Managed to get in trouble first thing this morning with an ostrobogulous suggestion. It was the word of the day but it sounded like a good idea. It wasn't.
Then I went for a routine checkup. I did not make an ostrobogulous suggestion to my doctor. She knows too many painful things to do.
I am through applying handle scales to my knives. I did not have a single problem during that process this time so I must be doing something right or I am getting the hang of it. Shouldn't have said that. I am now banging my wooden head against the veneered surface of my wooden computer desk. I imagine the veneer is applied to some particle board which is wood, right?
I removed all the excess glue, pin ends protruding through the scales and sanded the wood flush to the steel. Next step is carving the handles to make them feel good in the hand.
Yesterday, I carved two handles with my Foredom and a carving burr. I smoothed and blended the contours with some 80 grit paper. I will take it down much finer and do the final smoothing with my Sand-O-Flex flap sander. I usually take all the knives through each step before moving on to the next. I try to be organized like that so that I don't have to back up.
I really enjoy this new hobby. I will never be a great blacksmith or even a great bladesmith as I am not really doing much more than shaping and heat treating steel. I am not forging out a blade from a lump of steel like a true blacksmith you see on the TV show
Forged in Fire. I haven't decided whether I will pursue the homemade forge. I can buy a small portable stainless steel forge almost identical in size that is designed to do the same thing with a bottle of propane gas for $65. It comes lined and includes some half-thickness fireproof bricks for the steel to rest upon and to control heat loss. The homemade version will cost almost as much by the time I buy the refractory cement, plaster, sand, bricks and metal parts. I am pretty sure I am too lazy to build what I can buy and have a better piece of equipment to boot.
News Flash!!!!
Kids are getting injured on the playground because they don't know how to play.... An article says that children are getting injured at a much higher rate because they haven't learned how to play safely from their siblings and other children. Parents don't play with children any more and you can't learn how to play safely from your cell phone.
The article to which I have linked below states that children are being injured much more frequently just because they don't know how to play. And suggests that parents who are distracted by their smartphones fail to supervise their children to teach them how to play safely.
I don't know about you but I grew up and played with other kids pretty much without parental supervision. We learned how to play with and from other children. If we played poorly or in a bullying fashion that was explained to us simply with a smack in the nose or by bearing the brunt of sarcastic comments often pointedly emphasized with sarcastic overtones and expletives. We learned how to cuss from our friends.
Parents taught us when play time was over. We were told to come home for supper and then come back in the house when the porch light turns on. That was about the only parental supervision we received. Oh, there was the proverbial "Don't shoot your eye out" when you got your Red Ryder BB gun. Our parents were the original Free-Range Parents long before the phrase was coined.
One father, a research fellow at Yale University, decided to find out, and the results of his study might make you cringe: Smartphones, Craig Palsson concludes, have caused an spike in the number of children getting injured, particularly for the 5-and-under set.
www.yahoo.com
