A knife for Mark by Markman

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These are some photos of a knife being made for me by Erik Markman.
Some of the things I really like in a knife are:
Integral Bolsters
Interesting Patterns in the steel
Sculpted Handles
Ultra Clean overall
From what I have seen in Erik's knives, these are normal features.

Here is what Erik has sent so far;

First pic is welded, forged and profile ground.
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On the second pic I have ground the bevels and the transition to the bolster.
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A little more grinding and it is ready for heat treat.
 
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Thanks for the introduction Mark!

Here is the progress of yesterdayevening.

After rounding the bolster to its final shape i placed the blade in my newly made clamp for grinding and filing the back of the bolster square and flat.
It has a slot on the front so I can see if the blade is in the right position and has 2 leathercoverd steel plates inside it that are pushed together by the bolts sticking through the sides. It also has a piece of allthread running through the bottom of the square tube and the plates so the don't drop out. There is a hardened steel plate on top so the file doesn't chew up the surface. It works much nicer than my old clamp wich I will show later.

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Here you can see the plates clamping the blade.

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After grinding away the bulk of the unneeded steel.

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After filing the back of the bolster.

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Here it is out of the jig, the tang is still almost half an inch thick by a little over 3/4 high, that doesn't come off easily..

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Erik
 
I ground and filed the false edge and tomorrow evening it's time to clean up the tang and grind the blade to 400 before heattreat.

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The blade with the beautiful stabilised Redwood burl block provided by Mark.

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Drilling the pilothole.

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Getting there...

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Sawed off the angle for the bolster with not much fitting left to do.

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The block fitted against the bolster, the contour of the handle scribed and ready to drill the pinhole.

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The blades painted in antiscale compound and my HT oven heating up.

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Quenchoil heating up. This is Durixol 25W wich is a professional HT oil, I have been using it for almost a year now and it is a great improvement over peanutoil in hardness and keeping things straight.

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The blades as-quenched, nice and straight and free of scale. Lucky me......

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Here is the block ground to profile and the lines for the contour scribed.

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Roughly ground to shape.

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With the template I use for these knives.

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The corners knocked off and roughly shaped.

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I make sure i keep the centerlines on top and bottom so it is easier to keep things symetrical.

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Now it is time to finish the blade. I like a flatground blade so I use a DMT diamondplate to take out scratches and high spots to get things really FLAT.
This is after a few wipes and it was almost flat already.

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Wow, love the idea of the DMT plate!

How long does it last? How much work do you do with it?
 
This one is 600 and 900 grit. I use the 600 for flattening but it needs to be fairley flat to start with or I will use a coarser one.
 
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