Building a Knife Making Station, Part II
So, the concrete is poured, the bench is built, and we are moving on to installing the vise, creating the spark chute, and a rail for the spark chute. And, because this is about knives, I will show off the wooden prototype that I am marching towards as my first build. Let’s start off with the knife first because, well, knives…
Above is picture of my wooden prototype for the first knife I intend to make. I want to crank out a few of them and give them to some folks—my ten year old, my Dad, Nick (if he will take one), and I don’t know who else. One thing I didn’t count on his just how daunting this can be. Arm chair knife company executives on the Internet regularly moan about how one thing is a copy of another. The reality is, given how long knives have been around and how the job dictates the design (form follows function), there are only so many ways a knife can look before it looks like a knife made by someone else. There is not much room for originality. But I am trying.
The design is a mix between a hatchet and a knife. I am drawing on the design of some renowned Japanese hatchets. Two, in particular, looked interesting to me. I liked the long handle of the nata. I also liked the blade and orientation of the edge of the hitsu nata. Together, I thought I could make something that could do some food prep with a hand in one position and chopping with your hand in another position. Because you’d be choked up in the detail work position, the blade didn’t need to be that big compared to the handle. Additionally, angular momentum doesn’t care about blade length, only total length and so the (Tree) Limb Lopper, shown above, was born.
It doesn’t hurt that the edge is straight. I am concerned about my distinct lack of skill and so I wanted to make the blade as simple as possible and nothing is simpler than a straight edge (right?…right?!?!). If you watched the Outdoor Boys, Luke’s hitsu nata plows through small branches and limbs and the hope is that this design will do the same thing. There is a lot of yardwork around me that is basically just chopping up wrist-thick pieces of wood and the Limb Lopper will likely do that quite well. I plan on making it out 3/16” or 1/8” 1084, so it should be relatively inexpensive for me to make a few. By the way, I have purposely not bought blade steel yet. If I had it, I would be powerfully tempted to just start making a mess and avoid the safety stuff. But before sparks fly we have some more work to do on the workstation itself.
First, I attached the really great Panavise 301 to the bench. Again, if you haven’t seen one it is deceptively simple yet incredibly effective (which is the mantra for all great tools). I have the standard head on it, but I am probably going to get the offset head as well. It’s pretty cheap and might give me a bit more reach. The idea is that I am going to hog out material from the blade stock using an angle grinder and then refine the shape on the grinder before grinding the blade and cutting bevel. I will have to send blades out for heat treat, but I want to start small and see how it goes. I attached the Panavise on one of the bench’s legs with very long screws. The idea is that I wanted it to have a huge amount of mass behind it, and the two 2x4 legs do that. The 3” 8d screws bit hard. This thing isn’t going anywhere.
Another thing I want to make sure of is that I have a way of capturing sparks. Here is the chute I have made before it is put in place:
It is basically made of sheet metal pieces used in a forced hot air heating systems. There were a lot of options, but I wanted to make sure the chute tapered down to 4 inches in case I ever put a dust collector port on this. Obviously I wouldn’t want to run the dust collector with hot metal sparks, but the idea, down the line, would be to install a splitter with a gate that could open when I am grinding metal, letting the sparks fall through, and close when I am grinding something else like wood or G10 for handles. In a decade or so, I will probably be on to leatherwork and I could sand edges for that hobby on my grinder in 2036.
The chute will be attached to a small piece of wood (see the box in front of the glue bottle). That box will slide on a rail (the pine board the box is sitting on) and will allow me to catch sparks from the grinder or the Panavise. Eventually, I’d like to get a small band saw to rough cut blanks, but again, I am starting small on purpose.
Here is the rail in place:
To ensure that everything slides easily I waxed the rail AND I put a round over on all four corners. I don’t want to slide around too easily, but it is perfectly workable with a light touch it moves from position to position. The chute cart and the chute are married together with a hose clamp that I drilled two holes in to hold the entire thing in place. I also used some foil tape (REAL duct tape) to hold all of the pieces together.
After that I had to drop in an outlet. I want to make a box fan air filter system (an Air King 20” fan and a 20x20x4 MERV 14 filter) to install on the bottom shelf. I also have to, of course, plug in the grinder. This was a new drop in the line that I used to power about half of the stationary tools in my workshop (the miter saw, its dust collector, and the drill press ride on this run). I had to turn off the circuit at the panel and then pull out the Romex out of the final drop. This allowed me to use the final drop’s Romex for the grinder drop. Then I took some extra Romex I had laying around to push up out of the grinder drop and put it into the final drop in the line. It was a bit of tight fit, but it all worked out. My brain loves electrical work. It is like logical reasoning in philosophy—it works or it doesn’t, but when it does or when you figure out what is wrong, you know it will work immediately. Turning the power back on is almost unnecessary.
The last post will cover a few final touches—putting on the shelf on the bottom, bench accessories, attaching a fire extinguisher to the wall, connecting the aluminum bench top to the wall, and finally I built, hung, and then modified the belt racks.
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