It’s official – my first two customers have received their new knives!!
One was a 6" utility knife with cherry handle and personalized with the owner’s initials on the back of the blade.
The other was a 170mm santoku with curly maple handle, and the buyer requested red detail along the tang and around the rear pin.
The pictures don’t do justice to the iridescent quality of the curly maple – after five coats of tung oil, the shimmery “curls” appear to move in the wood as you turn the knife in the light, like looking at a polished tiger-eye stone.
Each one takes a total of about 15 hours (roughly – I haven’t tracked the specific hours spent on each step so far). Right now I’ve got another seven blades ready for handles, so each of those have maybe 10 hours apiece invested. Besides the cherry and curly maple, I’ll be using black walnut, African mahogany, and rosewood for handles. I also have a few odd pieces of golden oak, hickory, ipe, cocobolo, and olive that I’ll try to coax handle-sized pieces from.