Recent work

I've been ridiculously busy with school recently.  This blog has suffered, I'm afraid.

However, I have made a couple of things and now is my chance to share them.

 I had a friend over to make his first knife.  I normally make one along with someone who is doing it the first time.  That way I can demonstrate each step and then he/she can follow along and do the step just demonstrated.

Pictured above it the knife I made while he made his.  Nothing fancy or special, but it is a little larger than a lot of what I make.  I rather like it, actually.  I may end up putting it in my spoon carving tool kit.

When I first started blade smithing, this was the knife I wanted to make.  I just love knives that show the whole story in one piece of steel.  They are less comfortable and less practical than knives with proper handles, but they just look cool.  I made these one day when I had time to hammer out a couple of blades.  Still need to put a final edge on them and find them homes.

These particular one-piece knives are often called Viking knives.  The claim is that these were common (some seem to think ubiquitous) to Vikings.

Now, I'm not an archaeologist, and I am not an expert on Viking artifacts or material culture, but I've never once seen evidence of this sort of knife in an actual Viking context. I've seen a couple of pictures supposed to be from Novgorod that depict knives with integral handles sort of like these, but not very many.

The issue is that if I made blades with normal tangs that would fit into wood handles, I could make two blades from the steel in each of these knives.  Steel was a fairly valuable and relatively scarce commodity in the dark ages.  Heck, right up until the Industrial Revolution, actually.  I just can't see very many smiths making a blade that is less useful that consumes twice the resources when he could make two blades that would fit wood handles with the same amount of steel.

So, I don't think they are very historical, but I do know they are a lot of fun.