French Miner's Pocket Knife Part 3

The wood has cured to the stainless steel parts, now I have to shape the wood. I used a grinding disk and hand viles. The grinding disk goes fast but it burns the wood so I use it to begin with and finish with the hand viles. At a certain point you get closer to the metal parts and the two start to merge together. I then drill holes for the metal pins and I can now begin to test fit it together to see how the overall shape will turn out. It's still too thick, more wood has to be removed for it to fit nice and comfortably in my hand.

When I get close to the final shape I wet the wood and grain will show up and protrude, you let it dry and sand off the fibers that are sticking out for a smoother finish. From now on I can just use sandpaper. I'm not worried about the top part, the spine of teh knife, it will probably need some viling to get the metal spine to sit flush with the handle pieces.

In the next part we will put everything together and finish the knife with a coat of linseed oil.

French Miner's Pocket knife Part 2

The next step in creating the handle for the pocket knife was to glue the wood pieces to the metal pieces using epoxy. Then leave it alone for at least a day to fully cure.
In the meantime I etched a logo on the blade using electricity and an acid-salt solution. Nail polish is used to protect the steel and the logo was created by removing nail polish with a pencil or small scredriver.
I have seen knives that have the spine viled with decorative designs so I decided to give that a go as well. Carefully measuring the spine and putting marks where to vile. There's no "undoing" when you start this.
Next step will be to shape the handle and drill the holes for the steel rods that will keep everything together.

French Miner's Pocket Knife Part 1

I have done pocket knives before, usually american types and some fake french, chinese made Laguiole knives. But while searching for other knife kits I happily stumbled upon a french website that offered knife kits from various french regions. I like the designs, they look pretty solid, something worthwhile spending your time on making it. So I ordered some and this is the first one I'm showing. It is called a "miner's knife", it's very simple but good quality 12c 27 steel. First, the choice of wood, I had some ash wood still lying around and it fits perfectly cause I don't want a showy knife with expensive wood, I want it to look like a tool. Here's some photos of all the pieces after I roughly shaped the wood to fit the handle.

Leather Watch Case With Lighting Part 4: Finished

It took me about a week in total, mostly evenings, to finish this project. I'm very pleased with it I must say. Could it have been done better? Yes, especially dealing with the faux leather around corners, next time I will have to think about how to do that better. There were still some small jobs to do after it was basically done. For instance, I had to make a cover to hide the battery that powers the lighting. The acrylic sheet had a lot of scratches, which I buffed out mostly at the cost of it being no more shiny. The underside has some velt feet to keep the leather from being scratched. The closing mechanism needed some more adjusting cause I could barely open it. All in all quite some work but it was worth it. Now I can start collecting some watches! :)