Raptor Prototype

Well, I finished up the new Virtue knife last week, but didn't take the time to take any high-quality photos of it yet.  I'll get to that soon and post it here for your viewing pleasure as well as to the Available Knives page if you would like to add it to your collection.  It turned out really nice by the way and the action is as smooth as silk.

As always, as soon as I finish up one knife, I simply can't wait to get started on the next.  I chose to give a new design a try which I call Raptor.  It's really a study of simple curves which I think look quite elegant.  I even put a little bit of recurve into the blade for looks, but mostly for enhanced cutting due to edge geometry.  The design looks good on paper and I hope it works out well in reality. I don't plan to go into the whole build process with this knife, I'll just take some quick pics along the way.  Here are those photos.

Here are the chosen materials for this build.  Even though it's a prototype, I'm going to use some high quality components since I'm pretty confident that this will be a keeper.  The blade will be made from some "Dense Twist Damasteel", the bolsters and spacer from 416 stainless, and the liners from 6AL4V titanium.  The dyed maple burl shown above wasn't quite the size I needed for the scales, so I ended up using some really nice buckeye burl.  This photo shows all the parts ready to be cut out.

Lots of progress made before I snapped this quick pic.  The blade is in heat treat, the handles have all been profiled and assembled, and the back spacer has been rough ground.  Lots of drilling, tapping, and fitting screws going on to get to this point.

Here is the first full assembly of the Raptor.  You can start to see the elegant curves of the piece and it feels really nice in the hand.  It's a little bigger than my usual gentlemen's knives with about a 3" blade. What you don't see in the pic is all the work that went into building the pivot system and setting the open and closed positions of the blade.

Here's a pic after the knife handle has been contoured and ground up to about 320 grit.  It's hand sanding from here on out.  I'll put a nice polish on the scales and start the finishing process.  I've heard great things about Tru-Oil, so I'm going to give it a try on these scales.  The bolsters will get either a satin finish, or I must might texture them like I did with the Virtue knife which I just finished up.

This is turning out to be a really nice build and I'm quite pleased with the design.  So far so good. Let's hope my luck holds out.  I'm getting really busy at work right now, so I might not get much done on this one for a while.  I'll squeeze in a few hours if I can and keep you posted on the progress. Thanks for following along with me on this build.

-  Brandant Robinson