knifemaking

Knifemaking: balance, fruition, and the Lioness

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“Dance with a girl three times, and if you like the light of her eye and the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your little questions about horseflesh and music about affairs masculine and feminine, then take the leap in the dark.“

Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm

I had a dream where I met my feminine identity.

I was in a busy open air train station with one of my best friends.  It was busy and it must have been cold because everyone was bundled up.  From almost nowhere came a woman, small, but with hair the color of autumn and a lot of fire to her.  She wore a loose fitting white Henley t-shirt, weathered jeans that were rolled up to mid-shin, and walked barefoot.  There was a lion cub walking by her side.  She also wore a long knife on her hip.

We didn’t speak but there was something very familiar about her.  She was exquisitely beautiful but I didn’t desire her- I knew this being was a part of me.  She paused for a moment, long enough for the lion cub to nuzzle my leg.  Then they were both gone.

In the weeks leading up to this I had been reading a lot about women.  The way many of them flow with emotions, and are incredibly adaptable to a variety of things the world deals them.  I found this lady who does workshops for women, helping them to appreciate men.  Her name is Alison Armstrong and her website is here.  She has a lot of podcasts and in listening to her explain men to women (warning: she knows all of our secrets), she revealed many things about the fairer sex.  Definitely worth checking out.

I think a lot of tension that comes from men’s interactions with women is that there is an expectation for them to complete something in us.  What we don’t realize is that all those things we are looking for in women are already inside us- they just get buried.  Society and culture tells us that men have to be this thing, stoic and unfeeling, and if you’re anything other than that you are less than.  The Bible says women are to be quiet and subservient.  There are a slew of women’s magazine articles with explicit instructions on how to make him love you more.  Conversely there is a shitload of literature written for men on how to keep her by your side, how your six-pack abs will fix your love life and how to resolve your relationship woes in six painless steps.

To me this is total bullshit.  We can’t find balance with another person till we find balance in ourselves.  You are already complete, there is balance within you and you need no one to fill a place in you which you perceive to be empty.  In the same way, it is not your responsibility to fill someone else’s emptiness, regardless of what society, modern media or ancient texts try to tell you.  Balance yourself and everything else will compliment you.

Once things come into balance, fruition can occur.  Seeds need the proper balance of temperature, moisture, and soil composition to germinate.  A storm needs the proper meteorological conditions to develop into a force of nature.  From this place of stability things can blossom outward.  The possibilities are endless.

To the autumn-haired lady that lives somewhere inside of me: thank you for the lessons.  This blade honors those lessons.

She has a gentle recurve on the blade- this helps to keep the knife edge from wandering too far when slicing through large volumes of material.

So here we are- fierce curves that betray a keen edge…

After heat treat…   She is properly tempered- the blue near the spine of the blade means there is some flex and bend while the grey color near the cutting edge is hard and edgeworthy.  Too much of one or the other and the blade will be brittle and prone to shattering, or won’t be hard enough to hold an edge.  Proper balance is key…

I chose Cherrywood for the handle of the Lioness.  In Celtic lore, Cherry possesses both masculine and feminine properties. 

      This is the blade that the autumn-haired woman carried.  Gentle but strong, beautiful but functional, simple but so much depth…            The way to fruition is to find a balance of the things within you.  Don’t worry, it’s all there.  Just have a peak around…this is the lesson of the Lioness

lionandlady

Knifemaking: The Precedent Epilogue

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“…feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.”

―Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

(you can find the initial crafting and thoughts on the Precedent here)

This was the first real knife I started working on.  I put it aside for a long time.  I had a tough time heat treating it and kept avoiding finishing it.  I’ve been rolling and moving and was at first hesitant to look back on this knife because it was so raw.

I think there’s a hesitation to look back because somehow I fear that I will fall back into those things, or worse, see that I haven’t really moved forward.  I see lots of mistakes and lots of flaws.  There is the fear that things that once were can somehow bleed into what is now.  That the cycle just continues.  I’ve found the opposite is true- that knowing what pain and loss feel like help us to grow.  We remember what it’s like to feel joy and peace.  And while there is the realization that we will most definitely feel pain and loss again, there is the little light that reminds us we’ll feel joy and peace again as well.

All of this comes from the fear.  What a powerful teacher that is.

Fear is there to keep us safe, in the same way that our mind thinks many thoughts and is always requiring input and judging our surroundings to keep us from harm.  So I find that I don’t do things because of the fear of putting myself in perceived danger’s way.  Sometimes there is a fear of not dealing with my shit because I may feel that it is too much and this will somehow put me in an unsafe place.  Then come the distractions to divert the overthinking mind from dealing with perceived danger that is usually not so dangerous in the first place.  Look, something shiny….

Shiny things may manifest themselves as emotional unavailability, codependency, working way too much, not working enough, or a myriad of overindulgences that we interpret as something that can save us.  We tell ourselves there isn’t enough time, ask ourselves what good could come of it all, and other things to devalue ourselves.  All to try to protect ourselves.

Anyway…at some point it’s best to put the shiny things aside and deal with your shit.

As you look inside at past transgressions and flaws it’s sometimes easy to overlook the beauty and power imbued in those things.  The little signatures of being human and the wonderful nuanced lessons that comes with that.  Sometimes I have to take a pause to give myself enough space to see that.  This is the ultimate lesson of the Precedent.

I tried maybe four or five times to harden this knife.  It was a frustrating process.  Finally I got it.  I was working with a forgiving steel.  Forgiveness is a powerful thing….  Those spots are where the blade got too hot during previous hardening attempts and caused a bit of decarburization.  It is still very much functional.  I sanded these bits off later.

Originally when I started on this blade I wanted to craft something that would cut through fear.  For the handle I thought it fitting to use some of my grandmother’s old maple cutting board.  It had split in half when I used it at a tailgating party in the snow and ice.  I use the other half in my kitchen.  I love this board.

I usually do a satin finish on the knife (or attempt one anyway).  In keeping with the rawness that fear can often have I used a coarse finish sanding of 120 grit paper instead of the normal 600 and buffing.

I always want to make something functional as well as beautiful.  I find this to be both.

Maple is notoriously hard to stain.  I used Tung oil to bring out the grain.

Deep breaths…and lean into the fear.  It’s actually all ok.

Knifemaking: reaction, the sacred pause, and the Querencia

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“In bullfighting there is an interesting parallel to what I call the art of pausing, as a place of refuge and renewal. It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find his own particular area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia. As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when he finds querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear. From the matador’s perspective, at this point the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power.”

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance


Up until this point I noticed my knives were relatively polite and concise.  Maybe there was a reaction to some imagined expectation of what this undertaking should be.  Sometimes we might restrain ourselves for fear of how others may react to us.  It could manifest itself in muting our truest selves or limiting our potential so we don’t have to deal with any unpleasantness that may arise from this.  We build ourselves around others’ expectations of us and brace ourselves for negative reactions when we inevitably fail to meet those expectations.  It continues in a cycle.  This is no way to live.

This is where the sacred pause comes in.  Where you are in a position to just observe everything you are doing to hold yourself back.  I like to think of this as creating some space- and this is what I’ve found meditation to be helpful with, however you choose to approach meditation.  You take a step back and survey everything.  At first it’s a bit painful and the tendency may be to freak out but once you get past those waves you can start to find yourself.

In this space I gave myself permission to be wild, large and maybe a bit scary.  In this blade I wanted something a bit more unbuttoned, unbridled.

With this blade I also wanted to capture the essence of a being that has come out of his reactionary rage, found his power, and become something shining and beautiful.  A being that is no longer dangerous and unpredictable but a force to be reckoned with.  These are things I’ve looked for in myself.  This is the lesson of the Querencia.

I ordered a thicker gauge of steel.  It’s much wider as well.

I wanted something bull-like with a forward momentum.  Muscle in the front end and a set of horns.  This is what I came up with:  

  Full flat grind and it took a long time…
  Flattening the blade with some draw filing

Heat treat…

 Lovely mesquite wood, milled by my cousin from Texas…
In keeping with the idea of letting oneself shine, I picked up some brass for a golden lining:

My lovely millwork…  After grinding off the excess, this was revealed:

  He got rather warm whilst trimming the brass and I was afraid the epoxy would lose it’s bond or worse, the blade would lose its temper.  So we took a sandwich break to cool off….

  

 Sometimes you have to take a break from everything before you can find yourself, your real self.  Take all the time you need.  This is the lesson of the Querencia.

Knifemaking: The Saj Epilogue- embracing the unexpected

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“Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure…

Face your life
Its pain,
Its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.”

Mrs. Owens, from Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

(you can find the initial crafting of the Saj here)

This is another blade that sat on my bench unfinished for months, made from the same bedframe steel as the Spellcaster.  I ignored him for a long time.  I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to say with him.  He’s different- a thinner blade that has a good flexibility, Eastern and exotic in function and very gentle in the hand- you hardly know he’s there.

I could see a lot of my earlier mistakes in him.  Scratches I couldn’t get out, unevenness in the bevel and a really quirky handle shape. 

Sometimes you have conversations with people where you aren’t entirely sure what to say.  Maybe it’s someone important- your boss, your future boss, a figure you admire, someone upon whom you’d like to make a good impression.  Maybe you go into it with an idea of what you want to say, points you may want to hit, things you’d like to work in.  As the conversation moves forward, the energy and flow may start to feel trite and contrived- forced, even.  Trying to put things in a place where you feel they should be, even though there is another being present who may have a different idea of where things should be…   

That is where I was with this knife for a long time.  Trying to manipulate the conversation and getting nowhere.

These are the moments to let things play out as they will.  This is easier said than done, especially if you are someone with varying degrees of control issues and anxieties…

I have a notebook full of sketches of knives that never make it to fruition.  This one was spontaneous and just sort of happened.  There’s a reason for that I think- those are some of the best things once you accept the idea that things will happen whether you plan them or not.  That relationship with someone you wouldn’t have expected, the job you didn’t plan on taking, even the recipe you may have botched but turned out more wonderful than you imagined. 

Sometimes those unexpected things don’t turn out in a way you would like.  That’s ok too even though it may not feel like it.  These are the times when it’s best to have a drink and think about what you are going to do next.  That part about leaving no path untaken applies to both the easy and the hard paths.

I went back and fixed my mistakes, knowing a little bit more than I did when I started this blade.  I let it be what it was.  When I found myself trying too hard, I stopped.  I worked on other things, sorted other things out, and felt my anxieties.  It’s important to be patient…

…then sometimes you just have to dive in

Some of the scratches were harder to remove than others.  I let those be.

     I have a cousin in Texas who’s a woodworker.  A really wonderful gentleman.  He sent me some Pecan wood that he milled himself.  I was really excited to work with it.  The state tree of Texas:

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As anxieties eased, I began to really feel the beauty of the process and not so worried about the outcome…

IMG_2038 IMG_2039

The figures are really quite lovely…

      I ended up being rather enamored with the wild elements and rugged bits of this blade…       The nature of life is you really don’t know what will happen.  Try to relax into that.  I’ll try to do the same.

Knifemaking: stubborness, resistance, and The Mule

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“You know all that shit you don’t want to do?  That’s the shit you do first.”

-my very dear friend Mr. Alan Parrot on resistance

“Slim, you stubborner than a motherfucker“

-my very dear friend Mr. Alan Parrot on some of my finer traits

Stubborness.  Unyielding, refusing to change.  The ability to dig one’s heels in and not budge.  I think this may be a bit negative, although those things are not necessarily untrue.  I think it lends itself more to an earthiness or stoutness of heart although it’s probably pretty frustrating at times for those close to us stubborn people.  Hell, sometimes it’s frustrating to be close to myself.

Alan is a gentleman I have worked with. I call him Mr. Al.  Here is a picture of us in West Virginia:

…it was cold…

He’s a fifty-five year-old African American man, ex-marine, and one of the most profound people I’ve met.  He’s fixed my car, dropped some serious lessons on me, and made me laugh till I cried.  He’s also stubborn as shit.  We did quite a few jobs together…and sometimes we would end up screaming at each other.  I couldn’t tell you what about.  Maybe it was my forklift driving or maybe he wasn’t moving fast enough for my liking or something else that really wasn’t all that important.

After we had screamed at each other and finished whatever nightmare job we were on, I’d usually buy him a cheeseburger.  Because I’m stubborn, even in my love for this man.

This is the lesson of the Mule.  Rooted, but in an earthy way and ultimately coming from a place of love.

I find resistance to be the negative side of things.  That thing you feel when you know what you need to do but don’t do it?  That is resistance and it can be sticky and awful.  To get through that I often need to look at what’s beneath that.  Oftentimes it may be fear of failure, feelings of not being good enough, or any number of things.  Things of the smaller self.  To get through this I usually imagine the small self being held by my larger self, usually a very large tree.  It doesn’t work all the time because life can be overwhelming.  When it does work it is quite liberating.

 Sometimes you need to dig into your being.  So I put a sharp foot on the profile of the Mule to do just that….Slowly to the left….    slowly to the right…  Hardening the foot as well as the blade  Hardened up nicely she did…  Wet sanding… For the handle I used Cherry wood.  In Celtic lore, Cherry is the Tree of the Heart. She sits and cures…  Brass rivets and a lovely grain…


I left some of the scuffing.  The stuff of character…  She’s been through a journey.  I fancy a bit of the singed oil smduge…  

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The lesson of the mule is to take heart in your stubbornness, and to let go of resistance.  Both of these things will always be continuing works in progress, at least for me.

Here is a picture of Mr. Al watering his plants;


Knifemaking: The Spellcaster Epilogue

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“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The Spellcaster was a lesson in faith- I wasn’t sure if it would even turn out.  I loved the idea that the steel came from a bedframe but I wouldn’t know if it would harden and temper properly till I had put in a lot of work on it.  It did.  I’ve been working on this blade a long time off and on and finally, like many things in life, I just had to take a leap and just go for it.  It is a thinner blade, very nimble and made for a smaller hand (well, smaller than mine….)

The lesson here is to trust that things will be ok, even if they aren’t the way you expected they would be.  Even if they aren’t the way you would like them to be.  This is something I struggle with- letting things be as they are.  In order to finish this blade I had to let it be as it was. Only then could I see how beautiful it really was.

This is after heat treat.  A file couldn’t touch it.  The bedframe delivered…   

I used white oak for the handle.  I love oak.  It has mass and it’s heavy.  It takes up space and lets you know that it’s there.  In Celtic lore, oak is a protector, wise and strong and a bridge to otherworldly places.  I wanted that for this blade.

This is a beautiful process and one of my favorites: 

  Roughing it out…The grain is starting to come out…there is a woodworkers’ trick where the wood is rubbed down lightly with water and allowed to sit- this brings the grain to prominence.There she is….

Brass rivets with a walnut danish oil, finished with tung oil.       


Always keep your faith.  This is the lesson of the Spellcaster.

Knifemaking: finding your home, braving the elements, and the Northerner

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“A farm of your own is better, even if small. Everyone’s someone at home.”

Hávamál, st. 36

Home is what you make it.  The first thing I do when I go into anybody’s home is notice how it smells.  There are many things that can be inferred this way.  It may smell of cooking and spices, a fireplace, clean linens, pets, Murphy’s oil soap, and the people who live there.  All these things are things of love, cultivated in a place where the person who lives there can just come and be.  It’s a safe place where we can take off whatever armor we may wear during the day.  It’s a refuge that shields us from the elements in our lives.

Some brave harsher elements than others.  And in the times we live in, the elements are no longer relegated to heavy rains, freezing blizzards, or lands parched with drought.  They are deadlines for work, the threat of unemployment, passive-aggressive emails, fruitless battles with the DMV, quarterly tax estimations, health insurance premiums, our police executing citizens without arrest or trial, politicians stripping us of our civil liberties and thousands of other things we have little control over.

This can send our stress through the roof and it’s a small wonder.  From an evolutionary standpoint our reactions to stressors were designed to help keep us safe and alive.  You see a bear, you react appropriately by stressing out hard and in turn releasing enough adrenaline to haul ass out of that situation. Then you calm down, throw some logs on the fire and snuggle up with the misses.  Or the mister.  But these days unrelenting stress can lead to unhealthy anxiety and this in turn often leads to depression, ultimately leading to feelings of being stuck and health issues.  Depression and anxiety have their evolutionary purposes but I feel their effects been blown way out of proportion by the amount stimulation and unnecessary stress in today’s world.

This is why it’s important to have a home.  A place where the elements won’t creep in.  This may take some work.  An inspiration for me is John Wemmick from Dickens’ Great Expectations.  He has an unpleasant job, deals with many stressors but goes home to his castle, a safe and gentle refuge he has built for himself.

Throughout history and literature the people from the northern areas are by nature a people more hardened to the elements.  They are a people capable of great acceptance, aware that they can’t change the elements but instead find a way to thrive within them.  That is the inspiration for this blade.

I had to do a bit of research on blade shapes and functions.  I wanted to make something that would aid a modern day Northerner in his outdoor tasks.  This blade is loosely based on a composite of bushcraft designs.  It is a drop point blade with a partial saber grind.  I tried to find a balance between having a deep enough belly for slicing and having enough of a point for effective piercing.  I am rather fond of the O1 tool steel.  It is relatively easy to work with and hardens up beautifully.  it takes a keen edge and is forgiving of my mistakes.

 Cut and profiled

And the grind.  A little bit at a time… 

 

Ground and sanded.  The larger holes help to lighten the blade. 

Wet sanding after heat treat.  I have been using WD-40.  It won’t rust and I find it gives a smoother finish. 

I went to a lumber mill to try to find some more exotic wood.  It was awesome. 

I found a beautiful piece of quarter sawn white oak.  It is sawn in such a way that gives it more stability and shows the grain more beautifully.  Here is a lovely video on the process and how it affects the grain.

Handle work: brass rivets that I bevelled and the oak shaped and rough sanded.     After much more sanding….  A dark shade of Danish oil

  The Northerner

The grain is stunning.
  A fabulous backside is always a bonus….

Edge detail….

There will always be things in our life that will challenge us and create stress.  As long as we have a place we can go, whether bricks or mortar or built within ourselves, we will always be able to brave the elements.  This is the lesson of the Northerner.

Knifemaking: being content, releasing, and the Minimalist

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“Elegance is achieved when all that is superfluous has been discarded and the human being discovers simplicity and concentration: the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be.”

Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

Originally, I wanted to call this blade The Monk.  When I see images or videos of Buddhist monks, or anyone living in a monastic setting, I used to wonder how they survive on so little.  Recently it was explained to me that they aren’t choosing a life of poverty.  They are choosing a life of contentment.  The idea as I’ve come to understand it is that they have enough and this brings contentment.  Enough, but in a gentle and satisfactory way.  This is pretty much counter to most of the ideas of what we are taught about being successful in Western society.

That was the inspiration for this blade.  Something simple.  Enough.  Content to just be.

There is an elegance in the simple.  Simple is difficult to pull off well.  Think of the best things.  Bach is simple but by no means easy to perform and certainly not lacking in beauty or depth.  Then there is steak- the best steak needs nothing but salt, pepper and a hot grill.  The list can go on.

This is where the beauty is.  An idea or tool or work of art or meal that has everything it needs and nothing it doesn’t.

There is a practice in many Buddhist temples that consists of tidying and cleaning.  It is believed that a tidy workspace helps with concentration.  There are books on the matter of getting rid of clutter.  Behind this is the idea that when we release the material things that are no longer serving us it will follow that we also release the emotional things that hold us back from being our naturally vibrant selves.

Ultimately I find this blade to be a reflection of how I desire to be.  In a way I am this blade.  As I was slowly removing the things that ultimately didn’t serve the purpose, function, being, beauty or existence of this knife I thought of the things that don’t serve me that I desire to release.  Like the grinding of this blade, release doesn’t happen all at once and if I tried to do it all at once I would be an overwhelmed, anxious, and contracted human being.  I’ve been there.  I think we all have.  Breathe deeply and appreciate how beautiful the simplicity of something can be.

I started this blade with a bit of O1 tool steel stock:

I wanted to make something simple and functional and beautiful.  This is what I came up with:

 

And a flat grind…

 

In keeping with the idea of not having anything unnecessary, I removed some of the stock in the handle.  It also makes it lighter.  Here he is after filing and sanding….

 

Hardening and tempering.  It took some tries but I got a forge built that gets plenty hot: the Brigid Marsal 3.0…

 

And after a dunk in some warm cooking oil…

 

He cleans up nice:

 

So for the handle I went back to the idea of the monk- enough clothes to keep you warm and decent, a safe place to sleep, and enough to eat.  Having just enough to help you really feel your inner being.  I found a dough proofing board used by bakers.  I made the handle out of that, one’s proverbial daily bread.  A simple coat of Danish Oil protects the handle and brings out it’s beauty.

 

 And the secondary bevel…

Handle detail.  So much love…. 

As I learn and grow, I find that some of the things I thought I needed aren’t serving me.  It’s ok to release these things.  This is the lesson of the Minimalist.

Knifemaking: befriending what tries to hurt you, process and mistakes, and Brigid Marsal

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“I build the road and the road builds me”

-African Proverb

I think about this saying often.  Sometimes you work and it’s hard to see progress until you look back and see how much road you’ve built.  Maybe you think about giving up until you look back and realize the only way to go is forward.  Parts of the road may be shoddy or weak or bumpy but it came from you and that is a beautiful thing.  It’s a process and sometimes parts of the process are bumpy and shoddy.  I’ve found the bumpy parts are the most sacred because that’s where the deepest lessons are.  It’s important to not skip or ignore the bumpy parts and to be with them as fully as you are able.  This is sometimes difficult or even painful but it is often times the only way to move forward.

I started building a forge to harden my knives.  Her name is Brigid Marsal.  In Celtic folklore, Brigid is the goddess of fire and fertitlity among many other things.  Marsal is a make of pizza ovens.

This is not my first attempt at making a forge.  Brigid 1.0 was a woodstove at the warehouse that I fueled with charcoal and bellowed with a shop vac on reverse.  It was loads of fun but never quite did the job.

Funny story.  This summer I was on a pretty hellacious job with Fred and Mr. Al in a mall in Kensington, Maryland.  The mall was set to be demolished and we were there to extract some safe deposit boxes, some dental equipment, and a gigantic Marsal double stack pizza oven.  One of these stacks alone weighed about two thousand pounds and they were covered in a brick facade.  There really wasn’t a lot of room to work because the kitchen was built around the ovens.  So here are Fred, Mr. Al and I trying to wrestle this monstrosity onto our crank lift which is really only rated for maybe eight hundred pounds.  The lift breaks, the monster of an oven comes crashing down and I had to dive onto the counter to avoid being crushed.

We all collected ourselves and found that there wasn’t any way to move these ovens without help.  It took another trip up there to get the ovens and thankfully I was not invited to go.  The ovens came back, were rebuilt, and sold.  There were a few of the heat stones left over.  Fred gifted two of the unbroken stones to me to build a forge.  Turning something that nearly kills you into something that works for you- I like this idea.

Here are the devil stones:

According to Fred they are liquid poured and can handle temperatures of up to “infinity degrees.”

They are also ridiculously difficult to cut.  They are dense and stubborn and have a tendency to crack if you don’t go slowly and patiently.  The satisfying part is to see how far you’ve come.

What starts as this:

Becomes slowly cut away into this:

And you have to do it one pass at a time, evenly.

The idea with this particular design is to create a vortex of heat to bring the knives evenly up to critical temperature- about 1500 degrees.  To do this I cut the stone into square- or as close to squares as I could get them.

many hours later…

I put a two inch hole into three of them.  There is no quick way with stone.

On one of the pieces I added a half inch hole in the side for the blow torch.

I lined the stones up to give it a go….

Pretty, but not quite vortexing the way I would like…

So the forge doesn’t work the way I had planned.  What I found was that the stones, which hold heat very well, are not so good at reflecting the heat, which is what I need.  There is still another forge to build but I am going to use the Marsal stones somehow- to remind them that I am not so easily crushed…reminders of bumps in the road you build and sacred lessons along the way.

Knifemaking: fear, flaws, and the Precedent

/ ballardmidyette / 2 Comments
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Ah fear.  What I’ve learned about fear is that, contrary to what Mr. Herbert says, fear makes one human.  Fear means you are feeling the proper spectrum of emotions.  Fear helps you to think through things rather than blindly charging into them.  Fear keeps you alive.

The real mind-killer is resistance to fear.  Not doing what you know is right because you are afraid.  In my life this resistance is what keeps me feeling stuck, keeps me going in circles, and keeps me from loving at my full capacity.  It is this resistance that leads to patterns of negative thought, that fear is wrong, and that at the bottom of it you are somehow wrong or flawed.

The idea of being flawed is something that operates on a deep level.  A flaw by definition is something that is marked as a fault or imperfection.  In my own life I tend to find the flaws in things.  Maybe I am am looking for validation of my own flaws.  Lately I have been pausing with this and I find that I can reframe it into something else.  As long as I can operate from the level of my heart I find that I am not flawed, that what I perceive to be flaws are beautiful little signatures of being human, of lessons I am still learning, of ways to move forward.

When one gets to the bottom of what they find their flaws to be and sees the beauty in them this provides a springboard to move forward.  It doesn’t mean that the fear is gone.  There is fear of making mistakes, fear of failure, fear of letting people down, fear of letting yourself down.  This is all ok.  I breathe all of that in and step forward.  This sets a Precedent and is the inspiration for this blade.

Part of moving forward was to order a bar of O1 Tool steel.  I found this bar in itself was rather exquisite.  As far as steel goes he is soft and forgiving to work with.  He can be hardened up to be very strong and tempered to be flexible.  It’s not a stainless steel.  He can rust so care and love are a requisite.

I wanted to make a knife that I felt would cut through the resistance of fear.  I found this to be a microcosm of my being at the moment and my intention was to remove from the bar everything that was not me.  It came out looking like this:
I found some plans for a filing setup to help guide me in making a clean grind.  It is a slow process but also a meditation.  Slowly removing that which doesn’t need to be there and finding the beauty in that which is slowly revealed.  Often I find myself counting the strokes of the file….
This where the blade is planed level by drawing a file across.  Here is where I find out how even my grind is.  What I’ve learned is that if I hurry through filing on the jig then I spend that much more time draw filing the blade level.  Best to take that extra time counting file strokes on the jig and spend less time draw filing.
After that comes sanding to polish up the blade before heat treat.  I’ve found that I don’t mind a rougher finish.  I like seeing rogue file blemishes and the grind on the steel.
So here is the Precedent, ready for heat treat (which is a lesson I’m still learning….)

The lesson of the Precedent is to find courage in your fear and beauty in your own human condition.