Looks good Joshua. Thanks for sharing.

Chris

Joshua

Nice work. Love the spacer and file work.

Anthony

Nice! I like it Joshua!

Do you mind expounding on how the intermediate forging went? If you want, reply in the other thread. I don't want to high jack.

Not a highjack at all Lin. I'd be happy to talk about it!

This took a bit of thought and planning. The spacer package is O-1 and nickel-silver. I seem to remember that you used all stainless in your first version and did the intermediate forging hot. I had some concerns about that because of the NS & O-1 I was planning. I wanted to groove the O-1 and didn't want to put the grooves in before forging the center in case the rosettes overlaid the grooves. I also didn't know if the heat would have a hardening effect on the O-1, making filing a bear after the forging was done, so I chose to do the forging of the NS cold. The other consideration was the shape of the spacer package. This handle is flat on the top and bottom and if you look closely, you will see the taper from back to front on top & bottom. I had to install a dummy spacer in the center of the package and shape the entire handle off the knife to get the geometry correct. Then I could insert the NS center and scribe the over-sized profile to give me meat to forge down. Then I basically followed your method of filing the octagons and hammering with a small ball peen hammer. Anyone who has forged NS can tell you that it gets work-hard pretty quickly. So, there was a bit of disassembling, annealing the center, reassembly and continuing.

I wasn't having a lot of luck putting the package in the vice like you did and ended up forging most of it on a small bick I have for silver work. I did the final shaping in the vice where I didn't need a lot of force to get the finish I was looking for. It's difficult to see in the photos, but the center spacer has a very peened look to it with lots of little facets. I used my pin peening tools for some of the final work. The most difficult part was taking the dings out of the O-1 spacers from a couple of missed hits. Luckily, most of them wound up getting filed away in the grooves. Then I could put the O-1 into the Caswell's black oxide solution for the dark finish.

Excellent run down! I like that you gave so much forethought to the material's character and met it half way. Great job.

This is the kind of thinking I want to encourage within our ranks. It's great to see it here. Of course it happens all the time in shops around the world and goes largely unseen.

|quoted:

Excellent run down! I like that you gave so much forethought to the material's character and met it half way. Great job.

This is the kind of thinking I want to encourage within our ranks. It's great to see it here. Of course it happens all the time in shops around the world and goes largely unseen.

Thanks Lin. You do a great job of encouraging this type of thinking and experimentation with your WIP project photos and your constant pushing of the envelope on design. Your work has been a significant source of inspiration for me personally.