This weekend was very productive in my knife shop. I was able to almost get the second Glaucus knife finished. If only I had had just a couple more hours . . .
Here's the blade after several hours of hand sanding. The 600 grit finish turned out quite nicely. I thought about a mirror finish on this blade, but it just didn't look right, so I went to my old standby of a hand-rubbed satin finish. In my eyes, this is a much better finish.
Here is the left side of the handle. If you look closely at the bottom where the bolster and scale meet, you will see that the thumb notch has been ground out to allow for the lock to be released with one hand. Here's another big confession moment. That makes two with this knife. Ouch! I was hurrying too much and actually ground off the wrong scale. So, that forced me to remake an entire liner. What a pain! That's the second piece I've had to remake for this little knife. I guess I can call this a break-even knife. Anyway, with the new liner in place, everything was back on track.
Time to work on the lock. To begin with, the area of the lock gets blacked out with a permanent marker. I attach the spacer and the pivot/blade mechanism and scratch a line along the back of the tang where the lock will make contact with the blade. I also scratch a line along the length of the lock to guide me as I cut it out.
This photo shows the lock after it has been cut out. I do this with a small cutoff wheel mounted on a mandrel which is chucked up in my drill press. The liner is held in my drill press vise and I manually feed it into the cutoff wheel for a nice, smooth cut. Works great.
The liners get a jeweled finish on the inside surfaces. The picture looks a little blue, but they are really natural titanium and have not been anodized yet.
After filing the lock face down to where it mates up with the blade tang correctly, I drill and install the detent ball. This detent ball that I used on this one is ceramic. It really makes a difference in how smoothly the blade opens. It's definitely worth the little extra cash for the ceramic over stainless steel. Plus, it doesn't give me any problems during the anodization process like stainless steel does.
The majority of my shop time this weekend was eaten up in fileworking the spacer and liners. The spacer got my favorite "twisted ribbon" pattern and the liners got a serpentine pattern. These two patterns look really great against each other. The liners have also been anodized a bronze color that looks fantastic against the creamy mammoth scales.
Here is the blade after my mark has been etched into the side. I'm quite proud of my new mark. It looks pretty fancy.
This is where I left off for the week. You can probably see that I decided to put a satin finish on the bolsters. The mirror polish looked nice, but mirror finishes show scratched way too easily and a knife made to use will get scratched. Satin finishes look much better for much longer. The knife is very near completion. It needs a little bit of fine tuning on the pivot to make it silky smooth. I also need to make a thumb stud and put an edge on the blade to finish everything up.
Here's a view of the spine. It's a little out of focus, but you can kind of see how great the bronze-colored liners look against the scales. Very nice!
This knife should be finished up this next week without too much trouble. I'll take some good pics and also send out an email to my email subscribers when it's done and available for purchase. If you're not on my list, just send me an email at theoldstump@live.com with "Subscribe" in the subject line and I'll add you in. Thanks for following along with me on this knife-making adventure.
- Brandant Robinson
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