Criticizing Your Own Hand Work - a Knife in this case

[--Tom--]

Don’t forget most butchers will use multiple different grips and it should work in each one- this is where classic handle shapes have become classic for a reason.

For knives on boards a pinch grip is almost defacto, the “how to buy a chef knife” facts peddled in online articles are largely bunk. Things like balance point are a lot of personal preference- and for a maker can be hard to achieve without trial and error (wa handles being far easier to adjust by making over long and then trimming the length)

 

[D_W]

Thanks, tom - do you know of anything that talks about butcher's grips? the guy who wanted a much higher steel quality boning knife mentioned that a lot of butchers will pull a knife through with a stab type grip or flip the stab grip and push it, and I've seen another grip that butchers use cutting the larger cuts to small cuts where a knife that has a curved blade is more suitable.

Maybe I should just track down a couple of videos and watch them work, too.

 

[D_W]

lunch today - I partially finished the paring knife. It still needs a little bit more attention to the handle (I gave up on poly, it's not really a maker's finish) and did a transition coat of shellac and then a couple of light coats of thin CA. I don't have lacquer yet.

cleanup still needed, but i measured the bevel - i'm not shooting for anything in particular - it's .012" thick at the top of the cutting bevel and just under 2 hundredths an eighth of an inch into the blade. I couldn't guess accurately on hardness, but it's hard enough to take an easy good edge, and it won't be easily dented. If I was at a prison camp with the ability to leave if I guessed right, I'd say 59. AEB-L is a weird thing - it comes out of the quench less than its potential highest hardness. At temper around 200F it actually gains a point or two and then comes back down to about initial temper around 325F temper. which is what this is - double tempered around 325F.

It's not easy to get it much harder without a funance and liquid nitrogen and still have some toughness.

there is a mistake on the edge of this knife, see if you can spot it. not in fineness, but in something I forgot to do.

This thin bevel with little to no convexity above the last little honed bit is intentional both for cutting action as well as sharpening. The initial sharpening after finishing is only 10 strokes on each side on a norton fine india, then ten strokes on a ceramic steel that's broken in (nothing special, just something that was like $15 from china, but it's good), and then five tangent passes with moderate pressure on a 5 micron buff which will hone and slightly round the edge at a very tiny scale to keep dents and chips from occurring easily.

It will catch a hair and then start cutting it length ways, which I didn't expect. I could make it sever the hair cleanly, but it's pointless to test something tedious to get to that because you'll never do it in practice. I'll have to hide this until the kids are a little older (9 and 12), but I may make a better one before I get much chance to use it, and if that's the case, I'll just send it along as a free gift with chisels to someone. I've learned a lot from this - it's easier to give it a shot and learn from mistakes. I have things to try on the next blank all the way from shape, handle, finish, to heat treating that I know will add just a little more hardness. And some more that i may learn from the handle as I don't normally use CA - experimenting to apply it thin and buff it back to a gloss without going through the CA and without spending gobs of time.

Scaled up in the picture, I can see there's some more small scratch stuff, etc, to take care of. Total time making from bar stock to handle to knife has been about 2 1/2 hours. Hopefully another half hour of hand finishing of the blade and the handle and removing the forge scale sticking out of the handle will be all that's needed.

new set of bananas not yet ripe enough to try the drop test.

 

[D_W]

Buffed.



And another buffed handle made the same way.

Turns out, CA is a far better medium for doing this until lacquer is in hand. Urethane will either dry slowly or if you dry it with some heat, the surface will cure in an hour and the next thin coat will come off like a layer of skin.

I'm happier with the handles than I was at first, which is a warning...write what you don't like about something at first look and feel, or you might get used to minor quibbles and not improve them later.

 

[D_W]

I'll bet those white segments in the second picture look like chatter or waviness on the surface of the knife. they're actually the LEDs in the overhead light.

I finished a couple of chisel handles like this at one point, but backwards - pore filled with CA and then finished with shellac. I have one and I sent a couple to folks and told them to sand it off. It's certainly a lot faster to do this on the lathe, which is where I've seen people do it with CA. with a sharp knife, it's a little more fiddly and takes longer, perhaps 10-15 minutes of time to do it. But the feel on chisels is terrible and the knives feel like polished micarta instead of wood, but they won't suffer much due to moisture unless they sit in it for a long time - something they'll never do.

I saw a video once of a guy finishing a guitar with CA....from pore filing to top coat. I can't imagine how much eye burning there would be doing that.

The routine to polish is simple - 1200 grit paper spit lubed (water would be fine)
- finger buff with a microfiber rag for about 1 minute with 5 micron bar, same stuff I use at the buffer
- cheap drill attachment with a polish buff bar for about 1 minute. The full buffer that I use for sharpening things is full speed and would burn right though the finish. Little cheap import buffing attachment sets are about $15 from overseas and include a small collection of buffs and buff holding fixtures. So far, I've used them to polish guitar frets, fix scratches on the car, take light surface rust off of things, and now buff handles.

 

[Fergie 307]

I think it might have been one of Guy Martin's programmes where he visited a traditional Japanese sword maker. After the blade was forged it was handed over to a chap who then finished it all over by hand using wet stones, took about a month if I remember correctly. Marvellous workmanship , I dread to think what he must charge for one.

 

[D_W]

I think it might have been one of Guy Martin's programmes where he visited a traditional Japanese sword maker. After the blade was forged it was handed over to a chap who then finished it all over by hand using wet stones, took about a month if I remember correctly. Marvellous workmanship , I dread to think what he must charge for one.

I'm not sure what they are called, but the folks doing the finish work generally follow something we'd consider to be a routine abrasive process, but with what used to be natural abrasives / fingerstones. The most traditional types probably wouldn't allow for much deviation.

The characteristics of the polishing stones (you can find terms like uchigumori) are to be progressive but not leave deep marks that will be seen later. there's another one that became the rage at the end of the time that I was buying and reselling (what I didn't want) japanese stones at cost to sting some of the dealers who were going past what I considered to be in good taste....it wasn't uchigumori but I got a request for it a lot. It was basically a 6k-ish knife finishing stone, and I never bought one and had to explain to a lot of people that it was for a task they weren't going to encounter.

I was using a fingerstone made for machinists, but almost cut the tip of my finger off with the boning knife here - I would *hate* to do the task on swords, but I guess one would get good at holding things from an end and in a direction where your fingers don't contact the knife. I flippantly was fanning the fingerstone back and forth and just got the tip of my finger in and cut off a half-pea sized amount that lucky stuck on by a hinge, I glued it back on and it looks like it'll be good to go!!

As nice as it is to work by hand, I think polishing something by hand would be kind of boring.

if there are swords made out of hand produced sand iron and finished traditionally, I wouldn't be surprised if they were several hundred thousand dollars.

 

[cotedupy]

Nice work and very interesting thread D! And (unlike almost everything else on the forums) it's actually something I know a little bit about. For the last couple of years I've basically been making custom kitchen knife handles, as well as sharpening and restorations, for a living. The below are some observations, rather than diktats. As with anything - there are many ways to skin cats.

---

Commercial knives, from what i can tell, including expensive commercial knives, are made to prevent people from being able to break them and return them either soon or years later. The combination that you get with them is a shoulder behind the edge and a concession on hardness so that if someone abuses them, they will usually bend.

For knives, I think geometry trumps hardness, but hardness is still important.

This is certainly true, the geometry of a kitchen knife is the single most important factor that affects its performance.

The 'shoulders' or area immediately behind the edge of a knife does serve in part to make the knife more durable, as kitchen knives tend to get bashed around a bit. But it isn't the only purpose; the grind of the main bevel (as opposed to sharpening edge) has a very important role in how a knife goes through food, and how it releases it. Most kitchen knives, Japanese and otherwise, traditionally have slightly asymmetric, convex grinds that favour either right or left handers, depending on the side of food release.

The grind I think you're describing is something like a true zero bevel, or full Scandi grind, and has the potential to make things very sharp indeed, though the downsides would probably regarded as outweighing the positive. Firstly as you note - it's going to be pretty fragile at the edge, though how much of a problem depends on what you're cutting, how careful you are, and obviously how hard your HT is. The other big problem is food release, and related to that - a true zero bevel will actually wedge more than a slightly convex one that's very thin behind the edge.

Those drawbacks though apply to general purpose knives used on boards, for some specialised things like your paring knife or butcher’s knife that's not hitting bone - zero bevels are fine. Yanagiba kinda have zero bevels.

Here are a couple of my own knives with exceptionally good performance FWIW...

This is a Mazaki Gyuto that I've thinned on stones a bit myself. The grind is now very thin immediately behind the edge, but still slightly convexed on both sides of the bevel. Though moreso on the right (left side in the pic cos the knife is upside down obviously), to favour food release for a right-hander:

This next is the same knife belonging to somebody else who was asking for some advice on thinning it. The grind here still has a RH bias, but is heavily convexed and quite fat behind the edge:

Lastly a different one of mine. This knife is very thin with a very pronounced RH bias in the form of an 'S grind'. The left hand side of the knife is almost but not quite a zero bevel, which you can do on the side of the knife that faces into your body because it doesn't affect release. This kind of highly asymmetric grind also requires different edge sharpening angles on either side, to counteract the 'steering' effect when going through food. 70:30 sharpening people call it.

treated in an open forge, which is a supposed no-no

I'm not a particular expert on the intricacies of this, but assuming you can get and hold a reasonably accurate temperature, then an open forge should be fine I think (?) If ever you fancy trying carbon steel - 1080 and 1084 are both really pretty decent knife steels that have wide tolerances during HT and tempering.

Freehand making a handle on an already sharp knife that its totaled if a belt touches anything ahead of the handle

This is the pretty much main reason I like to mostly make wa handles rather than yo / Western handles - you don't need to do it with the knife attached, and it makes it much easier. I'll do another post below with some more thoughts about styles and how I make them, but I like the look of yours there, the design is a bit different from the 'norm' and I think looks very comfortable.

Lastly, the finishing method that some may find useful.

Again - this is very much a matter of personal preference, but... often people don't like high grit, hard high-polish finishes on kitchen knife handles, because they're slippery. And especially pro chefs spend a lot of time washing their hands and working wet. The traditional Japanese Ho wood handles may be boring af to look at, and fairly lightweight, but in terms of grip feel and use they're actually pretty excellent.

Depending on the wood, and whether it's been stabilized or not, I tend to sand to between 180 and 400. And finish usually with a drying oil (Tung usually or BLO), or sometimes just mineral oil.

As nice as it is to work by hand, I think polishing something by hand would be kind of boring.

Haha, yes. You kinda have to learn to enjoy the meditative aspect, otherwise it'd be a feckin drag! Can make things look quite swish though; this is the knife in the first pic above with a nice kasumi polish on it, can't remember exactly what stone I used to finish but it was probably a Maruoyama Suita.

(Fun tip though - Belgian Blue Whetstone polishes in a way that would put many Japanese stones to shame).

 

[D_W]

Agree with all of the above. This tiny symmetric grind that I'm doing is a slicer, and wedging is traded for sticking in things where sticking can be a problem. An educated user wouldn't be able to break my knife, but if someone makes knives and doesn't choose the recipient, you can't avoid someone performing a side stress test trying to wedge things apart by twisting or levering the knife.

I do like the hand finishing - hopefully it doesn't sound like no. i don't know if I could do it full time, but you could get good enough to fall asleep. I'll eventually clean up these knives with more hand finishing, but no rush at the outset.

As far as 1084 - it's a good steel, but it's so unprotected from grain growth (just my opinion) and if the temperature before quenched isn't pushed a little, it can struggle to get good 60+ hardness and decent toughness. I solved my initial problems hardening it by snapping samples, finding out how far past nonmagnetic it can be taken, confirming I could shrink it back and then playing by the rule with it, so to speak. 80crv2 has enough alloying that you or I would feel it, just as O1 will start to feel alloyed on the stones if you work with enough water hardening steels. I couldn't make a technical argument for 1084 over 80crv2, but sometimes it's nice to master both.

80crv2, though, cycles to smaller grain so easily and then holds it that it's incredible, and then it turns around even at high hardness and sharpens like it knows exactly what you intended. It makes a great plane iron.

totally agree on the visual aspects if using stones on laminated knives. I bought and resold some large fraction of about 200 stones. To find a good japanese stone or a large mikawa nagura that will do that finish is expensive, and it's hit or miss, and more often is found in soft stones if the strong suita-ish type.

But a cheap soft arkansas slurried gets really close to the right look *very* quickly, as wood a blue - to the point that I think it's more practical at about a tenth of the cost. Same concept as the blue. Use what works.

The most common thing I ran into from knife folks when selling stones:
1) I want a stone that is exceedingly fine
2) that has a good soft feel
3) that cuts really fast
4) will polish the higane to a mirror
5) the jigane to a strong uniform haze with no stray scratches

OK. Good luck!! the balance of the last two was usually unrealistic - if it's fine enough for a pure visual polish, it's usually going to partially polish jigane, too.

Thanks for the thoughts on the handles and the rest of the stuff. I don't know if I'll make 3 more knives or 300, but if I make many more, the drive to make them better is there.

 

[D_W]

(too, you're right on simple stainless steels - if you can see color temperature and have a forge that allows you to control the temp of the knife, you can get a pretty good result in a relatively short soak. There are very complicated types that need a long high temp soak, but I don't like most of those, anyway, so the urge to get a furnace and a nitrogen dewar to handle them is not very strong)

 

[D_W]

You're the only person who will understand what I mean, but I see my comment above "controls the temp" probably implies controlling the temp of the forge.

What got me in trouble with various knife forums is mentioning having temperature control in that the heat source is hotter than you want the knife to be, but the heat source is a point or two points with relief behind it so that you can accurately heat a knife rather than trying to rely on controlling a whole forge and then hoping you left something in it long enough.

I have had good luck with it. I need a little more heat for stainless, but I'll get that figured out. On carbon steel, I can match or better book results for combination toughness and fineness, and to say that you can do that is contentious....for reasons that I don't know. Especially if you have test data with familiar steels that prove it. when the results come out better than the book, which is what I find with 26c3, then you can almost guarantee that you'll be banned if you say "I think those samples could be better, too - maybe it's an uncommon steel where a furnace soak doesn't do it favors because it puts too much carbon in solution and in a quick forge heat, that doesn't happen - it just matches hardness and has better toughness".

I'd love to get more people introduced to heat treating their own stuff well with skill - it's quick, it's easy to test, etc. But not much interest seems to come from it if it seems more complicated than 2 step paint by number. It looks boring to do, I guess. I find it a real thrill.

 

[cotedupy]

You're the only person who will understand what I mean, but I see my comment above "controls the temp" probably implies controlling the temp of the forge.

What got me in trouble with various knife forums is mentioning having temperature control in that the heat source is hotter than you want the knife to be, but the heat source is a point or two points with relief behind it so that you can accurately heat a knife rather than trying to rely on controlling a whole forge and then hoping you left something in it long enough.

I have had good luck with it. I need a little more heat for stainless, but I'll get that figured out. On carbon steel, I can match or better book results for combination toughness and fineness, and to say that you can do that is contentious....for reasons that I don't know. Especially if you have test data with familiar steels that prove it. when the results come out better than the book, which is what I find with 26c3, then you can almost guarantee that you'll be banned if you say "I think those samples could be better, too - maybe it's an uncommon steel where a furnace soak doesn't do it favors because it puts too much carbon in solution and in a quick forge heat, that doesn't happen - it just matches hardness and has better toughness".

I'd love to get more people introduced to heat treating their own stuff well with skill - it's quick, it's easy to test, etc. But not much interest seems to come from it if it seems more complicated than 2 step paint by number. It looks boring to do, I guess. I find it a real thrill.

Very interesting to read hear your thoughts on all this, as it's not something I know much about in terms of having actual practical experience. I know quite a few knifemakers so have spoken to them a bit, and I've HT-ed 1084 myself to make a knife, but not much else. I'm not brilliant at grinding stuff on belts either tbh, but this turned out quite nicely, though the handle was a serious faff to make!

if someone makes knives and doesn't choose the recipient, you can't avoid someone performing a side stress test trying to wedge things apart by twisting or levering the knife.

Haha yep, tell me about it! Most of the knives I sell are Aogami 2 with thin Japanese grinds. And quite a significant number of people ignore my advice not to treat like their cheap stainless, so wang massive chips into them and/or snap the tips off almost immediately.

But a cheap soft arkansas slurried gets really close to the right look *very* quickly,

Funny you should say that... I didn't know this until recently when someone sent me an ark to try out and give my thoughts on, from some rock he'd picked up after chatting to some quarrymen in the late 60s, and only cut and flattened a couple of years ago. Which was pretty cool I thought.

It turned out to be exactly that kind of fast, friable soft ark, and I decided to use it to remove some rust on a nakiri. I was really quite surprised by how nice the finish was and how well it picked up the banding. (Turkish/Cretan stones can do this too because of their friability).

OK. Good luck!! the balance of the last two was usually unrealistic - if it's fine enough for a pure visual polish, it's usually going to partially polish jigane, too.

This made me laugh as well. As you say - some of those things simply aren't compatible.

Though I'm pleased to report we're getting an increasing number of people on KKF understanding to the joys of Washitas, for sharpening at least. And I should probably thank you for that... certainly when I started using them there was one of your videos, called something like 'Various types of oilstones', which gave me a huge amount of understanding about how and why they worked. I share it pretty much every time someone asks me about them.

(I'm assuming it's your video anyway...? Apologies if I'm mistaking you for someone else entirely!)

 

[D_W]

that video is me. sharpening stones are a strong side hobby, as well as how to get as much as possible out of them as fast as possible.

 

[cotedupy]

Some thoughts on 'wa' handles then if anyone's interested. Perhaps not desperately relevant in regards to making full tang, scaled, western handles, but fwiw...

---

I largely make traditional Japanase octagonal handles because; they're comfortable, they're easy to make, and I like the way they look:

The reason that they're comfortable and have been used for a very long time, is because the joints in your hand kinda make that shape naturally:

They're easy to make because of the way that I make them, and you don't need to do it with the knife attached.

I take the handle blank, either just a block of wood for a one-piece handle, or with ferrule and maybe spacer epoxied on top, and I shape it initially using a handheld belt sander laid flat on its side. It allows you to easily look down on what you're doing and judge chamfers and tapers very accurately. It's an infinitely easier and more precise way of making handles than trying to use an upright, bench-mounted grinder/sander. After that I finish the handles using sheets of sandpaper laid on a flat surface, drill the tang hole, and fit with epoxy or hot glue. Example of how I use the sander:

And because I like the way they look I work with a knifemaker in Japan who makes blades that have hidden tangs. Which also gives you a separate element of control in designing the handle, specifically with relation to balance. In the pic below I've ground down the tang of one of them because it's quite a short (180mm) gyuto, and if I want to get good balance when using a heavy wood for the handle then I need to try to push the balance further forward than it would be with a longer tang.

Balance point is a consideration to make in some types of knife but not in others, it's importance can be overplayed. A short knife like a petty will always be backwards weighted, a long or heavy knife like a sujihiki or cleaver will always be forwards weighted. It's when you get to more general purpose knives like santoku or gyuto that you need to start paying attention.

And like everything else about handles there's no 'right' or 'wrong' balance point, it depends on personal preference and style of cutting - in general if someone uses 'push cutting' motions the balance point should be further forward than for people who 'rock chop'. I personally tend to try to put my balance points neutral at a pinch grip, which is about here:

The pinch grip is the 'normal' way of holding a kitchen knife, and looks like this:

Now if anybody's made it this far through the post then there might be some people who think that doesn't actually look like a particularly normal way of holding a knife at all. And it's completely fine if you want to hold it in a different way, but that is how kitchen knives are designed to be held. You'll notice there that the grip is entirely between my thumb and forefinger. Not much of my hand is really touching the handle; just the ball of my palm, my little, and ring fingers.

So my last observation (which perhaps isn't something I should say given I do this for a living) is that despite all of the above... handles don't actually matter that much at all. Or at least - there's an awful lot of leeway in terms of designing them, while still being very comfortable in a traditional grip. Knife handles are mostly there to provide a degree of balance around a pivot point, and look nice.

 

[cotedupy]

A few of the other wa styles I do occasionally and which also work well...

'D Shape'. This is mostly oval, with a kinda triangle on one side, so you make them for right or left handed users. This is an old nakiri I restored a bit and rehandled, saving the original blonde horn ferrule. This is a right handed d-shape, the first pic shows it upside down:

'Heart shape'. This is an octagonal handle on the top and an oval on the bottom, it's a bit less traditional than octagonal or d-shape handles but extremely nice in the hand. This one was done by a friend:

Lastly a hyrbid of the two. Here the octagonal top of the heart has been rounded, so both sides are like the triangular side of a d shape handle.

 

[D_W]

by chance, finger touched belt sander in the next to last photo?

Looks familiar.

The two posts re: handles are a treat to read. Thanks for sharing. I also like using a belt sander for faceted handles, especially if they're already mounted to something - but either way, it avoids the issue of trying to accommodate work holding a handle that you often (especially for chisels) want to rough really quickly. Hand finishing can follow.

not a great picture, but you can see the desire to make the handles and not scuff up the bolsters. They can be sanded close very quickly and then scraped or cleaned up right to the mark with a shear cut type file like a nicholson supershear (I think that's what they're called).

 

[cotedupy]

by chance, finger touched belt sander in the next to last photo?

Looks familiar.

The two posts re: handles are a treat to read. Thanks for sharing. I also like using a belt sander for faceted handles, especially if they're already mounted to something - but either way, it avoids the issue of trying to accommodate work holding a handle that you often (especially for chisels) want to rough really quickly. Hand finishing can follow.

not a great picture, but you can see the desire to make the handles and not scuff up the bolsters. They can be sanded close very quickly and then scraped or cleaned up right to the mark with a shear cut type file like a nicholson supershear (I think that's what they're called).

They're very nice, both handles and chisels.

I have a handful of somewhat rusty old Marples chisels I need to Marples chisels I need to tidy up a bit. Perhaps I'll make a couple of new handles for the ones that've been bashed in with a hammer.

 

[--Tom--]

Thanks, tom - do you know of anything that talks about butcher's grips? the guy who wanted a much higher steel quality boning knife mentioned that a lot of butchers will pull a knife through with a stab type grip or flip the stab grip and push it, and I've seen another grip that butchers use cutting the larger cuts to small cuts where a knife that has a curved blade is more suitable.

Maybe I should just track down a couple of videos and watch them work, too.

Couldn’t find something directly covering it but as you say watching them work gives the idea, e.g

 

[D_W]

Perfect - thanks tom. Now I see why the tip of the knife takes abrasive wear. I see how he's working close to the bone everywhere with a bias to avoid cutting into the meat.

I see one of the grips that the original requester uses (fingertip on knife spine) but also see a whole bunch of other things I wouldn't guess.

I sharpened the knife all the way almost to the bottom of the pip at the bottom of the handle and think maybe that's not so great. It can be muted easily, though, just like the tip and heel of a razor is better muted for a mm or so to avoid the corner filleting faces.

 

[D_W]

I'll have to think about other potential handle finishes (the knives here are mine and won't get into this, but someone else might). I see the point easily now about fat and slickness of a gloss handle. If nothing else, a garish rotary sanding of the handle around its girth would help to prevent forward and backward movement.

Rubber or micarta will be a better choice than wood, perhaps. I so appreciate the video vs. descriptions - it provides information that's easy to see and discern without trying to turn it into 2500 words.