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Thanks guys!

Don't hate me for this one...I made my own Kramer. Why? I honestly couldn't tell you. It seemed like a fun project. Not sure what to do with it now though as it's obviously WAY too big for my needs. Maybe it will suffer the fate of a real Kramer and sit there looking pretty 😂

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Thanks guys!

Don't hate me for this one...I made my own Kramer. Why? I honestly couldn't tell you. It seemed like a fun project. Not sure what to do with it now though as it's obviously WAY too big for my needs. Maybe it will suffer the fate of a real Kramer and sit there looking pretty 😂

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I like the profile and the damascus looks great. Congrats! Give us some details on the steel and HT. It would be nice to learn more
 
I like the profile and the damascus looks great. Congrats! Give us some details on the steel and HT. It would be nice to learn more

Thanks! It's actually the last piece of carbon damascus that I bought before I started making my own. If I remember rightly it was around 300 layers, steel is definitely 1095/15n20. I heat to 1500°f and hold for 10 minutes for 1095, and this seems to work fine for the 15n20 as well. As tempered it should be 60-61hrc. It's taken a pretty nice edge too.

Quick edit: brought it home and used it to make a sorta-ramen dish for dinner. Waaaaay too big for me. That said the profile is actually pretty nice. Some belly near the tip of you want to rock, flatter section for push cutting (I’m actually a puller, but same idea). I’ll try it on some root veg sometime and see how it works with those. It’s a heavy knife (280g!) but that was probably inevitable with this much steel. If I remember rightly that’s roughly what Kramer’s knives come in at in this size.
 
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That's so flat its playing tricks with my eyes/mind. I think it's the shadow falling across it that's causing my problems #PretendRecurve :)
 
Big change of style, here's the nakiri that I asked for advice on in the shop talk forum. Current weight is 116g but I'd like to take some out of the tang. It's on the shorter side at just under 150mm, 50mm tall.

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I picked up some old farriers rasps on ebay to play with. Cost me about $5 for 3, so if it doesn't work out I don't really mind. Reading up on the subject I guess I'll be treating it like 1095 in the heat treat, and spark testing suggests that it is high carbon all the way through rather than just case hardened, so first bullet dodged. Of course it's impossible to ignore certain...fashionable knife brands in this area, and reading some websites made me want to hurl, so I thought of a potential ad campaign courtesy of the show Parks & Recreation.

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It's amazing how many old members are now in the business. I really love your work.

Jason

Thanks man! I guess if you spend enough time salivating over things you can't afford, you decide on a different tack. Or to quote Jeff Goldblum "Life, uh, finds a way..."

For anyone interested I'm running a giveaway over on my instagram page. Check out the @thorntonblades handle for this knife. It was my first attempt at san mai with wrought iron, and a few cosmetic issues have made it a freebie rather than something I'd sell.

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I'd love to enter your giveaway, but I don't use Instagram regularly so I don't know anyone there. Way to go!

Just tag me, if you like 🙃 @juice_journo

I wouldn't bother FOLLOWING me, but feel free to tag me. I tagged the #BeigeLion, so I suspect this is going to be a pretty incestuous little tagging go around :cool:
 
Lovely steel and handles! From a visual perspective, the end of the nakiri is a bit overly rounded to me. Fabulous overall though!
 
Lovely steel and handles! From a visual perspective, the end of the nakiri is a bit overly rounded to me. Fabulous overall though!

Thanks! Could well be, it's only my second nakiri. I spent some time on the phone with Jon at JKI to get an idea of what goes into a good nakiri and I may have gotten more fixated on geometry than overall shape.

Did I see on your website that you do some honyaki forging?

I've done a few. I find them fascinating as well as a real challenge to do well.
 
Thanks! Could well be, it's only my second nakiri. I spent some time on the phone with Jon at JKI to get an idea of what goes into a good nakiri and I may have gotten more fixated on geometry than overall shape..

Watanabe, Toyama, and Catcheside are often cited as among the benchmarks for geometry/grind but they are all fairly different. They all do tend to run tall which is my personal preference. With regard to profile I tend to see more that are very close to a rectangle (heel and tip height nearly identical) or that are actually slightly taller at the tip than those that are more than a few mm shorter at the tip (we'll leave @RDalman 's personal broken off gyuto out of the conversation). I think there is enough variation both in geometry and profile that there is no orthodox template.
All your knives are very aesthetically pleasing.
 
Here's the knife I was forging out. I don't know why the video has disappeared, here's the direct link to it

It's a good sized one, 255mm long and 57mm tall at the moment.

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