The Jaguar, Raven, and Bobcat are getting very close to being finished. These three have been on my bench long enough and I'm ready to complete them and get them into the hands of my patient clients. Below are a few action shots of the progress.
Here is the Jaguar's liner at the mill. I use a thin cutoff disc to cut out the lock. It usually takes about two disks per lock, but I broke so many that I went through a pretty tall stack of them. Not my best of days cutting locks.
After the locks are cut, I use some cloth-backed sandpaper to clean up the cuts and knock off the burr.
Time to grind some bevels. Here is the Raven with my file guide clamped to it to help keep the plunges accurate. I'm using a 12 inch wheel to create the hollow grind for this blade.
Here's the Raven blade with the bevels ground and a nice, hand-rubbed satin finish on it. I love the look of a satin finish on a blade. It's hard to catch the true beauty of it in a photograph, especially with my crumby photography skills.
I decided to just focus on the Raven knife for the time being. I just have that need to finish a knife. Here are the liners after the inside surfaces have been jeweled.
In this photo you can see the the lock bar has been bent to give the proper tension and the detent ball has been pressed into place. A corresponding detent hole was drilled into the blade, but I didn't get a pic of that. After I anodize the liner, I will add a layer of carbide to the lock face to reduce lock stick and improve wear resistance.
The Raven gets a custom milled pocket clip. Here it is clamped in place and I'm milling out the back side to thin it out.
Here's the pocket clip attached to the handle. I put the same chipped stone finish on it as I put on the spacer. It looks pretty cool. The clip is attached from the back so that the screws are hidden.
It's time to sign my work. My maker's mark gets etched into the blade using this stencil and my shop-built electro etcher.
I'm seeing a lot of blue! The liners, spacer, pocket clip, and thumb stud all get anodized this brilliant blue color. It really looks great against the blue shred CF scales.
The Raven is all but complete. I actually have it all assembled and am breaking it in. I hope to take a couple of good pics of it tonight and maybe make a short video of it. I'll post it here on the blog when I do. Next week I hope to finish up the other two knives. These builds have been fun, but I'm ready to finish them up. Thanks for following along with me on this knife-making adventure.
- Brandant Robinson