Matus Knives - finished projects

Kitchen Knife Forums

Help Support Kitchen Knife Forums:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Matus

Staff member
Global Moderators
KKF Supporting Craftsman
KKF Supporting Member
Joined
Feb 18, 2013
Messages
10,566
Reaction score
3,915
Location
Germany
In this thread I would like to share my finished projects. At least at the beginning I will be posting detailed posts on my blog how the projects were done - Knifemaking for beginners - that is meant to be of help for those that just like me less than a year ago, consider starting to make knives and wonder what is it all about.

Since I have a few finished projects at this stage - I will briefly mention them here and then will continue to post new ones as they come.

For now I number the projects I start, though that usually does not reflect the order under which they are finished, so do not wonder if some numbers appear to be missing.

Please do not hesitate to post comments and questions. Should you have an idea on a project I should try - bring it on! :knife:
 
Project #3 - Petit Gyuto Kitchen Knife

This was my first attempt to make a kitchen knife. I have used a filing jig to grind the blade from a 2.2 mm thick O1 steel. Since I did not grind the blade thin enough prior to HT, I have spent about 6 hours on Atoma 140 to give the knife a more useful geometry. I have then finished the blade up to 400 grit wet sanding paper.

The handle is made of curly birch and stabilized Oregon Maple bolster. I made the handle too large. In the mean time (after the photos below were taken) I have sanded it down, but will probably do one more iteration. The handle was originally finished with just board butter, but I went with Tung oil after re-sanding.

All in all - many beginner mistakes, but that is where I am right now :)







Next to my Carter funayuki - here is it made quite obvious that the handle is too large.
 
Project #4 - Birch Bark Handle for a Puukko Blade

OK, this is not a kitchen knife project. I was long intrigued by the birch bark handles on puukko knives. I have one on my Iisakki Aito - which is a great workhorse when working with wood. I have watched tutorials online how to make one, but still did not expect how much work it will be to clean dried birch bark (all cool guys on youtube use fresh one).

I have used a Polar blade (for about 8€) that had a full-thin tang that was perfect for this kind of blade. I have decided to use brass bolster and end-cap. Towards the end of construction I have realised, that I did not prepare enough bark, so had to improvise with a piece of stabilised wood.

It was a lot of work, but (save for the few scratches I have put on the blade - lesson learned), it turned out really well (NOT perfect, but better than I have hoped)







N ext to my trusty and well used Iisakki Aito.
 
Looks great!

The gyutos profile looks very purposeful. Nice grind too.

The birch bark handle looks spot on. For some reason I've seen a few a little here and there in my time. :D
 
That birch bark handle looks incredible, great job! I think it actually looks really cool with the extra piece of different wood at the bottom. :doublethumbsup:

Your little gyuto looks excellent as well, super clean. How long and tall is the blade? What are the handle measurements? Maybe the Carter has a handle that is too small? :)
 
Thanks :) The birch bark handles have a particular look to them, but feel so awesome in hand. One day I may find the courage to put one on a gyuto :)

No, the handle on the Carter is just spot on - it is indeed rather slim, but the knife is very light, so it fits well. The handle I have made for the petit gyuto would suit a 200+g 240 gyuto. I was just too scared to sand it smaller. The length on edge is approximately 160 mm and height some 37 mm. The mistake I did design-wise was to make the axis of the handle near parallel with the edge at the heel. I changed my designs afterwards.
 
Project #5 - 240 mm D2 gyuto

This project learned me quite a lesson (several, actually). The blade was ground with a filing jig and the D2 being a wear resistant steel it took me about 4 hours to get the basic grind done. What followed was draw-filing to finish the blade geometry, but left DEEP scratches that I spent a lot of time taking out - only really finished that after HT with my than-new 1x30" gelt grinder. Making mistakes on the way led to the profile being slightly altered (sometimes you just thin too much).

The handle design is nearly the same as the petit gyuto from Project #3, but I did not 'hide' the dowel.

All finished the knife came out with cca 235 mm cutting edge and weight of just under 200g. The blade is thin and cuts well and was hardened to HRC63 (by Juergen Schanz). I went up to 600 grit when finishing the blade. I will be probably using 800 - 1000 grit finish in the future, but 600 is already a lot nicer than 400 I did on the petit gyuto.

The knife was used by a friend (a chef living in Prague) and I was happy to get mostly positive feedback (there are things to improve of course).







 
Project #9 - Making finger-stones

This is one of those not strictly knifemaking projects. But all I did here is to follow what Maxim explains on his Wiki. I have since improved a bit the stone chipping. I now cut them into small blocks that have cross section of the size of a finger stone I want to make. This also makes the stone very easy to chip into nice evenly thick pieces with relatively little loss of stone material. The photos below do not reflect that 'upgrade' yet.











 
Project #10 - WA handles for two 165 mm single bevel funayuki knives

The story behind this project is the following. I had a Single bevel Ittetsu petty on order from Jon and a friend of mine was in similar situation. None of us had much (if any) experience with single bevel knives and both of us cook/filet whole fish too rarely to buy a proper 180 deba. So I came up with the idea to buy some cheap (sub $100) 165 mm funayuki knives so that we can learn to use and sharpen single bevel knives, as well as have a knife to test kasumi finish. I threw away original handles (with plastic ferrules) and use them to try to make a new (to me) handle style.

The knives did not only get new handles, but I also worked on the spine and choil.

I have used 5mm thick brass for ferrule and Mora and Purple heart wood for handle. I am officially in love with Mora - it has fantastic color, fine, very nice grain pattern, finished lovely and is surprisingly cheap. Not easy to find though (I got mine from Dictum.de)

The challenge was - since the ferrule was press-fit onto the tang, the handle could only be shaped after it was epoxied to the tang. So making a mistake that could not be corrected or accepted would necessitate a very unpleasant process of handle removal.

The result is again far from what it could be - the biggest mistake being not gluing properly the mora onto the ferrule and creating a gap on the back of the handle. I have also many things to learn to put a more even finish on the brass ferrule.


Original condition of the knives:








After rehandle:





 
Great Matus! You're becoming an accomplished knife maker. Good to see the knives are pretty thin behind the edge.
 
Matus, these last 2 came out beautifully. Completely changes these knives.
 
Thank you :) I have to admit that I find it easier to grind a blade thin, than to remove all the scratches afterwards. But a proper 2x72" should help me there.

I am working on 2 new handles and several new knives, I just wish I had more time :)
 
Thank you :) I have to admit that I find it easier to grind a blade thin, than to remove all the scratches afterwards. But a proper 2x72" should help me there.

I am working on 2 new handles and several new knives, I just wish I had more time :)

quit your day job haha
 
I have managed to finish project #15 and #16 (the blog articles will be finished in a course of few days). I have taken my first 'comissioned job' (basically for the cost of materials) and I would like to thank to the owner of the knives for the trust :)

The job was to rehandle a Kato 80 mm petty and a small Watanabe mukimono. With the Kato the choice of materials was brass and ironwood, with the mukimono I was given a free hand and finally decided to use buffalo horn and stabilized maple burl (I am testing a new source from Russia as importing from US is not really feasible and it looks good so far).

It is not all perfect and I did some mistgake on the way (most of which could have been corrected). I have also learned a lot - if anything I have identified steps in the process I definitely need to concentrate more on. I am far from 'perfection'.

Here are the results:

Kato petty:








Watanabe mukimono. The violet part of the handle appears too dark here - apparently this part of the spectrum is not well represented in our LED lamps in the living room. I guess I will need to get better lamps and some sort of softbox in the future.











These 2 photos are from the process:



 
Nice work and excellent write up! :doublethumbsup:

I'm pretty sure all epoxies are liable to fail due to heat build up. Some may be a bit better than others, but I bet the trick is managing the heat buildup when working metal.
 
And here is another one - Project #16 - making a WA-style handle for a Watanabe mukimono.



I love how you leave your mistakes/mishaps in your blog. I can attest to learning the same hard knock lessons too. :scared4:

The handle came out wonderful on this one, thanks for sharing!
 
Thank you Dave. Describing the mistakes is half of the point of my blog. It will not necessarily prevent others from making the same mistakes, but show them that it is OK to make them :)
 
Matus what do you think about the belt grinder you are currently using, in terms of grinding power, speed and every other aspect of it?
 
Matus what do you think about the belt grinder you are currently using, in terms of grinding power, speed and every other aspect of it?

Let me give it a try. First of all - the grinder could indeed use bit more power - 1/2 hp instead of 1/3 would be nice, but it still allows for reasonable material removal. The point is to use high quality belts - I have bet experience with Norton Blaze 60 and 120 and 3M Trizact (normal and 'gator'). The speed is medium - fast enough given the power - can also be used very well to grind handle blocks to shape what is a great plus and saves a lot of time. With handle materials you can not push too hard as otherwise they will burn, so the speed or power is not really an issue there.

Also - when shaping blanks after you have cut them with a hack saw or with a angle grinder (I made eight 180mm petty blanks with angle grinder) the speed with a sharp belt is incomparable to what it would take with a coarse file.

The particular model I have had problems with running stiffer belts - they would roll-off the wheels because the only degree of freedom you have is the angle of the back small wheel and the range was not enough. I used a brute-force approach and bent the whole frame a little. It works not, but the belts are running a few mm off the platen. This could of course be fixed by making a proper platen for the grinder, but I did not bother as I am not grinding plunge lines and I have a 2x72" on order.

I may have spend just 80€ on the grinder, but I have spent about 200€ on the belts (though I still have a decent stash of them). That is something to keep in mind.

I have ground a few of the 180mm O1 petty blanks, one 180 Niolox gyuto and currently working on three 210 mm gyuto knives - and the grinder keeps working. I would wish for a more speed there as the gyutos are made from 3.0 and 3.5 mm thick stock, so a lot of material needs to be removed. With the 180 mm gyuto which is from 2.2 mm stock it was OK.

In total I would say - if you do invest in a good quality belts than a grinder like this is a very good starting machine to learn grinding and to make some knives and see how you like it before you would get a more powerful and more flexible grinder. The price is worth it. And even should you later get a big 2x72" the narrow 1" belt is practical when shaping handles (with or without platen).

What I dislike about mine is that the work rests are both made from aluminium - I had to put a glossy tape on them otherwise they stain & scratch handle material. But most 1x30" I have seen online seemed to have steel work rests.
 
Back
Top