wmhammond
Well-Known Member
I'm sitting here in my living room, I've had a shower after a rather long, pretty hot day in my shop. I'm relaxed and am enjoying an adult beverage and I'm pretty proud of myself. As many of you know I am rather new to knifemaking and for the last several months I have been trying to unravel the mysteries of creating a Hamon. To date I have attempted 14 different projects that incorporated a Hamon and have not been satisfied with any of them. In some cases I just trashed the knife and in some cases I just sanded out the poor results and completed the knife without it.
I have asked a million questions of members of this site and pestered John Doyle to distraction. He is truly a friend and one of the finest gentlemen (ask Wall e) on this site and has helped me immensely with this journey and I thank him specifically for the results you will see below. After all those attempts I had evolved to purchasing some 1075 from Aldo and investing in 5 gal. of Parks 50. Additionally, I have paid a lot of attention to improving my hand-sanding technique and results.
So, for my 15th attempt I designed what I call an American Frontier Trapper's Belt Knife. A knife used by an outdoorsman to clean and skin game but hefty enough to deal with wood-in-the-wild: chopping, splitting, sharpening, shaping, etc. The blade is 1/4" thick 1075, 5 1/2" long and the handle is 4 3/4" long. Today, I finished hand-sanding the knife to 1000 grit (to my horror, there was no sign of a Hamon all the way up through the grits so I was kinda bummed and chalking it up to the 15th failure in my journey), but then I etched it in Ferric and WOW!, IT WAS THERE! a real and better than good Hamon. Now I started sweating whether I could buff it out to perfection.
Well, here it is. let me know what you think.
Thanks for looking and commenting (please forgive my photography, I haven't mustered the energy to worry about pictures, I'm working on being able to make excellent knives and sheaths, the photos will come later.
Wallace
I have asked a million questions of members of this site and pestered John Doyle to distraction. He is truly a friend and one of the finest gentlemen (ask Wall e) on this site and has helped me immensely with this journey and I thank him specifically for the results you will see below. After all those attempts I had evolved to purchasing some 1075 from Aldo and investing in 5 gal. of Parks 50. Additionally, I have paid a lot of attention to improving my hand-sanding technique and results.
So, for my 15th attempt I designed what I call an American Frontier Trapper's Belt Knife. A knife used by an outdoorsman to clean and skin game but hefty enough to deal with wood-in-the-wild: chopping, splitting, sharpening, shaping, etc. The blade is 1/4" thick 1075, 5 1/2" long and the handle is 4 3/4" long. Today, I finished hand-sanding the knife to 1000 grit (to my horror, there was no sign of a Hamon all the way up through the grits so I was kinda bummed and chalking it up to the 15th failure in my journey), but then I etched it in Ferric and WOW!, IT WAS THERE! a real and better than good Hamon. Now I started sweating whether I could buff it out to perfection.
Well, here it is. let me know what you think.
Thanks for looking and commenting (please forgive my photography, I haven't mustered the energy to worry about pictures, I'm working on being able to make excellent knives and sheaths, the photos will come later.
Wallace
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