Gift Knives for Christmas

[EdgarFigaro]

Well these are a couple of knives I made for my grandparents for christmas, as I knew they would both be interested in having one.

So to start with there's grandma's knife. Mom had suggested something smaller. I ended up going with something about the size of a paring knife. I figured she could use it as one, or as a little utility knife, but I figure it might be more of a show piece.

While back we'd bought some clamps from Harbor Freight as they were on sale for like 2$. Well after a while they failed, the plastic fails in the handle trigger, or one the end broke off. Sparked the steel bar and it sparks pretty well, so I saved it. Ended up making this little knife from some of it, think I've got two of the bars. Figure it's just a simple steel.
This was the style of clamp http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/cta...emnumber=46807
Went fulltang on it, and used some of my micarta as the scales. I had some blue/red denim I'd been wanting to use.
Used some small mosaic pins I had.

Blade : Scrap clamp bar steel.
Scales : Blue/red ladder micarta + Mosaic pins.





Grandpa's knife was a bit bigger. He does the majority of the cooking, so was kinda thinking of a chef's knife when I'd put this one together. Kept going back and forth before I decided on a wood, which was some I got with birthday money when we went to woodcraft, mom had also picked up some of the same for grandpa as a gift. So he'll have some if he wants to make a stand or block for it. The handle wood is curly honduran mahogany, the pictures really don't show the curl off very well.
Steel for the blade was W-2, ended up reheat treating it as once polished and etched, it didn't turn out as I wanted. When I'd done it the first time, I'd tried doing some ashi, and it kinda looked like the area under them didn't harden, so I redid it.
Spacer is waterbuffalo horn, and since the scales were kinda thin, I made up a black micarta spacer the thickness of the tang. The two spacers match up fairly well. Turned out pretty good. Only bad thing was I'd marked the blade before the first etch, so between grinding and repolishing, it messed up my mark just a tiny bit, as I do them deep.

Blade : W-2
Handle : Curly Honduran Mahogany, mosaic pin, waterbuffalo horn, and black micarta.






They liked the knives quite a bit. Just finished up another today that's part of a 4 knife order, gonna try to get pics of it soon.

[Stormcrow]

I like those, especially the top one. Looks very simple and useful. Suits my taste nicely.

[EdgarFigaro]

Thanks, that was pretty much the goal with the top one, something simple and useful =]