vossiewulf

Short update, work and other issues have kept me awake and busy for almost all of the last three days. Picking up where we left off, I de-clamped the two knives and then spent the next 30 minutes on the Byrnes disc sander leveling and squaring the blade-side vertical face with the two sides. Using my big straightedge to check that the faces are flat and straight. Not really required, it's just a handle, but if I go to this effort I like to make sure it's exactly what I intended. And then we redraw the outlines of the final handle shapes and it's ready to dance on the scroll saw with an 8tpi/6R blade. I've forgotten what the 6 means but the R means the blade teeth pattern reverse below the cut. Finally looking sorta like a knife! When it comes to shaping handle, I grabbed several choices, never quite sure which will work the best. I ended up using the carbide single-cut bur. This is my sophisticated rotary-tool carving setup where I take my Festool dust extractor intake and tape it to my bench. Place it between you and what you're rotary carving and almost all the dust will go down the vacuum. If I'm working on something small I'll put a mesh over the end of the vac tube. However after doing the initial bevels I wasn't happy as even the nice sharp carbide bit was causing some minor tearing of the grain, which I didn't anticipate since the burl planed so well but there it is. So I had to switch to straight abrasives. And I decided I wanted to do a slightly different grip from my normal "pregnant snake" handle pattern, so I quickly made one out of balsa to test before committing to the real handles. And here a little test-driving. Whenever I catch up on sleep and I get a chance to work on them again I hope to get to the initial finish stage, which will be soaking the handles in thin CA.

Wood I guess on the handle? Because the usual is rattan wrapping and that takes zero time to remove. I've seen some with wood handles similar in shape to their sword grips, fairly large handle that is elliptical from the top view but straight from the side view. It should be easy to remove, the handles of Japanese tools are considered temporary, to be replaced whenever needed/wanted.

Although there are larger more expensive sets, in this case you should be completely covered by a 9 piece $15 Swiss set that is .9mm - 2.3mm. So this is more of a minor flesh wound However since they're only $3-$5, I'd also add a couple bigger ones between 4mm and 10mm so you can rapidly finish even 1/4" ends

Steps of the build where you have to fit and trim the same pieces a zillion times can be very tedious, or at least I think so. So I might need to take a couple of days of BTO (Build Time Off) while you finish this part. I'm pretty sure I've accrued enough days, last time I checked my contract says I get 20 days of BTO per year plus all the standard holidays- navy day, national wood day, the festival of St. Redleaf, patron saint of oaks, etc.

Today's episode of Tools You Need That You Didn't Know You Needed.... CUP BURS! Here's a quick description of their "official" purpose, that of deburring, rounding, and finishing soft wire ends in jewelry. However, they work just as well on wood dowels, carbon fiber, plastic, polycarbonate, pretty much anything but hardened steel piano wire. And for that, you can find cup-shaped grinding burs in many types of grit. Standard cutting-type cup burs look like this, this is on a 3/32" shank, I don't think I've seen them on 1/8" shanks but they probably exist for larger sizes. Here I will demonstrate with a piece of (I think) .035" carbon fiber rod. I've intentionally cut it leaving a sloppy bad edge. Hit it for like half a second with the cup bur though, and now it looks like this. Square, clean, with a lightly beveled edge. Perfect! Of course you can also do this with sandpaper or files, but nowhere near as consistently and ten times slower, at least. If you're cutting a wire or a dowel once a week you don't need cup burs, files and sandpaper will handle that. However, if you have eleventy thousand treenail ends to prep for insertion or you're cutting lots of wires, go get yourself a cup bur or two. Best results are with a bur only slightly larger than the work piece but in my experience you can get by with just two or three sizes, buy a set of 8 if you want full coverage, or just one that's a bit larger than the largest size wire/dowel you typically work with and make do, it will still work much better than sandpaper and files.

Also FYI I edited the knife process post above to add info about marking with machinists' dye and why you want to use brad points and not pilot point drill bits in wood, and added some text formatting that hopefully helps with readability. Probably not of much use to the people replying here, it's there for the less experienced people. Also also FYI, I edited this post to add more information about the more information that I added to the other post I edited.

Pthhhttthtthtttttt! I'm going to my woodworking bench, collecting all 8 sets of scissors, and then I'm going to run around the house with four in each hand!

Very nice and straight and aligned, that's a very good start, looking around its surprising how little attention some people put to this crucial step. Making sure everything is aligned right at the beginning means everything else will go on without any gymnastics.

Oh it was just a 1/16" little hole in my fingertip, but with the fineness of the points that was reasonably deep and so at the time it was dripping all over but 30 seconds of pressure and a bit of superglue and it was all fixed. You should try your hand at it some time, making things with tools you made yourself is particularly rewarding, or at least I think so.

You're probably right. I've been discussing it with wefalk in another thread, and ordered some eye shadow application sponge makeup brushes and am going to try that to apply India ink. We'll see how that works.

I'm sure I'm understating a little when I say that must be frustrating. And odd, here shipping costs worldwide have become so low that I order from all over, only rarely do I see shipping costs that make a purchase not worthwhile. That's a huge disparity and I don't know why it would be so different. So we have everything ready to go, clamping pads and all the clamps laid out and set to require just a half turn to tighten, epoxy and mixing sticks, nice and orderly like it should be before gluing up something like this. Note that this is not something for spring clamps. Something that will be stressed like a knife needs totally reliable glue joints and that means epoxy and serious squishing pressure. So everything goes smoothly right? Yeah, not so much. I should be using nice slow 60 minute epoxy but didn't have any on hand and I was too impatient to wait, figuring I'm a super cool knife making kind of guy and it'll be fine. But it makes you move fast and that's never a good thing with knives. Second, I had an oversight as to how these are different from other knives I've made. In those cases, you make the handles slightly too wide for obvious reasons, and therefore the brass pins which go all the way through in those cases can be slightly recessed, and clamping is straightforward. Because the pins on these knives are only on one side, I had left them long. And I didn't want to cut them down at that point because there is no extra width on the handles, the piece of amboyna burl I had was just barely enough. So I get glue on and the knife assembled and reach for the clamping pad, a piece of basswood same size as the handle, and #%#^$#$^ well that won't work, great, ok remove the one on that side and then just use one but wait while thrashing with moving it around let's stab our finger reeeel good on the super sharp point and start dripping blood all over. Well that's just oodles of help. Dealing with that the other clamping pad fell off the bench and I said screw it and just clamped straight on the handles. That won't make the no extra material problem any easier. So anyway here's the process with the other knife, which went slightly better. I'm using this precision Dremel router base to do the rabbets. You could do it on a mill or even a drill press considering you're taking off .040" on each side. I decided to use this as I bought it to do inlay but haven't done any with it yet so wanted to fiddle around with it and figure it out. It works fine, it's a bit fiddly but you can control depth down to thousandths of an inch without too much difficulty and I managed to keep it stable on these narrow handles, although the size of the Dremel didn't help. Being used to micromotors it's like having some finish nails to tap in and someone hands you a giant cartoon hammer. They've actually gotten bulkier AND louder, that's some fine rotary tool engineering there, Lou. Look at the Otto Frei basic micromotor kit. At $180 it's not much more than one of the big Dremel packages. Sigh. Actually not sure that's a good idea, it's not even brushless. The Marathon is probably the best entry level choice but it's $330 for the kit, hardly a minor investment. Demonstration of the point. Besides the size, the other huge advantages are they are an order of magnitude quieter with a similar reduction in vibration. Here I am testing the depth. BTW, Important Point, this is not a plunge router it's an inlay router. That means for best results the depth of cut shouldn't be more than half the bit diameter and you should be going at max RPM for the Dremel. For those who've never done something like this, you first remove the waste, not coming too near the edges, leave no more than half the bit's diameter. Then go back with the bit not working nearly as hard which means you don't have to push as hard, and therefore it's easy to trim right up to the edges. Another Important Point is to always cut against the rotation of the bit. The other way is called climb cutting and it is not good for accuracy. And we end up with something like this. Just need to clean out corners and trim the lines just a bit. And it's fitting to use him to make his new home. And we end up with this. And looks good depth-wise. Next I made this, because another thing that didn't go well on the first knife was the front brass pin hole was quite a bit off. It's much easier when the holes go through the blade, I had tried to just measure positions and got the back one exactly right but was off on the front one by more than 1/64", it will require fixing. So that wasn't accurate enough. Any guesses? I then cut it off at the line you see above, and needed to file the cut line flat. This is my hand vise, it's as the Brits say a bog-standard set of draw tongs for pulling wire through drawplates. I love the tightening mechanism, because of the cam curve you have very fine control of the pressure, although I'm not sure why considering draw tongs only need one pressure, mega-squish, but there ya go. They have a very smooth action and very fine control and can smoosh the hell out of something if you want to. And they are hefty steel, nothing flimsy here. Only thing I did was epoxy leather on either side, looking pretty worn out, need to replace them. Oh and they were like $15-$20 at Otto Frei I think. = It was so I could use the brass piece to do this- mark the two rings that are blue outlines. The blue is another good trick, I use machinist's layout dye, it comes in blue and red and they are both full-nuclear stainers. Don't get it on anything you don't want it on, only metal will survive un-blue, they are lacquers and come off metal easily with lacquer thinner. On cloth thinner just spreads it. For wood though, you can do this with any marker, although you don't want to use anything that penetrates deeply. Machinists swab it on a surface - it dries in seconds - and then use a hardened scribe to draw lines, the bright metal contrasts extremely well with both the blue and red dyes and good scribes cut very very fine lines. On wood I do the exact opposite, I wiped it on, used my little brass piece as described below to punch the circles in the two correct spots, and then I sand off the dye. It's unlikely you will lose more than .001" to do this, as long as you're reasonable and use 220 or 320 grit. And it doesn't need to be perfect or complete, as you can see with just a bit of sanding what you end up with are perfect little thin-line circles that make it extremely easy to center your bit. Also, if you're drilling wood, use the correct bits that are carefully engineered to cut the best and cleanest holes in wood - brad point bits. Pilot point drill bits are specifically designed to cut metal. They'll drill wood of course, but require a center punch to keep them from wandering, tearout more, and generally cut much less clean and very un-round holes than brad points. Buying a set is a one-time purchase, ship modelers don't drill anywhere close to enough holes to dull them. Well except for member Gaetan maybe, the size he uses for treenails probably has been replaced once or fourteen times. That's the one disadvantage of brad points, good luck resharpening them, whereas pilot points are pretty easy to sharpen. Dull brad points get recycled or made into something else. The center point will not wander, is easy to locate, and the side spurs cleanly sever the wood fibers at the edge of the hole before the drill edges proper remove the waste. So my little brass piece is a transfer punch, used to copy a hole's location to another piece to be drilled. The ones you can buy transfer the center point of the hole; since making that kind required firing up the mini-lathe I opted for the inverse, and have it transfer the full circle. Here's how I did it although this is post facto as you can see I've already drilled the resulting holes. It is just tall enough to make the mark but short enough that I could assemble that side of the handle with the blade to ensure correct positioning. I then rapped it a few times with a small chasing hammer. And this time thankfully it was perfect, dead on. It looks like something from John Carpenter's The Thing. But this time all went smoothly. A measure of the clamping pressure is that on most of the clamps the basswood is crushed down to less than 1/32". As long as you're not damaging the wood of the handle there's no such thing as too much clamping pressure here.

This knife from that site is 20cm. Since you only need about 5cm for a knife you might get 4 out of that $30AUD, at least three. But they'd all be single bevel. I'd make skew like mine left and right and two more with a skew angle of only 20 degrees or so, that geometry is really good for cleaning out corners of things. That's what I'm going to do with the other two pieces I have. BTW, don't buy a Japanese pocket knife if you ever let anyone else especially children use it. For reasons not clear to me even their pocket knives are insanely sharp Rc63 steel.

Oh yeah I've used Japanese marking knives before, many (many) years ago when I spent five years as a custom furniture maker before going back and finishing school, so I knew any reasonable one is going to be typical Japanese quality and Rc63/64. There is no people with greater obsession about steel and sharp steel implements as the Japanese, so there really is no such thing as poor steel from any reputable seller, they range from really good to amazing. Also the only western knives I use are from Ron Hock, the rest are all Japanese and much like the above were not terribly expensive, I buy them as kind of raw kits and then finish them into something much better. The $25 or so Japanese knives from Japan Woodworker that I posted in my tools thread and above I think are also good examples. Regrind blade, take handle to mill and mill half of each side off, glue on $2 of fancy wood, shape it like you want it and then finish it in solid CA glue. Almost all my tool handles get that finish because it provides really excellent grip, the shinier it gets the better the grip gets, and it's almost bulletproof. Look at my wenge knife that's been rolling around on my bench for at least a year since I last shined it up a little and it almost looks new. Back to marking knives and steel tools in general, in an intelligent approach to lowering costs, generally the mid-cost tools will still have very good steel, but not nearly as perfect preparation; you saw there was a fair amount of work to get the backs and bevels on these flat, if I'd spent another $25 on them there would have nothing required but the steel wouldn't be any better. So if you have a bench grinder and a good array of sharpening tools and a willingness to spend two or three evenings working on knives, you can make yourself beautiful knives that will last forever and do exactly what you want them to do really well for maybe $15 in blade and wood. Remember that Japan Woodworker sells them in "western pattern" double-bevel style with the good steel in the center. You will want to get those unless you want single bevel like mine. The reason the standard versions are left/right single bevel and made to be extremely sharp is these make not just a "mark", but their cut is the actual visible edge of the joint (in traditional joinery at least), and considering that Japanese woodworkers are pathological about perfection, that means those knives have to be very sharp. And to ensure that perfection, they are single bevel and in pairs so no matter which side of the ruler you're cutting on, the cut is dead on that ruler edge, straight and perfectly perpendicular to the wood's surface.

Thanks wefalk. It seemed likely they'd use what they called lamp black and we call carbon black today with buckyballs and nanotubes and graphene. I ordered some eye-shadow application sponge brushes for makeup yesterday, I think those might make good india ink applicators, and I guess am going to continue to experiment. I'm still a ways from needing to make a decision. But the Faber-Castell pens are pretty black, people should really consider having a couple on hand for very small areas or hard to reach spots at least, they're an order of magnitude easier to use than anything involving a brush and the ink should last fine.

I had forgotten about artist's markers. These are acid-free archival ink and should last at least as long as paint and I very much like the thinness of the coating- much much more in-scale than any paint or finish we typically use. This isn't quite as black as india ink, but would be super-easy to do. BTW, what was the contemporary black pigment? If they used carbon black like india ink then that would be the accurate choice, as wefalk said, india ink doesn't fade.

Trying to finish the knives, included here for those interested in the process. I don't think it's particularly difficult if you have a bench grinder and a drill press, but grinding already hardened and tempered steel without damaging the temper is not a super-swift process. I make it go as fast as possible by using icewater, cool the blade way down between grinding passes, that way you can get in more before it has to go back into the water. Also always try to hold it up near the cutting edge, that way you know for certain when it's time for it to go back in the icewater bath. First we don't need all that length in the handle, so I cut them in half with a larger cut-off wheel in my rotary tool. This process is more about good cut-off wheel and linear speed of said wheel's edge than it is about torque, Dremel tool could easily do this too. Since the linear speed makes a difference, a larger cut-off wheel like this helps, especially as cut-off wheels are usually restricted to 15k RPM or less. And now we have two for the price of one, and those $22 knives are now $11. I already know what I'm going to grind these new blanks into, but not right away. They got waxed and tossed in my knife drawer. As mentioned this side of the knives is very low-carbon steel and is barely hard, and therefore files easily. This is just establishing a flat to help with the grinding. There was no way I was going to be able to drill through Rc64 hardened tool steel, but I still want mechanical blade retention, although these will be light duty knives you never know, and I never make anything flimsy. So I took a 1/8" end mill and made holes as deep as I could, which was basically zip through the low-carbon steel and then hit a solid wall of the bottom Rc64 strip. I will glue in brass rods that will pass through one side of the handle. I definitely totally meant to have one with a 3/4" separation and the other 1", that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I then took them to bench grinder and narrowed them down and made the top and bottom edges parallel. I also ground in a notch as you see here so the wood of the handle will also be mechanically resisting the torsion stresses of cutting. And here we are cutting the rabbets, blade is fitted into its rabbet on one side. This is best done with a mill, but also can be done with a drill press set up for milling, a small router, or a Dremel with a router base. I used the latter here. I should be able to glue them up and mostly finish them tomorrow.

Planking in particular looks great and that is not an easy hull to plank. What are the plans for finish/paint? One thing I'd suggest is filling the grain, this wood has a pretty open grain structure for this scale, two or three sanding sealer coats would do it.

And by the way at this rate you're going to finish like three ships before I finish LN, and it all looks good.

What the hell, didn't I reply to this a long time ago? For some reason not showing up in the topics I have replied to activity list I use to track things, I've been wondering why you weren't doing anything. Sigh.

For those who don't read the what you got today thread, here is progress on the planking. Also I've finally found my black color, it's a warm and rich black with a very thin coat that doesn't hide the wood texture. Cell phone camera makes it look somewhat gray but trust me it's black and will be uber black with a satin clear coat. And boy it's going to be easy. Archival, acid-free artist's ink that should last just as long as any paint, if not longer. Also, continuing to work on the new knives towards bringing them to full operational status. First step was to grind away all that cutting edge I didn't need for this purpose. And here are the handles, they're made from an amboyna burl pen blank I had that I cut into four strips and then planed the inner surfaces to glue them to pieces of boxwood sheet that has a perfectly complementary color. It will also provide strength, burl of any species is very brittle and no matter which way it's cut it has short grain sections that will snap with very little pressure. It will also be reinforced by a good soaking in thin CA followed by medium for the outer finish, like my wenge knife or my cherry xacto replacement. What was very odd about this amboyna was that it planed with zero tearout from any direction. I keep my plane irons pretty sharp of course but still it planed easily to a glass surface and I've never seen burl from any other species be that easy to work with. So if you want some fancy wood that is apparently pretty easy to to work with, try this. Every time I stop by Woodcraft I'll walk out with a few small wood pieces, I think this piece was < $5 and will make two nice knife handles.

I think I may have made you aware of it and that it's THE book to have for building Dr.I models, but it was Ron Thibault who saw that they were in stock again and pointed that out. Thank him for continuing to check

Probably the kind of thing that started barfights at ship builder conventions.

Yes, called glaze coats (you're painting like Da Vinci when you do) and I do the same brush painting, as you say it leaves zero brush marks. If you decide to brush paint your model, this is really the way to go. Thin the paint much more than usual, so the coats you put on are translucent and have enough thinner that it's more like pushing some liquid around with your brush. The coats dry very quickly, you can paint coats this way every couple of minutes and once you're up to 4-5 coats you'll have an excellent painted surface.

The ship's longboat would be longer than my ship.

Are you using brad point drill bits for wood? They cut much cleaner holes than standard pilot points.