I'm having what my mother refers to as 'one of those days'. So far I have; ballsed up a fit so will have to remove and re-do, tipped a knife, cut myself twice whilst repairing it, revealed a load of low spots that I now want to remove, and run out of cigarettes. So here are some pictures to make me feel better of something that did go well a few days ago...
The first handle that I put on my
@Kippington wasn't quite right for a couple of reasons. The design of Jules' tangs forces height (and subsequently width) onto a handle, and the size of the spacer metal I was using didn't allow me to put much taper in whilst getting the fit correct at the neck. Which in turn meant that I had to make the handle longer than I'd like in order to get balance, as the wood wasn't very dense. The result was very pretty, but effectively the kind of handle that I'd put on a yanagiba, not a gyuto:
Earlier this week a guy I'd got talking to on a woodworking forum came round and brought me half a forest's worth of stuff he wasn't going to use. Beautiful things; some quite rare and expensive, highly figured pieces, lovely spalted wood, stabilized burl blanks, &c. Toward the end he took out three anonymous-looking brown sticks and told me they were a bit special, that I should be saving it for something good:
Western Myall is a very long lived, slow growing, shrub-like acacia, that grows in some of the more remote desert-y bits of Australia, and a geologist friend of his had brought some back from the arid inlands of SA. This particular tree had been dead some 250 years already, and was at least 500 years old before that, probably more. It's slightly difficult to describe, but there's something quite special about the pattern of the tightly-twisted grain, the chattoyance, tobacco-smoke colour, density, and general feel of it:
With a Red Mallee burl and steel spacer, and Ebony Ferrule:
