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Ok so I have been working on making this chefs knife for my cousin. I fored it to shape and was pretty satisfied with the blade profile. I held it up to one of my store bought ones and its pretty close to the same dimensions. I went with a flat grind for the blade and that was fine. One side is much cleaner than the other but im not completely unhappy with it. One of my final steps was to etch the blade. Now in the past i have used boiled vinegar to etch this same material and was happy with the results but was unhappy with the way it completely stunk the house up. So i decided to try some ferric chloride. First thin i can tell you is this pro tip. DO NOT PUT FERRIC CHLORIDE INTO A TIN FOIL BAKING TRAY!!! Yea turns out that that causes a chemical reaction. Extreme heat, smoke, boiling chemical. Lucky i had some gloves so i could pick it up and dump the whole thing into a plastic bucket which stopped the reaction. So yea after that i got a plastic container and poured the ferric into that and submerged the blade for 20 minutes to get the etch. I used one of those green dish sponge things to rub the etchant once i took the blade out and cleaned it all up. So the etch took and the pattern came out fine. But here is the thing. The etchant left this weird rusty looking residue on the blade which i think some of this pictures show. Now i thought it was actually rust so i put the blade into hot water and scrubbed the heck out of it with an SOS pad but it didnt do anything so now i need to re sand the whole thing and etch the sucker again. What did i do wrong?

I've been talking to some of you about a skinning knife I'll be making with a checkered handle. It's part of a set themed around some of the great American explorers. The first knife in the set, "The Clark," is a pretty straight forward drop-point hunter. Here's the WIP.... and the obligatory injury photo. More to come tomorrow.