John in Oly, WA

Thanks Charles for your helpful suggestions. Sorry for hijacking this thread. She has visitation in the form of therapeutic reunification counseling to repair the damage from her abuse. She refuses to participate. The court made it mandatory and appointed a supervisor to oversee her compliance. She's claiming she can't afford the $98 per session as her excuse for not participating. Maybe she can't. She remains purposefully unemployed and has managed to con some people into supporting her (longer than they planned, I'm sure) so she can focus full time on her obsession with destroying my life. The problem with the visitation is she sees the kids only as a source of income. Her plan all along was to scam me out of everything I own. To her, the kids were just a means to an end - to have custody and have me paying her child support for income. Before the therapeutic visitation was ordered, she had supervised visitation. She only used that to try to get information from the kids she could use against me in court. She was kicked out of visitation every time for violating that rule. So she definitely isn't interested in the more structured/controlled therapeutic visitation. I haven't pressed the issue of visitation, because it's better for the kids that she not have contact with them. She is verbally/psychologically abusive and it would take over a week for the boys to recover from the few supervised visitations she did have with them. There is no bright side to look on in this situation that I can find. It's complicated and the worst is yet to come. She's working now on suing me for support, including back support - it's an immigration thing and doesn't look good for me and the boys. In the meantime, I distract myself with other aspects of life, and react to her insanity only when I have to. Not sure how the embrace the suck approach works. Just plodding along, trying to get by and put her in the background as much as I can, but 10 years of continuous harassment is wearing on me. I'll survive it one way or another.

Holiday blues. I wish it were just the holiday blues. I have a problem with no solution that I can see. I'm definitely in the "pretending not to see the problem" camp as the only solution. I spend all my free time in my shop working on projects. It helps my brain focus on something else for a time. Don't know what I'd do without my shop and projects. I have an ex. Our divorce was final in 2008. She has been taking me back to court on a constant, continuous basis ever since. By constant, continuous, I mean 10-16 court appearances per year, every year plus all the time spent preparing for the appearances. Every frivolous thing the courts will allow her to file - which is anything, or the same thing over and over, all of it frivolous, some of it damaging, but still have to appear and go through the process to get her motions denied. Court won't stop her from filing. I live on pins and needles wondering what I'm going to be served with next, and when, how to pay the attorney fees (over a quarter of a million so far over the last 10 years). Now she's expanded it from family court to the county superior court and the court of appeals. Three times the difficulty and three times the fees. My attorneys can't come up with any way to stop this. Yes, now it's attorneys -plural. Three. One for each court. My ex is suing my first attorney now as well. Just existing, waiting to get my life back, raising my two boys - 17 and 13 now. Trying to keep focus on my responsibilities keeps me going. I got custody because she was found to be abusing them. She managed to get the court to absolve her of any responsibility for child support somehow too. She hasn't communicated with our boys at al in any way for nearly 6 years. I don't know how that's really affecting them, but it can't be good. I know they're angry at times. My youngest son, when a lady in the grocery store made a general comment to him about his mother liking something she saw us buying, said "my mom is dead". The poor woman was horrified and felt so bad that she'd said anything. I just try to keep a positive attitude and "normal" environment for my kids. No manual for this though, so who knows how well it's going. Get up every day, hope I don't get served with anything and focus on distracting myself from it. It's depressing and stressful beyond anything I could have imagined. Try to find positive things to smile about. This website is one of them. Thanks for letting me rant. Hope everyone has the best holidays they can, and may all your problems be small and have easy solutions.

Beautiful knife. Really like all the historical elements worked into the design.

That is! Hey, ANY excuse to buy another tool is just good operating procedure. My Dad's wise teaching - every project should include acquisition of a new tool. TommyTapTap - I will keep that excellent line of reasoning in my pocket in case my Mom pines for her old favorite paring knife. It was right on the verge of catastrophic failure! Who knows what could have happened!

If you could post some photos, that might help people help you identify it.

BigGun, that's my fall back if the new knife doesn't pass muster, with one small caveat - I don't know how to TIG weld - and I don't have the equipment. I have a MIG welder (Lincoln 135Plus) and I have an Everlast PowerARC 200ST 200amp TIG/Stick welder, but don't have the TIG set up for it. Maybe find someone who does and have it TIG welded.

Thanks Will. I'm a function over form kind of guy myself as well. If the tool doesn't function well, then the form won't appeal to me no matter how much effort was put into the form. And a tool that does function superbly, has a certain beauty to it regardless if any effort was made as to the form.

Wire wheel in a drill would clean it up without doing damage. Just don't use a grinder on it. Maybe wipe the sides down with linseed oil after the wire brush.

My thought exactly after I finished mine and found how much I use it.

Thanks Thomas! I figured there was probably a good explanation for it that I wasn't aware of. Learning something new every day!

All very nice! I like the texture on the handle of the first knife. And the material combination of the handle on the Bowie.

The lowly paring knife. Not a glamorous blade, but a useful one. My Mom wanted a new handle on her favorite paring knife from the knife scales my son has been making. But while my son and I were removing the old handles, the blade broke! So I grabbed some 15N20 and cut out another blade to match the old, heat treated it, tempered it, ground the bevel and we were back in business. My son made some simple mosaic pins. We attached the scales. Just need to do the final sharpening. Hopefully my Mom will be happy with it and won't miss her favorite paring knife.

Nice looking build! Very handy addition to the shop, I think.

Nice to learn a bit more. Thanks JLP!

Don't know anything about it, but it looks like a beauty. Congrats!

Thank you everyone for the clarification on iron oxide. And thanks JLP for the offer to send me some scale - I have some around the anvil, so I'm good there. Odd thought - we're trying to keep scale out of our forge welds, but we're adding scale to the flux to do so. Hmmm, confusing.

Thanks everyone for the info. I was just trying to replicate JPH's "Steel Glue" which listed Iron Oxide as an ingredient - specifying "real" iron oxide, not the concrete dyes. Maybe I don't need to get that complicated?

If you were making a flux with Iron oxide in it - what kind of iron oxide would you get? I see yellow, red, black, some labeled synthetic - most seem to be used as a dye.

My excuses for not forging: My forge isn't getting as hot as I'd like it to and I'm thinking (read: procrastinating) I need to build a better propane forge. Which leads to the second excuse... I'm bummed that my first forge welded billet attempt didn't come out quite perfect and I'm in a funk about it (See: forge not getting hot enough - procrastinating). I have several wooden spoons that I need to make for Christmas presents (they're not exactly getting done either). I'm struggling with some warm glass work I'm doing that's not turning out as expected (Mixed two different brands of supposedly COE 90 glass that aren't liking each other's company). I'm in the middle of modifying my 3D printer to print with wax filament, so I can continue the knife collaboration project from Theo. And a red-shafted flicker got into my attic, and aside from spending some time yesterday (that I'd like to say I had set aside for forging - but I really didn't) to create a path out for him/her/it, I need to find and plug his/hers/its path in, so I don't have that problem again. Dang, It's no wonder I haven't had time to forge recently.

And that's why the bidding is up to $500.

Understand completely. My comment just goes along with that general idea that you can never have too big of a shop. Although, I walk into Home Depot, take a look around and think, "yeah, this could be just about big enough" LOL

Beautiful, as always! Good luck with the move.

Me either! I didn't even know that was possible. LOL!

Equal amounts of table salt and RootKill (copper sulfate pentahydrate) in water. 1/3 to 1/2 a cup of each in a quart of water.

Also, use the TPAAAT method to locate an anvil. It's described in a "sticky" post near the top of this Anvils topic list. You might even find one nearby for cheap or even free.