Archive for category Life
USA, Blade Show and Engrave-In
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in General, Life, Travel, engraving on June 13, 2008
Like you can already guess from title, I’ve been rather busy lately. I had a chance to do at least 3 new things: travel to States, attend Atlanta Blade Show (THE knife show) and after that attend Engrave-In. I’ll try to write short overview of them all.
USA
In many ways it’s an interesting and strange country for me. I’m used to more European way of living, so when travelling around in Europe, at least in central part of it, isn’t that much different from Estonia. Maybe a little more civilized and cleaner etc. But America had quite a few strange things in store for me. All in all I could say that everything is bigger. Roads, cars, food portions and, yes, people too. While here we have rarely any 2-lane highways, there the usual norm seemed to be something like 4-5 lanes. So driving through the center of Atlanta at 130 km/h was quite strange experience.
And, my’o'my, about 50% of cars seemed to be SUV’s. No wonder you people complain about gas prices going higher. In addition we didn’t see that many people walking around. You guys don’t even have roads for walking. At some places we had to literally walk over flowerbeds to get to the other side of the road. Also, no public transportation to talk about. You guys are too comfortable with all those cars 
. Oh yeah, and no bicycles either.
But I loved the nature. Fortunately we had a chance to drive around in Tennessee and what a sightseeing it was with all those big mountains.
I loved the people. We had a chance to stay at 2 families during our trip and meet many other people at Blade and Engrave-In. I’d say 110% of kindness and helpfulness. Everybody went just out of their way to make us comfortable and see that we had everything we needed. We lived there like king’s cats. I also liked that people were so easy going and open, seemed to take life easier and enjoy it more. Here, when travelling by public transport, I sometimes have a real struggle not to laugh, because all people seem to be so sad, depressed or angry. I don’t know why they make life so hard.
Atlanta Blade Show
Now that was an experience. 3 days and about 600 exhibitors. Top makers from all over the world. If you’re a knife nut or a maker, this is definitely a show to visit. So much to see, so much to buy, so much inspiration. Also the biggest show I’ve ever been. There was actually the first time I could see in real life real high-end handmade custom knifes and engravings. A real treat for me.
During the Blade I got my Lindsay Classic with PalmControl from Ray Cover (Lindsay sent it to him, so I wouldn’t have to pay for international shipping and fees). If you don’t know, then Steve’s PalmControl is THE Cadillac of engraving world. Just the sweetest, coolest and most useful engraving one could imagine to have. And I have it! Nice thing about it is, that it doesn’t require much air and works even with CO2 tanks. So here is how my table at hotel looked one evening:
Engrave-In
This was engravers get-together meeting after the Blade at Scott Pilkington’s place. A very cool event, too. Many excellent and superb engravers were there along with many beginners, including me. There we had 2 seminars: one from Joe Rundell about carving wood and gold overlay and second was from Paul Hamler about investment casting. Both were very informative and I learned a lot from those.
There I also got to see the coolest gun I’ve ever seen. It was engraved by Joe Rundell. It wasn’t yet ready, but even at that stage it was very-very impressive. So far he has spent over 2000 hours on this engraving and he said he’s little over half done with it.
All in all it was a very nice trip and I’m really happy about it. I definitely want to go back to USA someday to visit the people I met there.
Blog anniversary and knife making video
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in General, Life on April 6, 2008
I’m little late for the 1st anniversary, it was on 3rd of April, but congrats anyway to… me! This year there has been 21,024 visits to this blog and best day was the first day, when it went up on reddit and digg – 3,025 visitors. Currently the average views per day is around 100, peaking at around 170. I think I’m pleased.
Big kudos to my friend Peeter, who suggested that this might be an interesting thing to blog about. “Thing” is of course how to change your life and follow your dream. It didn’t work out so fast as I wanted, as I had to go back to regular office work to keep my skin warm. But the pursuing is still going on and I learn new stuff about knives and engraving all the time. Fortunately there’s still very-very much to go.
Now the interesting part. I made a video of how we make hidden tang knife and a sheath for it.
Knife itself looks like this:
HD video from Vimeo is available from Making hidden tang knife video
Non-HD:
Right now I have engraving video in making and soon I hope to make also a short vid of how we make a blade. Later maybe damascus making, stabilizing wood etc.
Enjoy!
knivesandengraving.com launch and first video
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in General, Life, Smithing, engraving on February 19, 2008
Quietly, peacefully, without much noise Internet gained yet another new website. Its name is Knives and Engraving and it is about… Knives and Engraving! Who would’ve guessed, right? Actually the full name is “Custom knives and hand engraving” – main reason is to make search engines happy-happy.
This is a website for our small business. Currently there’s not much more to see than was in http://www.marrandi.ee, but I have some nice plans with it and it needs much-much TLC in the future. Actually the new website is English cousin for Marrandi Metallehis.
AND. Last week I got myself a brand new toy. Canon HV20 HD videocamera. First quickie video is up in video section of our webiste – check it out Workshop Tour.
If any of you, my dear readers, have ideas of what you’d like to see videos about, then let me know. Currently I have 2 ideas I’d like to make video about. First is a short overview of how one knife is made (maybe even with damascus blade, who knows) and second is about engraving. Something like my post Engraving process, but in video.
Moving forward, or backward?
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in General, Life on January 16, 2008
Quite peaceful lately here, huh? Well, there are reasons for everything, even for this long pause of quietness.
The following might be come as a shock to someone, so all you who are under 18 years of age, please call your parents and read the rest of the post with them. They can help you get over, if you happen to get traumatized.
OK, so here it comes.
I went back to work. The regular, usual, everyday ‘boring’ 9-5 office job.
I signed the contract with Skype before Christmas and started the work on 2nd of January. The position I have is systems administrator. Hey, at least we have free lunches plus free calls over Skype…
The reason, you might ask? Reason is very simple. Money, plain and simple as that. During the time I worked as freelance knife maker and engraver I had almost completely wasted my savings I had had, and knives didn’t bring in anything yet. So the reasonable part of me won over and I took the job.
But friends, all is not lost. I will definitely keep on engraving and making knives. Plus now that I have constant inflow of money I can afford to buy all the tools, materials, books and courses I need. And money to market the products and web…
Now I know that just jumping in overnight like that doesn’t work _that_ well. I need time to learn and market needs time adjust with one more maker competing for customers.
As of the website name contest. Unfortunately I must say that finally I didn’t pick any of your suggestions. It was hard decision. I had to choose (hopefully) a domain name for long-long time. I wanted it to be very simple and very search engine friendly. So the name I chose is knivesandengraving.com. I hope to put something up there real soon now ™. BUT, I will be giving out the engraved Zippo anyway. I just have to figure out who will get it – who submitted the most entries, who picked the coolest name, randomly?
Things of beauty
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in Life, Smithing on April 21, 2007
Last week passed very quickly. I mean really-really quickly. This happens when you do something you really like – you just get lost in the process and forget about yourself and world. Your mind is focused on the very thing you are doing. You are not checking your 3 email accounts after every 10 minutes to see if someone wrote you and you don’t check Google Reader to check out if any of the 20 blogs you’ve subscribed to has some new posts. And if something new accidentally pops up, then it’s even better excuse not to work and read it.
This happened to me very often when my job was boring. For some reason I just couldn’t find the excitement in programming anymore. Of course there are still many things/areas I want to learn in programming, but this can’t happen in some government office job.
Anyways.
Last week passed very quickly. We are getting very close to finishing our first bigger batch of practice swords. They’re katanas. They’re practice swords for us (we practice the making) and for clients (they practice some kind of sword art). In the beginning of week we finished the blade sanding – now they’re sanded with 150 grit paper. After that we started to make all those little details that go with sword. There are about 5 copper details to make and some of them require soldering together. So all in all about 50 pieces to cut out, solder, sand and polish to mirror finish. I hope they’ll be finished in a week or two. Then I’ll post some photos here too.
In the mean time my father made two knives to find out how 2 processes work. First is pattern welding 
(also called Damascus) and second is temperline creating (called hamon in Japanese sword). Good thing is that these processes are actually very simple (once you know how to do it).
This is the temperline knife. Blade length is 11cm.
This is Damascus blade. Blade length is 7cm.
And here is big closeup of Damascus blade tip. Different layers of metal are nicely seen, there should be about 30 layers.
Past, present, future
Posted by Viljo Marrandi in Life, Programming on April 3, 2007
This blog will describe one man’s journey from being a professional programmer to becoming a blacksmith. How it came to be, why it came to be and how I progress in this profession. Will I succeed or will I go back to my comfortable computer chair and sweet little cubicle with 8 levels managers on top of me in 6 months – that is the question to which future will give answer.
Little background. I started to study computers in 1995 at technical school. In 1998 I started to work as a technician after school – building PC’s, troubleshooting Windows problems etc. At that time I also became interested in Linux. Next job was user support and admin assistant in one TV station, which went bankrupt few years later after I left. After that came web programmer in one little company. There I became leading developer after some time. Mostly we used Apache/mod_perl/Embperl/MySQL (later we switched to PostgreSQL) for developing websites.
In 2003 summer I went to army, where I served for 7 months, instead of the required 11, because I had kidney surgery so they released me after that (that New Year’s Eve I spent alone in hospital drinking fanta and watching fireworks, how cool is that?). From 2004-2006 I worked in Estonia’s biggest telco. There I mostly programmed in perl and did all kinds of stuff from web-sites to MPEG video stream parsing (one of the most interesting projects I’ve done). In that time period I also became interested in lisp, thanks to Paul Graham’s essays and Eric Raymond’s “How to become a hacker” which says: “LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it.” – I got it enough to start liking it a lot.
Then came the government job. I let one guy talk me in to it. It was from 2006 to 2007. It was Java. It was Enterprise. It was editing 7 different java source files to change one SQL query. It was filling 2 forms with 7 signatures to get one day off. It wasn’t too much stress. It was good salary. I didn’t enjoy it. They offered me lots of money. I quit.
Then came 3 months working from home doing perl web development (it ended at 16th of March at 11:36). I got to choose how much I did, what I did and when I did it. This kept my skin warm, but still not much enjoyment. This also gave me time to think about life in general and what I want out of it.
Here’s what I came up with:
- I don’t need lots of money to enjoy life, I need to learn to enjoy basic things in life – spending time with people I love, talking, listening, being alone, food, wine, running, movies and so on.
- I want to work for myself, not for others and earn their living
- 7+ years of working daily behind the computer made me realize that I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life. I’ve always been good at doing ’stuff’ and enjoying it too, this could be an alternative.
- I want to live in country. City has its perks, but I’m not made for citylife. There’s just too much stress, noise and people in the city. And besides, isn’t 12 years in the city already enough? Which is better – while eating breakfast you see from your window other houses and busy city traffic with big trucks and lots of noise or see pack of wild goats also eat their breakfast near woods, running around and enjoying life?
- I want my life to be fulfilling
I think Universe had perfect timing for me. Just a little while ago my father rented out his company and started to make Japanese style swords as a hobby. He was also sick and tired of running the company just as I was sick and tired of working for others. He already had from good ol’ times lots of hardware needed for metal work. So he build a coal forge, bought an anvil and a good hammer and off he went (as of now he already sold his first sword made from old Volga springs for quite a nice price).
Then I decided – I’ll become a blacksmith/bladesmith too. I start to make knives and other things with blades – daggers, swords, scimitars, axes, you name it. Especially I want to do Damascus style blades. I know they’re not easy to do (well), but I have the time. I’ll start with knives, of course.
Here’s a picture of my very first try to make a knife blade. It is far from being finished and being perfect, but it might give some idea what will the results be in the future.
I’ll keep you updated with my trials in the workshop.
In the future I plan from time to time give away knives that I’ve made, so be sure to check my ramblings.
