Hillbill (Mark Hill) knife making course.. Pic heavy!
I recently got in touch with HillBill on this forum to see if he offered courses in knife making as a few other makers do. He very kindly offered to do one for me, he hadn't done this before so I admit felt felt very lucky :0)
I'll leave the cost of the day course out for Hillbill to expand on, but I can say I felt it was very good value for money especially when you factor in you'll be leaving with the knife you make!
I had been messing around with a bit of kydex sheath making and grinding a bit of 01 tool steel with very little success on the knife side of it, I'd invested in a little pillar drill, modified a bench grinder for knife grinding, top of the range dremel blah blah blah.... I can tell you non of it made up for a lack of skill lol
Mark kindly offered to spend a day doing a course with me focusing on the knife and scale/handle making, we covered everything from band sawing the template out in the tool steel, rough grinding the shape, putting a rough bezel on before heat treating, heat treating the blank, tempering, cutting the scales, drilling the blank and scales for fitting and shaping, then of course finishing the knife and putting the final edge on it...... A lot to cover in a :0S
I'd like to say Mark was very patient and opened up his home as well as his workshop to me, made me feel welcome and more like a friend than a student which of course made me feel at ease very quickly.
Mark Hill started the day by letting me choose any one of his templates to make during the day, Hillbill also chose a template and used this to show me each technique that I needed to learn to make something passable as a knife!
Hillbill would do each stage of the knife build and I would try and copy parrot fashion what he had just done.... As best I could, luckily Mark Hill was able to smooth over some of my mistakes with ease (of which there were a few)
On to some pictures...... For those that don't know Hillbill is the good looking one and I'm the short slim chap lol
I recently got in touch with HillBill on this forum to see if he offered courses in knife making as a few other makers do. He very kindly offered to do one for me, he hadn't done this before so I admit felt felt very lucky :0)
I'll leave the cost of the day course out for Hillbill to expand on, but I can say I felt it was very good value for money especially when you factor in you'll be leaving with the knife you make!
I had been messing around with a bit of kydex sheath making and grinding a bit of 01 tool steel with very little success on the knife side of it, I'd invested in a little pillar drill, modified a bench grinder for knife grinding, top of the range dremel blah blah blah.... I can tell you non of it made up for a lack of skill lol
Mark kindly offered to spend a day doing a course with me focusing on the knife and scale/handle making, we covered everything from band sawing the template out in the tool steel, rough grinding the shape, putting a rough bezel on before heat treating, heat treating the blank, tempering, cutting the scales, drilling the blank and scales for fitting and shaping, then of course finishing the knife and putting the final edge on it...... A lot to cover in a :0S
I'd like to say Mark was very patient and opened up his home as well as his workshop to me, made me feel welcome and more like a friend than a student which of course made me feel at ease very quickly.
Mark Hill started the day by letting me choose any one of his templates to make during the day, Hillbill also chose a template and used this to show me each technique that I needed to learn to make something passable as a knife!
Hillbill would do each stage of the knife build and I would try and copy parrot fashion what he had just done.... As best I could, luckily Mark Hill was able to smooth over some of my mistakes with ease (of which there were a few)
On to some pictures...... For those that don't know Hillbill is the good looking one and I'm the short slim chap lol
