1st Martell nakiri is DONE!

The Martell nakiri blade is 180mm made from O-1 hardened to Rc61 with the use of cyro. The handle is western style full (tapered) tang using dyed Oregon maple burl for the scales and African blackwood for the bolsters along with G-10 liners and copper pins. This came out so nice and I'm thrilled with it. Well her she is....

Watanabe Blade/Martell Handle - Nessmuck Knife

So every once in awhile we get in a special project, something completely different from the norm. Here's a unique knife that came in for a handle. The knife came to me without a handle installed, just a tang to work with a rough idea as to what was required. The customer had commissioned Watanabe to make him a Nessmuck knife. (In case you don't know who Nessmuck is - check him out).

I was to make a handle to match the blade. Watanabe being Japanese added a marked design influence to this style of knife but I was completely lost as to what to do for my part. The customer pretty much left it in my hands with some gentle nudges for ideas but still nothing clicked. Over 8 months passed and I just couldn't figure this one out, then it hit me, that I should do a Japanese inspired handle -duh! My thought was that since the blade was obviously Japanese knife tradition inspired, and since I do my knifemaking inspired by Japanese blades, that I should use this as the connection. So what you see here is my blend on my USA handle making work and what I get from Japanese hunting knife inspirations.

The wood is Hawaiian Signature (sourced from Stefan Keller) and African Blackwood ferrule (sourced from Burl Source)

So here's some pictures, the Watanabe/Martell Nessmuck knife....

Some Remedies for a Remedy

So I got a nice little project land in my lap awhile back that needed some remedies applied, it's a Lamson made Remedy gyuto.

The remedies that were prescribed and administered were blade thinning (see details below), hidden tang conversion, & rehandling.

This would have been a pretty straight forward refurb except for two issues. The first is that the blade has a decent overgrind strip on the right side where it appears that the blade was refinished after the mark was lasered on. There's a hollowed out section from spine to edge in just this section. I did my best to even the face of the blade out but I couldn't add steel where it had been removed so some evidence still exits. The second issue nearly kicked my ass, the bolster is whacked out, it was shorter on one side than the other and more or less uneven in every direction. This might not have been that big of a deal if I was applying scales but in this case I was putting a squared up block of wood up against these things. As with the blade I did my best to make this look as good as possible where there was little to work with and again some evidence still remains of the factory imperfection.


Blade Thinning stats:

Before
Spine (handle to tip) - .70" , .72" , .20"

Edge (handle to tip) - .13" , .13" , .11"

After
Spine (handle to tip) - . 63" , .60" , .09"

Edge (handle to tip) - .06" , .05" , .05"



Handle:Two toned straight grain ironwood (from BurlSource)
Copper bolster spacer
Copper & nickel silver mosaic pin
Converted full tang from to hidden



The customer saw potential in this knife and I hoped that I saw it realized.


Here's some pictures.....

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

Dave Martell's Core Set of Sharpening Stones

This is my most recommended stone set - these are the stones that I reach for everyday.

Dave Martell's Core Set of Sharpening Stones




http://www.japaneseknifesharpeningstore.com/product-p/set1dmcore.htm

Replacing the ATOMA diamond pad

How to replace the ATOMA diamond pads is a question that I get asked often yet we never have anyone buy the replacements - LOL. I suspect that people might be hesitant to take this on themselves without knowing what to expect so I decided to do a quick tutorial on how to do this.


First we have to have an old busted plate that needs replacing. This is my shop use 140x ATOMA that's flattened countless amounts of stones over the last couple of years and sharpened a fair amount of knives recently too. This plate isn't dead yet though, it's just too slow for my liking so I'm putting a brand new replacement 140x ATOMA pad on the base. *BTW - these ATOMAS outlast DMT's by at least 2.5x!!!

Here's the old busted pad. Not bad condition considering that I've never once dried it after use.

Here's the kit needed to get the job done. Well I left out some cleaning products but you can get by without seeing that. We have the old busted pad, the new ATOMA replacement pad, a putty knife, and a hammer.

Now we see the back side of the new replacement pad showing the location of the tape strips. Note these locations for the next step.

The way to remove the old pad is to use the putty knife to severe the grip that the sticky tape has between the old pad and base plate. Here you can see how I will do this although you should note that I'm showing that I picked a bad spot to attack the tape, I'm showing that I'm going in at a spot where there is no tape, I'll have to re-position.

Now we see what lies beneath the old busted pad and it doesn't look too bad really. Remember that I said that I never dried this plate off ever and look Mom no rust or damage what-so-ever.

This is the step that I didn't capture - the cleaning. I used WD-40 and some green Scothrbite to remove the residual adhesive and then followed by alcohol to clean up that mess and make sure that we had a nice fresh surface to adhere the replacement pad to.

Here we now have our replacement pad all lined up and ready to go.

I now peel away the little tape backing strip bits (whatever they're called).

Now to adhere the new ATOMA diamond replacement pad to the base plate and we're back in business.

I hope that this helps with your upcoming ATOMA diamond pad replacements.