Started making Scandi knives around 3-4 years ago. Just loved the style and simplicity.. Well, so much for that.. Something fashionable always finds it's way into the creative process and ends up trumping functional form.
So some interesting things about this knife:
- the sheath has 4 small neodymium magnets embedded in it to keep the knife from coming out on its own.
- the wood is juniper (Sabina osteosperma) and smells like cedar, is rot resistant, and naturaly antibacterial (the berries make a great mask for trapping when crusshed and rubbed on clothing)
- the blue-green accents on the sheath and the pommel are mexican turquoise. Bought them when i was surfing in mexico one summer and finaly found a use for them after crushing them gently
- the sewing thread is braided spectra fiber fishing line (10# test) doubled over twice and sewn through 3 times. It's UV stabilized, super strong. and will not be cut by improper sheathing of the knife
- The blade is the famous Helle Harding #23 laminated high-carbon. Will get around to increasing the angle of the grind edge for a better bite.
And a few photos:
Juniper is such a fun wood to work with.. it's soft enough to carve easily.. but hard enough to make it difficult with a saw.
Helle makes some pretty good all-around blades. Haven't owned any of their knives but really like the smaller 'marine' based knives.
The turquoise was crushed and then swirled into epoxy. It was allowed to set long enough to form into a relatively accurate spacer shape and then placed over the remaning tang. The tang was died and the tang nut tapped after the epoxy was 90% set.
A close-up of the turquoise
All of the metal on this knife is Alcoa 7075 T-6 aluminum taken from an order at Boeing surplus (the airplane manufacturer). They have a load of neat stuff at the yard which encompasses everything from a-z. The spacers are fox hide.
Heh, what about all those cracks?
Well like said, juniper is an interesting wood to work with!
Juniper differs from a lot of trees in that it's heart wood dries to a lower humidity than the outer layers. this causes the tree to twist and crack even while it is alive. This poses structural deficiencies for elongated use.. but add a dimension of strength because of the twist in the wood.
After the handle has been roughly carved down to its final sanding shape, all of the cracks are filled with CA (cyanoacrylate) ... super glue to the layman. The knife is then sanded down to final smoothness.. and voila! the crack is there but filled with a high strength bonded acrylic.
A fellow Canadienne trapper named a few other things that are handy with super glue:
- you can use it to bond deeper wounds together to increase healing time
- it repairs fishing poles much faster than epoxy
- instant fletching glue
so many other uses.. i carry a 2 oz. bottle in my pack for emergencies
...but anyway, let me know what you think
The next project will be using pinion burl and a juniper knot for a traditional scandi 'do-it-all' puukko
edispilff
So some interesting things about this knife:
- the sheath has 4 small neodymium magnets embedded in it to keep the knife from coming out on its own.
- the wood is juniper (Sabina osteosperma) and smells like cedar, is rot resistant, and naturaly antibacterial (the berries make a great mask for trapping when crusshed and rubbed on clothing)
- the blue-green accents on the sheath and the pommel are mexican turquoise. Bought them when i was surfing in mexico one summer and finaly found a use for them after crushing them gently
- the sewing thread is braided spectra fiber fishing line (10# test) doubled over twice and sewn through 3 times. It's UV stabilized, super strong. and will not be cut by improper sheathing of the knife
- The blade is the famous Helle Harding #23 laminated high-carbon. Will get around to increasing the angle of the grind edge for a better bite.
And a few photos:
Juniper is such a fun wood to work with.. it's soft enough to carve easily.. but hard enough to make it difficult with a saw.
Helle makes some pretty good all-around blades. Haven't owned any of their knives but really like the smaller 'marine' based knives.
The turquoise was crushed and then swirled into epoxy. It was allowed to set long enough to form into a relatively accurate spacer shape and then placed over the remaning tang. The tang was died and the tang nut tapped after the epoxy was 90% set.
A close-up of the turquoise
All of the metal on this knife is Alcoa 7075 T-6 aluminum taken from an order at Boeing surplus (the airplane manufacturer). They have a load of neat stuff at the yard which encompasses everything from a-z. The spacers are fox hide.
Heh, what about all those cracks?
Well like said, juniper is an interesting wood to work with!
Juniper differs from a lot of trees in that it's heart wood dries to a lower humidity than the outer layers. this causes the tree to twist and crack even while it is alive. This poses structural deficiencies for elongated use.. but add a dimension of strength because of the twist in the wood.
After the handle has been roughly carved down to its final sanding shape, all of the cracks are filled with CA (cyanoacrylate) ... super glue to the layman. The knife is then sanded down to final smoothness.. and voila! the crack is there but filled with a high strength bonded acrylic.
A fellow Canadienne trapper named a few other things that are handy with super glue:
- you can use it to bond deeper wounds together to increase healing time
- it repairs fishing poles much faster than epoxy
- instant fletching glue
so many other uses.. i carry a 2 oz. bottle in my pack for emergencies
...but anyway, let me know what you think
The next project will be using pinion burl and a juniper knot for a traditional scandi 'do-it-all' puukko
edispilff
