Working on my JS knives

[stephanfowler]

Sneak peak of the knives I intend to finish as candidates for my J.S. stamp.

On the far right is the 1 1/4" round bar of W2 that they all came off of, Started as a 36" bar, and I have 13 1/2" left

Two bowies,
two fighters,
one chef,
one camp,
and one hunter.
Now to start grinding




Got these rough ground and normalized last night,
I'll finish my pre HT grind tonight and may even HT tonight

[Stabber]

Nice! Will that Integral be one of the Test knives Good Luck

[stephanfowler]

Nice! Will that Integral be one of the Test knives Good Luck

yep, that will be a 8 1/2" French pattern Chefs knife.
in W2 with a crazy Hamon, probably blackwood handle.

gonna be pretty sweet I think

[stephanfowler]

I had really intending to start these last Aug. here I am in Jan thinking I REALLY need to get a move on.

the reason I chickened out last year from testing is that I hadn't had time to get all of my knives critiqued by MS. and the one's I had looked at had issues that needed fixing, which made me to worried that the ones that hadn't been looked at had issues.

In the end when I had the knives at Blade that I would have submitted I had them looked over and all but one would have been just fine. but that one would have killed me.

I am very pleased that I decided to wait, but I could have finished that one a little earlier, had it looked at, fixed the issue, and tested just fine.


this year I am determined not to make that mistake again. I will have this batch done in time to take to several MS and get input. I'm going to build them all such that I can break them down with out destroying the knife (bed the tang in epoxy, lightly superglue pins in place, take down nuts, etc) so that when an MS points out something I can fix it without starting over. Because they WILL find something to point out.

[infobound1]

The Grinds are looking awesome Stephen! Best of luck with them!

[stephanfowler]

working on the first one.

it's going to be a straight forward camp knife. blade is just a teensy bit over 10"

First I polish it on the belt grinder up to 600G

I start with a 36G Blaze belt, then an 80G Blaze, then a 400G Norax, then the 600G cork



I like to fit the guard before I do any hand finishing, saves me from having to go back and fix scratches.



Here I've finished hand polishing, you can kind of see the Hamon but I will etch it lightly to bring out some contrast.


like this.

[cornnutt]

Thats freakin' cool....

[stephanfowler]

This knife is going to be a single guard, Re-Curve camp knife, similar to my Springer Mountain profile.


I just love the way a good satin looks on a knife with Hamon, don't you




This hasn't been etched in any way, just a 400G satin.

[Buffalohump]

Looks like an awesome set dude. We're pulling for ya......

[stephanfowler]

Working on the guard for the other big bowie.

I decided to be a little bit fancier with this one

I did a really rough scribe of the pattern so that I could lay out the ricasso and blade size and make sure it would all work


after I got the guard blank fitting nicely on the tang I marked out the actual knife centerline (which is almost NEVER the bar centerline when you do these by hand) so I could align the template.

Here the pattern is glued down with super glue


All shaped out, what do you think???


Other side

[cornnutt]

That looks killer.....: Keep 'em comin'....

[Mr.LaBella]

Looking good, Sir.

[Snapper]

Coming along great stephan...keep up the great work.

[RoadFish]

Nice work. Thanks for sharing.

[Iceman]

Well?

It's been almost a month.............