A couple of weeks ago we shared a 5 from the Grinder with knifemaker Gary Graham. As the two of us engaged in email correspondence, he shared a project he recently completed…
Hi Clay,
Here is another project that I just finished.
This was a fun project that has a lot of sentimental value since I grew up farming tobacco in Eastern Kentucky. A friend wanted a knife made from his grandfather’s tobacco knives. There wasn’t enough material by themselves so I added some pieces from one of my dad’s old hand saws and some saw mill bandsaw blades to make up a billet of twist damascus.
Gary
It included a boatload of pictures. I will do my best to put them in the proper order.
A tobacco knife is really more of a hatchet, and is used to cut the plant stalk off at the ground and split the stalk in half prior to stacking the stalk for wilting. It includes a handle and an embedded cutting head, not too dissimilar than a simple tomahawk. As Gary said, there isn’t enough metal to do much with…
…so after removing the blades he had to add some extra material in the form of antique saw blades.
After assembling the stack…
…Gary hits the forge and press.
They call it “twist Damascus” for a reason…
Then Gary makes the knives themselves…
Almost done…
Final staining and polish…
Some nice blades, bringing new life to retired tools.
Thank you for sharing Gary.
If you missed Gary’s 5 from the Grinder, you can find it here…
.
If you are a maker who would like to share a series of build photos with us, we’d be happy to put them together into a post like this. Drop an email to clay(at)knifemagazine.com
Read the full article here