Traditional Skills

I am in the process of getting set up for knife making. It is something I have wanted to do since I was a boy and figured why not do it already. I am making a belt grinder at the moment which has been a long work in progress as it has been sitting on the back burner. So I found this video today and it was kind of an inspiration to stop procrastinating and get on it.

Be forewarned that he uses some foul language. This almost made me not post it, but I thought it was kind of a cool video if you are interested in knives and knife making as I am.

I just finished this spoon the other day. I did this one pretty quick. It seems like the more spoons I carve the quicker it is to get them finished. Must be that I am starting to get more spatially oriented to spoon carving. Be one with the spoon grasshopper. Anyways I used the same mystery wood as before from the wood pile and gave it two coats of walnut oil.

I really like this spoon and the way it fits my hand. I carved the spoonook, (I just made that up!:-) deeper this time so that it would work better for soups. Fun stuff!

Dave

This past fall I collected a handful of walnuts to make a batch of walnut stain. There isn’t a lot of information on making your own stains, but I remember reading about walnut stain in an old book when I was a teenager. I picked the walnuts off the tree before they fell to the ground in the fall. At this stage they are still green but it keeps them from getting full of maggots as they do when you get them off the ground.

One method for making walnut stain is to boil the husks in water for around eight hours and then decant off the liquid. I decided against this as I wanted it to be more concentrated so that I can add alcohol to it and make it into an alcohol based stain. This should reduce the amount of grain being raised on the wood and give deeper penetration.

The method I use, is to take the walnuts with the husk on and merely let them sit for 6 months in a large glass jar out in the shop. After a few weeks they start turning a dark color. After a few months they get a little moldy and start releasing their juice, which is what can be used as the stain. Below is a picture of the large jar used for aging and fermenting the walnuts.

Once the walnut juice has stopped seeping out, you can pour off the liquid and use it for stain. At this point I have not added alcohol, but plan to. This should help preserve the stain and keep it from molding.

Here is a picture of three handles for some tomahawks that I make. The top one is before sanding and staining, the middle is stained and lightly carded with fine steel wool, and the bottom one has been stained and given a coat of BLO (boiled linseed oil).

As you can see, this homemade walnut stain produces a very nice deep brown color. I like using it for the handles on my tomahawks because it gives a nice aged look to them. It also goes well with the browning finish that I put on the tomahawk heads.

As always I hope you enjoyed this write up, and if you have questions or comments I would love to hear from you.

Thanks,
Dave