Hi; if you know me, you know this isn’t unusual. if you don’t know me, then you will come to realise this is so: for this week’s episode of “biting off more than I can chew”, I am looking at old leaf springs and my little forge…
What I want to end up with is a stock knife.
what I’m likely to end up with is a POS, and I don’t mean point of sale.
so here is my starting point:
yeah, it looks like trash, but starting points nearly always do. some truck leaf spring, some re-bar, an old hook. I keep not using the hook because someone else hand forged that.
and here is my ideas sketch:
on all of the old ones the handle drops to a point at or below the cutting edge, I think that this is to give better control of steering the cut.
Some (but not all) of the ones I have been looking at have the hook also drop down to at or below the edge, some of that may be 100 years of sharpening. But I think if you consider how that pressure against the tool works you can see that if the bottom loop were below the edge that would keep the blade lined up in tension, but if the loop were above the edge there could be a tendency for it to flop over when you don’t want it too. which would get worse as you moved the hook up further. So I am going to go with a low hook. It also keeps the pivot point right near the edge.
You can’t see it in the sketch, but it is drawn curved in length to just about match the curve of the spring. And also I have it drawn with a knife edge. A clogger’s main Stock knife has a single bevel (away from the clogger), but I am not making a clogger’s knife I am making a smaller stock knife for multiple uses.
lets see how this goes…
be well
K
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