Lady Nelson by vossiewulf - Amati/Victory Models - 1:64

[vossiewulf]

Ok one more long detailed one on planking. After this anybody who's interested in doing it this way certainly should be able to. So after this I'll just have updates showing progress.

 

First my pencil marks on the port side were going so I inkified them. Also I drew in the lines for the next two planks. Doing so gives me a good reference when doing my planking trimming, and also helps make sure we're not drifting in one of the 12,000 ways planking can go bad. With the additive nature it's the sneakiest of any modeling process I've ever seen and until you've done it 20 times you better be checking it from every angle on every plank.

 

The plank lines are really handy when knife-trimming planks because at that point you can't really go far wrong by making the edge of the plank you're trimming exactly halfway between its glued edge and the line of the next plank. I may in the end entirely give up marking planks in favor of that method, since I can get real close by eyeballing that.

 

I am doing all these curving plank lines using flexible plastic lining tape. I burnish that down with the same burnisher I use fixing planks, and then take my .3mm lead pencil and sharpen it on 1200 grit sandpaper  What? .3mm is a big fat line!

Especially because I never completely like those lines and end up tweaking them by hand into big fat lines. Sigh.

Now we'll pick up from the last post, I had just put on the starboard stern plank of the fifth strake. At this point I had to switch to the starboard side to trim and finalize the fifth strake lines, because that establishes the lines I'm going to mirror on the port side. Notice the port side doesn't have all the markings of the starboard side. I finished that, and then did the knife trimming on the stern end of the starboard plank before I remembered to take pics again. So here we are, again I'm getting very close with just my knife.

 

Switching to the bow, I fist mark the end of the plank even with the same plank on the starboard side.

I eyeballed down the line to see where the trim should end and marked it- our planks are exactly the right width out of the bag for the middle stations of the ship, so we only need to trim away areas in the bow and stern. Then back to my tape to get the right curve.

And pencil mark.

And then trim down to that with knife.

As nice as it is in terms of increasing speed, I wouldn't recommend cutting as close to the lines as I am unless you're as comfortable as I am with a knife and you know how to make it very sharp. Boxwood in particular is tricky as it splits very easily and you have to feel that happening very quickly to prevent a serious problem. With a good little sanding stick with 120 grit you should be able to remove 1/64" outside the line quickly.

 

This is after knife-trimming.

 

Slight break here to talk about holding knives. Being able to cut really straight lines is much more a matter of technique and less of talent than people think. First, there is the not-rocket science concept that to do something with precision, you need to eliminate ALL unnecessary motion.

 

Here is basically how I hold this knife. All fingers but pinky on the handle. Fingers are not just gripping the knife tightly, they are being pressed against each other tightly. Between the two, that blade is not going to wiggle at all and you can use your arm to pull your hand in a straight line and you're going to cut a very straight line.

 

The reason we do this is because our muscles are FAR more stable under a medium continuous load than they are relaxed. By putting all of the important ones except the one that HAS to move under load, you quiet your knife point massively.

 

This is what is looks like from on top...

But you can't see the important part, which is this - I am pressing my pinky down very firmly and usually it's locked. My third finger presses down into pinky and other fingers pressing blade down against ring finger. This is what I mean, you need your hand and the knife to be one solid locked unit.

I'll try to remember to demonstrate this with an even more extreme case where I had to hand-paint silver into the word Fender on a Strat neck decal and it had to be completely perfect. The way I did it, it wasn't even particularly hard.

 

Said paint job in progress. Only bummer was paint was thicker than it should have been so it didn't level well.

 

We now return you to your regularly scheduled build log...

 

Now that both the stern and bow are trimmed, I sand the whole length and test with upcoming planks until the fit is good for the whole length. And as we said, the trick is always sanding perpendicular to the surface:

And as we mentioned, we have to be totally batshit paranoid about keeping everything aligned. Here I am doing a reality check on both sides at the same station and there's maybe a couple thousanths variation. I repeated it up and down the length, found the stern still needed some work.

As mentioned, before we could do that process on the port side plank we had to do it first on the starboard side. And that means as soon as we're done on the port side, we can put on the next plank on the starboard side.

 

And here we see my glue thingy with all its battle scars compared to the brand-new ones. Look up RB Productions.

And here is why it's important, as I add glue to the second segment of the next starboard strake.

Skipping ahead slightly, here's that plank all glued in and cleaned up.

Marking the stern plank before gluing it in.

I haven't mentioned bending because I'm not doing any, there's nothing I can't handle with my hands at glue time. However, I AM twisting. Boxwood is some odd wood, this is first time I've worked with it. It's really pretty hard but it's also extremely plastic and bendy. I'm doing this twisting with just my hands with no heat, twist it past desired point and hold it for a minute.

I saw it before I glued in the first bit, but still, blech. Piece of cocobolo I trimmed to fix it is already sitting there.

First step was to widen the whole a bit. This is one of the dental scalers again, have found myself using them quite a bit. They're very sharp and work fine on wood as detail scrapers, at least these are, they're Osung and about $25 each.

Gluing it in.

We'll leave it for the moment, need to glue in the rest of that plank first. Here I am clamping a segment again with one hand.

Most of it glued now.

And once it was completely glued down, here's another perfectly good tool for leveling the planks, at least on convex surfaces.

Any number of small planes can be used for this, from this Veritas one to violin maker's planes and other decent small planes. Japan Woodworker carries a nice line of small planes that are really pretty good and not too expensive ($25-$30).

 

Now back to our sternpost fix, first have to level the planks.

A bit more scraping and sanding and all better now.

And now that starboard strake is on, next step is to trim and sand it down completely as remember that's required to establish the lines for the port side. So out comes the tape again! And this is how you accurately adjust said taped lines. For god's sake don't keep peeling it up and putting it down over and over. If you have a small section that's not right, just use something sharp to get under and lift that section. Then let it go. It will fall into a catenary and that probably fixes your problem. If not, after you let it go you can tweak it up or down a bit before burnishing back down.

And now trimmed down by knife. You can see that it's very easy to eyeball problems because the final line should pretty much be the halfway point between the glue edge and the drawn line of your next plank.

I mentioned this in the previous post, but here's a pic - a nice sharp small scraper with a perfectly square edge is also a very good tool for trimming down planks and should be considered by anyone not comfortable using a knife. It can remove material much quicker than sanding with much more control than a knife.

And skipping ahead to done, after sanding the whole thing and test fitting the next plank.

Here is the only preparation I do to planks about to be glued on - slightly relieve the inner edge where the next joint will be.

And here is where we say we're done - when a plank can be held up to every segment with one hand and we see no line at all between planks.

Actually I'll leave off here. If folks want yet more I have pics of doing the next port strake, I was on a roll.

 

But here is where we are now.

 

[gjdale]

Nicely done Jay.

[popeye the sailor]

the most important rule about planking.........plan as you plank!    ...and boy!  you got that covered!  well executed my friend!  

[MEDDO]

 Planking looks like it's coming along wonderfully now. Thanks for the detailed explanation. This is definitely going in my little notebook of post to remember. 

[Tigersteve]

Looks nice and symmetrical. Well exicuted. 

Steve

[vossiewulf]

Thanks folks. I'm sure there's nothing new here, just a synthesis of various other methods and ideas, but it does feel like "my" method now. And important thing there is that means I feel comfortable with what I'm doing. 

 

Also, it seems reasonably quick, my slow progress is my job not letting me spend time on it rather than the planking itself going slowly. For anyone who thinks the edges must be glued, the method of letting thin CA run down into the joints works, and it will leave a very fine glue line- I tested. I still have it in my head that it will be more stable in the long run with each plank allowed move a bit, but I'm not sure of that.

 

I'm also going to be sure the treenails are real treenails, probably going all the way through the first planking, to back up the CA with a mechanical hold.

[vossiewulf]

BTW, again for new people, this is the circumstance that I've run into most often that causes gaps in planking. The below drawing is very exaggerated for demonstration purposes, the reality is usually more subtle and sometimes extremely so.

The biggest problem is noticing them, especially the very subtle ones. The most obvious way to see them is by testing with the plank you intend to glue on, keep bending it to follow all the segments, you'll see most of them here.

 

The very subtle ones are on lines that are almost straight - basically the less curve there is overall, the harder it is to see the flat. These I found I could detect with my spring steel sander thing, I move it down a plank edge with a little bit of pressure at a steady and fairly slow pace. Periodically the sander will feel like it slips. That's your flat. You keep fixing and testing with the sander, eventually you'll do that test and you'll feel consistent resistance the whole way. Bravo! You have perfect continuous curves at that point that shouldn't have any gaps.

 

I think there's nothing special about the spring steel there and any little sanding block with a gentle curve (like my steel sander has) will do.

[vossiewulf]

BTW, when did the 2MB image limit go away? I just noticed I'm uploading 3.9MB images with no errors.

 

Couple of updates on the planking method.

 

First I was having a problem with plank ends particularly under significant bending, so I decided to make myself something to provide the required leverage. I had some handles sitting around (you can get them from jeweler supply for like $1.50/handle) so I made it out of a piece of 1/8" thick carbon fiber, but you could make a fully effective one out of wood, just reinforce the tip by soaking in some thin CA. 

 

It's designed to put pressure low down on the side of the plank to not mar the future gluing surface, and on the center top of the plank. It's working very well and is just as handy on the bow and stern plank ends.

Next is my Advanced Planking Symmetricizer. It's worked quite well in speeding up the mirroring of the starboard side to the port and ensuring we're staying aligned on both sides. Position and height are arbitrary but it is a requirement that it be exactly aligned vertically with the ship's center line as seen from either end.

 

Also the threads can't rotate, they should measure from a fixed point so I super glued in ones aligned with the rear and front centerline of the APS to check points aft and foreward of the APS respectively.

 

After I trim and sand and fully finalize the starboard side, I can quickly transfer that line to the port side with as many marks as I want.

 

As I mentioned I wanted to try single-bevel knives for trimming, so I got a L/R pair from Japan Woodworker. They aren't very expensive ($27 I think) and I knew the steel would be good but the inexpensiveness means they won't be terribly flat. So first step was flattening the back and bevels, you can see the back was less than flat. They're typical Japanese design with a thin very high carbon piece forge-welded to a lower carbon piece for flexibility.

Working bevel with 220 coarse stone.

Here they are after 4000, I worked through 8000 and the strop before they were done.

And oh yeah sharp. The basswood endgrain test, clean enough to be an identification sample.

 

After initial use though I realize the tips were too thick, too much cutting resistance. So I took them to the bench grinder to taper the blade.

 

Cleaned up.

Then blade protectors that aren't so much to protect the blades as to protect the rest of the world FROM the blades. I make these protectors for my knives, putting pressure down on the second piece of cork with the knife in place while gluing makes the perfect fit - they will NOT come off unless you pull them off. Shake them all you want, they stay in place and are perfect in that respect.

I'm not done though, they need handles. In Japan these are mostly marking knives and are therefore held lightly. For any carving/cutting purpose like I am putting them to, they MUST have thicker more rounded handle. The reason is flat pieces like this when squeezed vertically, just like you'd do trying to make a careful cut, have a very alarming tendency to twist suddenly in your hand, and blood and bad things can result.

 

[vossiewulf]

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. 

[vossiewulf]

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.

 

[BANYAN]

Great updates date Jay, I especially like the idea of your symmetry checking jig - a simple but elegant solution.  The planking looks excellent - nice joinery.

 

If I am reading right, you seem to like the steel quality of those Japanese blades (marking knives) - have you used them before?  if not, will be interested in seeing what you think of the quality as that looks a good way to go to get knife shapes to your custom needs.  

 

cheers

 

Pat

[vossiewulf]

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.

 

 

[Rick01]

One minor problem here in Aus. Your $15.00 blades seem to be double that plus postage even when sourced locally https://www.japanesetools.com.au/ and I'm not sure I trust EBay. Buying from USA gets a good selection at reasonable prices but postage kills it. :-(

 

[vossiewulf]

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.

[BANYAN]

Thanks Jay, appreciate the feedback.  I have a Japanese marking knife (single bevel - right) that I picked up at a woodworking show here.  It has a fitted handle but I may try and take it off.  As Rick points out we pay through the nose for quality stuff as many retailers use the excuse of shipping costs to over-elevate the price - but, it is very expensive for us to order them OS.  may have to look at a bulk buy with others to try and beat those shipping costs a little

 

cheers

 

Pat

[vossiewulf]

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.

[popeye the sailor]

back to the archive pen you showed.   i use the same pen for my simulated calking.   if your going to use it on a large scale,  I would suggest buying a bottle of India Ink,  and do a wipe on process.  it's the same ink that is in the pens  

[shipmodel]

What an excellent discussion of your process.  I may never make a knife, or its handle, but the story of your perseverence is inspiring, whatever the subject.

 

Hope your wound is recovering nicely.

 

Dan

 

 

[vossiewulf]

7 hours ago, popeye the sailor said:

back to the archive pen you showed.   i use the same pen for my simulated calking.   if your going to use it on a large scale,  I would suggest buying a bottle of India Ink,  and do a wipe on process.  it's the same ink that is in the pens  

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.

[vossiewulf]

6 hours ago, shipmodel said:

What an excellent discussion of your process.  I may never make a knife, or its handle, but the story of your perseverence is inspiring, whatever the subject.

 

Hope your wound is recovering nicely.

 

Dan

 

 

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.

[Rick01]

Did

3 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

Oh it was just a 1/16" little hole in my fingertip.

Did your mother never tell you not to play with knives?  Now back to boat building.

[vossiewulf]

2 hours ago, Rick01 said:

Did

Did your mother never tell you not to play with knives?  Now back to boat building.

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!

[vossiewulf]

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.

[Rick01]

33 minutes ago, vossiewulf said:

Probably not of much use to the people replying here

Actually it does us all good to be reminded why we use particular tool from time to time. It's so easy to forget and then just tell a beginner "use a ..mm drill bit, forgetting the "brad point" clarification.

 

37 minutes ago, vossiewulf said:

Also also FYI, I edited this post to add more information about the more information that I added to the other post I edited.

LOL

[vossiewulf]

On 6/4/2017 at 9:43 PM, BANYAN said:

Thanks Jay, appreciate the feedback.  I have a Japanese marking knife (single bevel - right) that I picked up at a woodworking show here.  It has a fitted handle but I may try and take it off.  

 

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.

[BANYAN]

Spot on; exactly that type of sword handle which I find a little too large for any other use but marking out.  I think I will try and replace it; although the other side of it acts as a great sheath

 

cheers

 

Pat

[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.

 

 

[shipmodel]

That knife is looking good!  Maybe you can go on "Forged In Fire - The Miniature Show".

 

I experimented with your pencil grip and found that even using a generic hobby handle armed with a #11 blade I could get clean, well-controlled cuts through thin sheetwoods of several species.  Thanks for showing it.

 

Dan

 

[vossiewulf]

2 hours ago, shipmodel said:

That knife is looking good!  Maybe you can go on "Forged In Fire - The Miniature Show".

 

I experimented with your pencil grip and found that even using a generic hobby handle armed with a #11 blade I could get clean, well-controlled cuts through thin sheetwoods of several species.  Thanks for showing it.

 

Dan

 

Great! Am honestly very happy anytime my experimentation and efforts can be be used by and help other people who perhaps don't have some of the opportunities I do to try all this stuff out.

[vossiewulf]

First, india ink vs. Faber-Castell Pitt pens. 

 

One of these is india ink and the other is the Pitt pen. Looks identical right?

Now let's change the orientation a bit so we're not getting direct specular reflections and we just see what their ambient color is.

Not quite so identical. The one on the left is india ink, and has as close as we get to a pure black ambient color, while the Pitt pen is dark grey. And this is not surprising when you think about it, I'm sure the ink in the Pitt pens started with a foundation of india ink, but pen inks are highly engineered substances at this point- they probably added flow enhancers and drying retarders and who knows what else to give the pens a long life and proper function.

 

And if you have something that's pure black and you do anything to it other than add more pure black, it's going to change it to a grey color. So I'm going to hang onto these pens, but probably use them the same way Popeye does - for small areas and deck plank caulking.

 

I experimented with using makeup application sponge brushes applying india ink last night, and it worked extremely well. In fact I'm wondering why I don't use these for any non-laquer finish, there are no brush marks and it can carry more paint without dumping it all in one spot, only smoother way to apply something is by airbrush.

 

This "brush" is what I was experimenting with.

However I also bought these, much cheaper and a long term supply, haven't tried them yet but see no reason why they won't work fine. I'll just cut them in half and stick them on a dowel to use.

While I was at it I also bought this, not for brushes, but as liquid application/cleanup swabs, was a shot in the dark but turned out to be a good choice - these are a good size and the swab material stood up to some pretty heavy scrubbing (I used one with some acetone to clean out tape gunk from one of my new knives). As in it wasn't damaged at all and was ready for scrubbing round 2. They also have a strong plastic piece inside the swab as reinforcement, which really helps if you're using swabs for cleanup. And best of all, ZERO lint.

 

Anyway, for 6 cents a piece this seems a good purchase.

 

Now back to the knives - don't worry Rick, we're almost done

 

First, another tip - this applies to cleaning up any surface actually, but is REALLY important shaping something roundish like these handles: you want to be positioned under good light, but at a very oblique angle. This enhances the surface detail and makes it much easier to see the bumps and recesses that you need to see to produce a smooth final result. In fact if you don't get yourself under light like this, you might as well close your eyes and go with touch as your main sensor to tell you where you need to sand and where to stop, because direct light hides all this information from you.

Along in here I also crosscut them to their final length. This pic should explain why

And here is my new grip type, I'm going to call it a dromedary handle. Test-driving strongly suggests it has some advantages control-wise over the pregnant snake design. That works very well also, but I think the dromedary might be the superior of the two, will see if that holds true once we get some real cutting miles under the dromedary knife tread, to horribly mix several metaphors.

 

Also, it should be obvious that an important part of the reason to make non-round handles like this is so they stay where I put them on my bench. No rolling for you, Tom and Jerry planking knives.

 

This is also the point at which we stop with the power tools and from here it's all hand-sanding. As Popeye would say, there are a couple of knives in there and we're getting pretty close to finding them  

We want to go slow here and be quite careful about what we are doing, it would be painful to screw them up at this point. So we work our way through the grits, regularly comparing the two and using our oblique light to help us get nice smooth continuous curves with a round (from end-on) tail.

 

And we look very carefully for those little scratches that like to hide until we have our CA finish on when it's a major pain to fix, see the spot I'm pointing to. The transverse scratch near the end won't come out, that is where the burl snapped in handling early on. I'm hoping that the CA finish hides it to some degree.

I won't mention how high we go in grit, because Popeye, who is guest-starring in tonight's episode, would have his eyeballs emulate his handle and pop out and do a full 360 before popping back in. All I can say is those who say there's no advantage to sanding to a high grit are somewhat less than 100% correct  IMO it makes a very significant and positive difference in the appearance of wood to have the fibers be cut as cleanly as possible. On holly, with nearly invisible grain, it is in fact probably not worth it - there's no grain to show to advantage. But if the wood has a dramatic coloring or grain pattern, it will be considerably enhanced by sanding out to Popeye eye-popping numbers.

Just need to drill out the tails for their brass balance pieces and they can go in their thin CA bath to start the finishing process. Here is where I do wish they were round - round handles can be chucked in the lathe and then the CA coats can be applied with a pad while moving down the spinning piece, leaving a nice smooth base for final sanding. Without that, getting a level CA finish on the whole handle takes a while and a goodly pile of sandpaper.