Back to the Chef Set

I had to take a break from my daughter's chef knife set in order to fill a custom order, the Glaucus knife that I posted last week.  I guess paying work takes precedence over gift work.  Gotta pay for more materials somehow!  But, with the order complete and a new satisfied client, it's back to the chef set.

I left off last time with all four knives profiled, drilled and tangs tapered.  I also ground in the initial hollow grinds on the paring and boning knives.  Here's what I accomplished this week.

I decided to take the first two blades through to the end before working on the utility and the chef blades.  I don't like to get too many parts strung out all over the shop.  Here are the paring and boning blades after coming out of air quenching after being hardened.

The next step is a deep freeze treatment, commonly referred to as cryogenic treatment, which completes the hardening process.  This is not a true cryo treatment since I use dry ice instead of liquid nitrogen.  Dry ice sublimes (changes phases from solid to gas) at about -110 degrees F and liquid nitrogen boils off at around -310 degrees F.  But, since liquid nitrogen isn't readily available, and for me is cost prohibitive, I settle for dry ice which I can buy at the local supermarket.  I've found that I get pretty darn good performance with dry ice, so I'll stick with that.  I did have to build a bigger box to treat these blades in since my usual suspects are only 4 inches long.  I used a piece of polystyrene insulation board that I picked up at the hardware store for a couple bucks, held together with the handyman's secret weapon - duct tape.

In this photo I've begun the work on the bolsters.  You can see the front bolsters have been ground to shape, drilled, and the back edges have been dovetailed.  The scales will be made from this beautiful box elder burl.  I found a large enough block to get scales for all four of these knives from with book-matched sets.  Should make for a nice looking set of knives.

I began work on the scales by fitting the front end to the dovetail of the front bolsters.  I decided to try adding liners to the scales for a new challenge and to punch up the cool factor.  These black liners are made from vulcanized fiber.  I'm not sure how other makers their liners to the scales, but I just used CA glue.  You can also see from the photo that the dovetailed edge gets a liner attached to it as well.

Next, it was time to finish out the blade and ricasso.  I wanted a nice, hand-rubbed finish on these blades, so it was off to the vise for some hand sanding.  I've showed this setup before, but it's just a piece of angle iron with a tapped hole to hold things solid with a bolt.  I've been switching off between 3-in-1 oil and Windex for a sanding lubricant to test which works best.  I'm still not sure which works better.  I guess either will do.

Here's the blade after the hand finishing process.  A nice 600 grit satin finish is hard to beat.

Before I can go on, I need to get the front bolsters attached, and before I can attach them, I need to finish out the faces of the bolsters.  Once they are attached, it's extremely difficult to finish out the font faces, so doing it before attachment is certainly the right way to do it.  Here the two bolsters are pinned together, ground and hand sanded to a 600 grit finish.

With a tapered pin reamer I ream out the bolster holes to give room for the pins to expand and lock the bolsters onto the tang.

In this photo the bolsters have been pinned to the tang.  It's a matter of smacking the pins repeatedly between a hammer and anvil until they expand to fill in all the holes.  It relieves a lot of tension when you get to bang on something with a hammer.

With the front bolsters attached, I can begin the process of fitting the scales.  A lot of knife makers will install both front and rear bolsters first, and then try to fit the scales to the space between bolsters.  I've found that doing it this way, I only have to fit one face at a time and not have to try fitting two ends of the scales to two bolsters at once.  It works for me.

The rear of the scales get dovetailed and the black liners attached.  The rear bolsters get dovetailed and attached to the knife just like the front bolsters.  With this method I get a nice, tight fit.  You might have noticed that the bolsters have not been shaped yet.  I've found that leaving everything rough until assembled works just fine.

Here is the knife after a trip to the grinder.  The bolsters and scales have been shaped and ground down to match the tang.  It would actually look like a knife now if not for all that duct tape.

At this point, the scales are ready to be attached permanently.  I mixed up a little epoxy and glued everything up.  With the scales locked in by the dovetails, pins and epoxy, they aren't going anywhere.

This is where I left off for the week.  I did get the finished hollow grinds done on the boning knife and the hand sanding process started, but I didn't get any pics of that.  I'll show it off next week and hopefully get to show this knife off as a finished piece.  Thanks for following along with me on this knife-making adventure.

-  Brandant Robinson