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milkbaby

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Since my sister saw the knife that I made and gave to my dad for Christmas last year, she's been bugging me for a knife. She wanted a little paring knife to use as a utility knife in the kitchen. She's basically one of those people who uses a little knife for everything in the kitchen, I think.

I started with a left over offcut of 15N20 carbon steel and drew something on there that would work with the offcut of handle scales I had left over from another knife. I usually design a knife on paper first, but I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: use up scraps, make little sis a little knife. Waste not, want not.

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From the start this knife was a bit of an afterthought while I was working on other knives. In the pic below you can see the leftover handle scale offcuts. The design followed from the leftover materials.

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Partial grind. Was pretty happy at that point that it was looking fairly clean and even.

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Heat treated and tempered at the same time as a chef's knife that warped from the asymmetric grind, but the symmetric utility stayed straight.

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Time for playing with wood and getting sticky fingers.

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For handles, I like to wet sand in tung oil finish especially on natural woods. This is bocote and padauk. Padauk tends to have open grain/pores that do better filled.

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Pictured with the chef's knife I made simultaneously. That knife is one of the best I've made so far but the utility knife is kinda blah at this point, sort of an afterthought. It looked a bit crap, wasn't happy with the grind and finish at that point.

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I delayed making a saya for a few months because how crap I felt about this knife. After taking this pic, I went back and redid the grind both going thinner and evening it out better.

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Saya is chiseled out basswood, a great soft wood that's kind to the edge. I love it for sayas because it's a bit more durable than balsa but easier to chisel than pine. The one downside is that it's a bit boring, though I do find bits with cool figure occasionally.

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Since basswood is boring, I fire distressed the saya pin and added some wood veneer and leather ornamentation on the saya.

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I put some tung oil finish on the saya but got it on the dyed leather which promptly turned really dark, not even very red anymore. :(

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I kept trying to get an acceptable color out of the leather and thought I was happy with a really dark maroon after sanding and trying to refinish but then I saw the original color in the earlier pic and thought it was a shame to not have some red in there. I thought that I had some textured red scrapbook paper to use but couldn't find it. So I dry tested a strip of the original dyed leather and thought it looked nice. Voilá, fixed! :)

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Also, I redid the belt finish because I almost always manage to leave some stone grit somewhere while sharpening or always cut through an onion root with dirt and scratch my knives. Pretty happy that I was able to turn around a project that I was originally unhappy with.

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Your handles and design concept are very unique and different. I personally prefer my knives toned down a bit as far as contrasting colors and materials. Sometimes minimal design can be beautiful 😊 Great craftsmanship!
 
I absolutely love WIP shots/threads. Thanks so much for the detailed pictures and explanation. Those take a lot of time and it's very kind of you to invest precious time in that for the benefit of the rest of us.

(Nice work BTW!)
 
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