More Progress

I was able to squeeze in a couple of hours worth of work on these two "Virtue" knives.  I managed to make some pretty good progress too.  There is still a whole lot of work left to do on them, but every step gets me closer to the finished knives.  Here's what I was able to accomplish today.

 

 

These are the two back spacer for the knives shown above.  You can see that I have drilled several holes through them.  The reasons for this are to reduce the weight of the knife and to make surface grinding them to final thickness a little easier.  I don't have a surface grinder, so this gets done on my horizontal disc grinder and finished up on a surface plate with sandpaper glued to it.

Next, it's time to set the stop position of the blades while in the closed position.  In the photo above, you can see the stop pins and the blades in place on the two knives.  If you look closely, you can see that the blade tips are not set into the handles far enough to keep the blade tucked safely away when closed, and that's not good.

In order to seat the blades in deeper, the tang needs to be ground a little more on each blade.  This is done with a 1/4" grinding drum mounted in a rotary tool.  It's kind of a slow process and requires several cycles of grinding and fitting to get the blade to close just right.

There, now that's better.  The tip is now concealed inside the handle and the blade stops before making contact with the spacer.

With the open and closed positions dialed in, it's time to get started on shaping the handle on the bolstered knife.  To begin, I like to start by chamfering the outside edge of the handle at 45 degrees.  The chamfer helps me keep the shape consistent as I round off the edges.

Here's the handle after the bolsters and scales have been rounded off on the grinder.  I use a slack belt to work the edges and the flat platen to smooth off the sides.  I finished the handle up to 400 grit on the grinder, the remainder will be done by hand.

Here's a shot of the spine of the knife.  I must admit, I've never really liked the looks of colored liners underneath scales.  That said, I think these actually look kind of classy.  And check out the fit of those dovetailed bolsters.  Nice!

That's about as far as I was able to get today.  The next steps will be to shape the other knife and to add any file work to the blades before they get heat treated.  If everything goes right, I hope to get that done and the blades heat treated on Memorial day.  I think these knives are coming together nicely and I can't wait to get started on the detail work.

Thanks for stopping by the Robinson Edge.

-  Brandant Robinson