human welfare did not suit well the powers that be in Moscow and the attempt was quelled by force. The Czech Republic was invaded and tanks from USSR, Poland, Hungaria, and Bulgaria rolled through the streets. It worked, but not as planned – the plan was to put up a facade that people do not want any reforms and that soviet-style socialism is wanted, as demonstrated by people welcoming the invaders as liberators. But weeks-long protests against the invasion put this idea quickly to sleep and what remained was subduing the population by brute force.

A year later, a young philosophy student Jan Palach has set himself ablaze in protest of this. He did not want the ideas that led to the push for humane socialism to die, he wanted the occupants to leave the country and in lieu of other options, he decided for protest by self-harm. I cannot say I condone his approach, but his goal was undeniably noble. He died, he became a martyr, but nothing much changed.

Fast forward another generation.

I was just a school kid during the times of the Velvet Revolution in the fall of 1989, in my last year of elementary school. I knew nothing about the things that happened short of a decade before I was born. I had no idea who Jan Palach is, I had no idea that we were still occupied by Soviet Army, and because I have lived in the countryside with no connectin to big cities, I had no idea that civil unrest is brewing for almost a year already. But it was. The boil of social unrest was swelling, unseen by many but clearly visible by others until it burst.

For me, the whole thing was an incomprehensible mess. I did not understand what is happening. Suddenly I heard on the news that peacefully protesting students were beaten to a pulp by police – a thing that only evil capitalists do to protesters, surely! And then the whole thing happened really quickly – and before the school year was over, before the next summer holiday, we had suddenly a different political regime and I had to learn that a lot of what I knew about how the world functions was bullcrap.

And suddenly I learned about all the things that were kept from school curricula – the deaths and torture in the name of the greater good, the lies and deception, and the fact that it all did not lead to a better life anyway. Those were not easy times – and I was lucky to live in a country where the armed forces were not given orders to use violence and the revolution was allowed to happen without bloodshed. Hearing about armed conflicts in other countries, and for example seeing Ceaucescu being shot to death was not cathartic or satisfying, it was only terrifying.

I do not like revolutions much. They might be necessary from time to time, but they are not pretty, they are not glorious and they do not lead to instant improvements. Not even the milder ones.

Prototyping Chef Knives

This was an interesting project. Interesting in the sense that nearly nothing went as planned.

First I started to make five blades and I broke one after hardening, so I have made it into a smaller knife for my neighbor. But what happened after that was a real bummer – the four remaining blades stubbornly resisted my attempts at tumbling. After over a month in the tumbler, none of them had the pretty, regular finish that I have gotten on my full-width tang blades. Maybe the point of balance of these blades, or their width, or both, have played a role. I simply do not know. I only know that after over a month I took it as “lesson learned, you cannot tumble these, finish them or toss them as they are”. And because they are prototypes whose main purpose was learning, I have decided to use them as they were.

The first piece went on a bed of flowers into a land far, far away. What happens there is in the stars and out of my hands.

The second piece I have finished with an experimental piece of wood – one of the very rotten willow pieces that I have stabilized with resin during my first tests. Only the piece was just a tad thinner than I needed, so the resulting handle is slimmer and straighter than I intended it to be. I am keeping this knife for myself. I just cut onions for dinner with it and it works reasonably well. Whether it works better or worse than other chef knives I cannot evaluate, since I do not use chef knives regularly.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The handle looks…. interesting, but not very kitchen-knifey. I have used dark brown dye for the resin on the assumption that it will give the wood the most natural look. And it did that. Only it gave the wood also a decidedly camo-tacticool look. I think it would be great for a bushcraft/camping knife, but on a kitchen knife, it looks a bit odd. But maybe infusing the wood with bright colored resin – yellow, red, green, or even blue – might lead to interesting results. I am definitively going to try that next time. The rotten log will not burn – yet.

I have made my first bolster from buffalo horn here and fitting that and the handle together with the curved spacer from bone went reasonably well right until the last step in the process. That last step was buffing up of the horn. I have used my DIY red hematite buffing compound because it worked well on the horn – it is less aggressive than industrial steel buffing compounds. But some of it got stuck in the pores in the bone and it is impossible to clean afterward. That is unfortunately a common problem with bone – it has nearly invisible pores that tend to pop-up at the very end of the work when the piece cannot be replaced. So working with bone is always a bit gamble and you often get some dark spots here and there. It is not plastic but a natural product after all. But these red spots look like someone bled all over it. Grrr.

The third piece got fitted with bubinga handle and bone bolster. It goes to my former colleague, who has been patiently waiting for it for nearly a year by now.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Nothing went wrong with the knife itself. I have fitted the bone bolster with the handle really well, there are no gaps between the white bolster and the blade. Nothing to complain about except the large cut in my right thumb during assembly because the blade cut during all that wiggling through several layers of cloth and masking tape.

Bubinga is beautiful and very hard, but it is not a wood that I would normally use. It is not grown sustainably and the species, while not endangered yet, are on a way to becoming endangered. But since I got this piece for free with a shipment of steel, I have used it. I think I got it for free because it had a worm-hole, but luckily enough it got completely ground away during work. And the piece was big enough for me to make the handle in a shape and size that I have initially intended. It has a trapezoid-profile with rounded edges, for better grip and edge-alignment.

The fourth blade was fitted with a horn bolster and cherry crotch wood with a bone spacer. And this is the closest to my intended design of all three. It is now in the possession of my main tester – my mom.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The cherry wood is very beautiful, all the more pitty for the unseemly cracks. I will have to devise and use some kind of end-cap for cases like this when it would be a waste to toss the wood but there are some blemishes on the end grain. My mother does not mid it as it is and I hope it will serve well. Apart from these cracks, the only thing that went wrong was a cut in my left thumb – yup, I got symmetrical cuts with different knives.

Stats for all these knives: blade ~210 mm length, 3 mm thick, 50 mm wide, grip ~130 mm long. They are more forward-weighted than my full-width tang kitchen knives, so they would be probably very effective choppers too – the point of balance is right at the heel of the blade.

A Predator Poses for Pics

Avalus has been out capturing the natural world for us, and this set of photos is spectacular.

And this morning I had this big bird of prey pose and flex its wings for me. Quality is not the best, as I was shivering on my bike (cold! Forgot my gloves! Again!) and the autofocus had its problems focusing the bird from about 30 m away. It was a majestic sight. The pictures don’t do it justice. 

©Avalus, all rights reserved

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The American Meaning of Democracy

I am sure we all have encountered someone somewhere saying that the USA is the greatest and oldest running democracy in the world, yadda yadda yadda. But what does “demo” in this word actually mean, in America?

Let’s grant that the US democracy is the oldest continuously running one in the world. I have no idea if that is actually true and I am too lazy to try and find out, but whatever. Is that a good thing?

When I look at the spectacle that is the US voting, I do not think so. Even without such obsolete carryovers from a different era like the second amendment, two senators per state regardless of its size or the electoral college, it does not look like the American democracy is very much democratic.

Take voter registration for example. What the fuck is that? Many of my friends in Europe are constantly dumbfounded by how elections in the USA (and to an extent in the UK) work. The “first past the post” system is generally viewed as idiotic and Gerrymandering makes most people to say “wut???”, however, the existence of voter registration is something that, so far, surprised everyone. And if you told anyone that there is a ruckus now about sending people voting ballots in advance, they would look at you as if you told them that in the USA “water is wet” is seen as controversial.

In CZ, the mailing of ballots in advance is completely normal. Every citizen is registered at birth, issued a state-paid ID at the age of 15, and gets ballots in the mail for each and every election once they turn 18. During the pandemic, the ballots came with full instructions on how to cast the vote if you are in quarantine or cannot legitimately go to the voting place.

Whether the citizen then actually decides to use said ballots as anything else than highly uncomfortable toilet paper or very good kindling is completely up to them, but they get them, always. We are so used to this system that most people here take it as normal and are completely taken by surprise when they hear how the US goes about this.

Vote on working day and kilometers long waiting lines for voting are another hoot. Here the vote is on Friday/Saturday, the whole day, so everyone has a chance to find a few minutes to cast their ballot, either on a trip to/from work or whilst going shopping. Because – and that is real funny, I tell ya – the longest I have ever waited to cast my vote was maybe a minute when there was someone in the booth and I had to wait for them to finish casting their vote. It might be a bit worse in a big city, I have occasionally seen 10-15 people long lines in TV, I think. But the only big lines are those reported from ‘Merica.

What I want to say is, the country with the highest GDP in the world finally should pay for a full-feature version of government, they are trudging by on an un-updated trial for way too long.