Knife #1

Here is my first knife made with my own two hands.  She may not be a beauty to you, but to me, she is just fine.  I don't have any pictures of the process as I was busy with a hammer, but I assure you, I forged this one myself and let me tell you again, it's not as easy as it looks.  It took me a whole day to make this knife and a whole bag of charcoal.  Vinh can do a knife like this in about 45min. and use about 1/4 of a bag of charcoal.  The man is a professional.

So, take a look.

I learned the process from start to finish; from a rectangle piece of steel to this, including the wooden handle.

The handle turned out very nice looking.  It started with just a piece of wood with bark and tiny little branches coming out of it.  You never can tell what the inside is going to look like until you grind it down and polish it off.  This one turned out very nice.  I think Vinh wanted to keep this handle, but he is nice and let me keep it.

You can see the black dots on the lower part of the blade, toward the bottom.  Usually when you polish the bevel those will go away, but because my blade had a few dents in it, I couldn't get them all out.  But it's no problem for me, its my first knife.

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Here are just a few other pictures.  It's hard to get new perspectives and new angels in the forge, as there isn't much to work with as far as moving around.  So I decided to take some pictures in black and white and just plant the camera in one spot focusing on the anvil and just documenting the action going on around it.

I had to sit on the horn so when Vinh hammered on the other end the anvil would stay planted.

Turning a handel

This one just looks epic.  Steam coming from the tongs and the bright fire in the background makes it look like there is an explosion!

Here is the mother ship; the one that forges them all; the beast herself ready to chew up and spit out any piece of metal that enters her mouth.  Careful with this one.