Kippington
A small green parrot
As many of us know, Dave recently recently sold a few knife blanks to keen enthusiasts around the world, asking the question: Want to try your hand at making a knife?
Now we have a great opportunity to display our attempts at tackling this challenge head on!
It just so happens that in my corner of the world, JayGee and Marek07 bought three of the blanks between them. They decided it was a good idea to start the first part of this project on a rainy Friday in my garage (where a 2x72" grinder happens to reside :biggrin.
I figured it was a bad idea to throw them straight into grinding the bevels by hand, so I set them up with a crudely improvised grinding jig. It was incredibly wonky and they had to deal with it's wobbles and shakes as best they could. Even with the jig controlling most of the angle, there are plenty of other subtleties to learn while grinding a knife.
The blanks had no bends or warps and the flats were straight, so we decided to try our hand at flat grinding the bevels as a first step. Marek started on the nakiri, which was done at the shallowest grind of the three, making it the hardest to look good. He slipped up at the very end and scratched up the side a bit, but we'll see what we can do to fix it up later:
Jay had a go on his sujihiki. Dave designed a nice K-tip at the end of the suji which lines up nicely with the height of the shinogi line, making it easy for Jay to see where he was aiming to grind:
Side by side with a Shiro Kamo Black Dragon - slightly off angle (both of them are 300mm long):
And I spent a short while on the gyuto before it got late and we had to call it a night.
We only had the time to work on one side of each knife (the other sides are untouched) but it was a solid start. It took the fellas about an hour each to get to this stage - not bad for a first attempt. Thankfully we had variable speed on the grinder, top speed can get pretty wild for a beginner!
Hopefully we can get some others that bought blanks to share their journeys too!
Now we have a great opportunity to display our attempts at tackling this challenge head on!
It just so happens that in my corner of the world, JayGee and Marek07 bought three of the blanks between them. They decided it was a good idea to start the first part of this project on a rainy Friday in my garage (where a 2x72" grinder happens to reside :biggrin.
I figured it was a bad idea to throw them straight into grinding the bevels by hand, so I set them up with a crudely improvised grinding jig. It was incredibly wonky and they had to deal with it's wobbles and shakes as best they could. Even with the jig controlling most of the angle, there are plenty of other subtleties to learn while grinding a knife.
The blanks had no bends or warps and the flats were straight, so we decided to try our hand at flat grinding the bevels as a first step. Marek started on the nakiri, which was done at the shallowest grind of the three, making it the hardest to look good. He slipped up at the very end and scratched up the side a bit, but we'll see what we can do to fix it up later:
Jay had a go on his sujihiki. Dave designed a nice K-tip at the end of the suji which lines up nicely with the height of the shinogi line, making it easy for Jay to see where he was aiming to grind:
Side by side with a Shiro Kamo Black Dragon - slightly off angle (both of them are 300mm long):
And I spent a short while on the gyuto before it got late and we had to call it a night.
We only had the time to work on one side of each knife (the other sides are untouched) but it was a solid start. It took the fellas about an hour each to get to this stage - not bad for a first attempt. Thankfully we had variable speed on the grinder, top speed can get pretty wild for a beginner!
Hopefully we can get some others that bought blanks to share their journeys too!