Archive for July, 2007
Antwerp – engraving, diamonds and jews
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in General, engraving on July 17, 2007
When I and my father started to make knives and other sharp ‘things’ we saw immediately that if we wanted to make really beautiful and high-end knives we need to learn engraving. When knife even has some very little engraved parts it looks just so much better, for examples look here (Sam was our instructor in Antwerp, btw.) and here, these are knives are engraved by the best of the best engravers and it shows. So we bought engraving machine, some engravers and then some books. After trying to figure out how to engrave by myself I thought that it might be wiser to take a class, because trying out it by myself I might get some results, but I might use totally wrong techniques and waste more time doing things than I really should.
Anyways, long story short – I was 5 days in Antwerp, taking Basic Engraving course with Sam Alfano. Man, this was just so very fun. First day seemed like it lasted only 2 hours, time just flew by (actually all days were from 9 AM to 6 PM). And I learned really a lot. I even had a nightmare on Monday night – I thought that it was already Friday, the class is over and I have to go home. What a relief it was to wake up…
The course was set up very well. We started on day 1 by creating our tools, sharpening engravers with correct angles and stuff, and then engraving plain straight lines, then curves, then little more complex lines and patterns. When 5th day ended we saw and tried out how to do different borders, script lettering, rosette, relief engraving, gold inlay and sculpting. Every new thing we learned relied on previous things, so it was really nice gradual and (relatively) fast paced learning week. Before this course I could barely engrave a straight line, after that I was doing quite well on scrolls and stuff. I especially liked relief engraving, because it created just such a beautiful effect. Also I tried to learn the relief engraving as much and as well as I could, because Sam said it is de facto requirement for high-end knife engraving and that’s what I’d like to do. Not 25 cheap knives but one really good, and thus expensive, knife in a month. I also enjoyed watching Sam, our instructor, engraving – it’s just so nice to see how a guy knows his stuff. Creating beautiful designs and executing these at such perfection and speed that’s quite unfathomable to me. But hey, 30 years of experience if worth something! So far I have only 50 hours under my belt.
The trip itself was very good too. I like this city, old town and especially the cathedral is very beautiful. And oh man, was there diamond businesses. Just one part of city was filled with every kind jewelery shops, workshops and then some more shops and then some watch shops and… well, you get the idea. Quite amazing for me, I must say. My hotel was in jewish part of the city and that was quite an experience for me too – as I’ve never seen so much jews at one time.
Anyway, check out my photos I made in Antwerp and during engraving class (when you see photos of engravings be sure not to mistake my practice plates and Sam’s work).
Knives and mokume gane
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in Uncategorized on July 6, 2007
It’s been a while since my last post, but no worries, I’m still working and creating ’stuff’. Past few weeks we’ve been making prototype knives, testing out some new technologies that can be used to make knives look more interesting and better. Last cool thing I ‘discovered’ was mokume gane, which means wood-grain in Japanese. It was actually developed at 17th century in Japan for katanas. Basically it’s the same as technology damascus (take many layers of different metals and forge-weld them together in very high temperature), but with different metals like brass, copper, silver, gold, palladium etc. and is used for touching up swords, knives etc. But some people also use this technology to create wedding rings and other very beautiful jewelry.
Here’s a little roundup of past few weeks:
Different designs that we’ve come up with. As you can see two blades still need to be finished and made into knives. The length of the largest blade is 22cm, so you know how long the others are.
Little close up of knife that has satin finished blade with hot-blued finger guard and pommel.
OK, now to mokume gane. Here’s how 30 layer brass/copper mokume billet looks like (red layers are copper, yellow ones are brass):
Here’s 60 layer mokume already used in knife (4th from the top of first image):
And here’s mokume billet with twist pattern, that probably will be used to make some parts of folding knife:
This one shows some problems, but hey, it’s our first one, we’ve still got a lot to learn!
During that time we also got/made two new machines – belt grinder and milling machine. I must say that the new belt grinder is just superb. It uses long belts – 75×200mm. I bought the best belts I found from 3M and now grinding is just a pleasure. These belts cut through metal like there’s no tomorrow… If you must know, then the belts are 3M Cubitron 777 and Trizact belts. Cubitrons are 80 and 120 grit, Trizacts start from 200 and go up to 2000. I used to 2000 one to finish the 2nd knife from that picture and it looks just awesome, unfortunately photos don’t show that very well.
