JPH Posted December 15, 2024 Posted December 15, 2024 Howdy!! Here are the results from the last 10 days or so worth of work...all are laminate...most are Twists patterns.. with wood, Bakelite and Bovine ivory grips..phosphor bronze mounts... Came out OK although the red Bovine Ivory one was a pattern fail..didn't work at all.. But it's clean and solid..just not any real pattern Live and learn.. JPH Quote
Frosty Posted December 19, 2024 Posted December 19, 2024 Beautiful as always Jim, even the not so hot pattern is WAY beyond my best pattern welds. Frosty The Lucky. Quote
JPH Posted December 21, 2024 Author Posted December 21, 2024 Frosty: The pattern I was going for was more of less a modified Ladder..with a "V" shape rung with the bottom of the "V" pointing to the tip of the blade...Methinks I didn't cut the grooves in deep enough and that's what killed the patterning when I flattened..Next time I try this I will cut them in a bit deeper. The steel is clean and all..good solid bar and the whole dagger came out nice otherwise. When I first started doing this 50 plus years ago I would of sold my soul to get a piece of steel this clean..I am sure there are folks just starting out that feel the same way now that I did back then..... I am not complaining about this fail.I am showing it to illustrate the point that no matter how long you have been doing something....surprises happen... and sometimes things don't work out planned... All in all this was a successful failure. You learn more from fails than successes... JPH Quote
Daswulf Posted December 21, 2024 Posted December 21, 2024 Beautiful work. Only you and people of your caliber/experience could pick out anything wrong there. Thank you for sharing your work with us. Quote
Frosty Posted December 21, 2024 Posted December 21, 2024 I hear you. No matter how good a person gets smithing is always a compromise with the material. The more complex the product the more difficult it is to predict and control. And of course, the better a person gets the more they try. I don't see anything I wouldn't brag about if I owned let alone made. However I didn't make them so my eye isn't drawn to what I'd consider mistakes or outright failures if I had. After you described the fail I went back and can see how the pattern gets kind of "muddy" near the tip and what you were going for. Learning is a process of "failure analysis." Try something and fail, we analyze what we did and what we THINK went wrong and try it again. And again and again till we're satisfied. We pick up something we'd missed at every step. IF we're paying attention or better yet taking notes. Thanks for letting us in on the critique. Frosty The Lucky. Quote
JPH Posted December 21, 2024 Author Posted December 21, 2024 Well.. This is one of the ways that this is interesting..every now and then the "Powers That Be" slap ya down and make you realize that nothing in this art is for certain..there is always some gremlin just waiting for the right time to upset your cornflakes... Besides it is a wise man that remembers from whence he came... You have to keep adding to your skill set..if not you start to stagnate and become a bit lazy...as it is I am trying to teach myself some basic leather tooling..Well..stamping mostly..and so far after about a week or so making some gawd-awful things I am at the point to where I am comfortable in putting a very simple and basic "border" around the edges of my sheaths..and I will say that this really tarts them up a bit,...and it makes them much less of an embarrassment when shown.. In fact if I can I might take a photo of the one I did for the failed dagger and post it later tonight... Film at 11... JPH Quote
Frosty Posted December 21, 2024 Posted December 21, 2024 Uh HUH. This reminds me of what my Father used to say to us so often we got purely sick of hearing it, "Familiarity Breeds Contempt." He worked a very dangerous trade for a good 30 years or more and a second's loss of attention, a missed movement, any of a dozen things could ruin a part, hurt or seriously injure the spinner or potentially slice up someone else in the shop. Anyway, familiarity is synonymous with skilled, knowledgeable, etc. And applying that to todays yakking. Once a person makes a few hundred items it becomes too easy to assume the materials will always behave the same or the hammer will always fall the same, etc. So, it becomes too easy to assume a product will finish like we expect and Mr. Murphy gets in his dig. Hopefully one that doesn't draw blood, remove body parts or even knock out a window or overhead light. Trying to control combinations of factors to our satisfaction in the face of the random nature of the universe means we must stay on our toes. I haven't tooled leather in at least 40 years and only dabbled then. I think I have my stamps somewhere in the basement amongst I don't know how many boxes of . . . stuff. I did make a couple things I thought turned out well, my favorite was an hatchet belt sheath. I'm sure all you guys will appreciate me deleting maybe 2 pages of reminiscing about making the hatchet sheath. You're welcome, Frosty The Lucky. Quote
JPH Posted December 21, 2024 Author Posted December 21, 2024 Howdy... As mentioned above .. This is a major "milestone" for me due to the fact that leatherwork and I simply do not play well together. In fact my leather sheaths and such looked like a chimpanzee made them..and it was very embarrassing to even have people look at them .. Now...after making a weeks worth of all sorts of mistakes and all I can actually feel a bit better about what they look like,, No more Chimpanzee leatherwork here... It's now more along the lines of a Orangutan made them... Nothing spectacular but they are solid and look half way decent now... That simple border stamping tarted them up a good bit and now I am no longer hanging my head when folks look at them.. Gotta keep learning new stuff... Now I am asking myself what took me so long to do this?? At times I confuse meself I tell ya...Geeze.. JPH Quote
Frosty Posted December 22, 2024 Posted December 22, 2024 Not bad Jim, I think you've progressed past Orangutan. The tooling looks nice. Have you ever done a saddle stitch? It's a 2 needle technique that is easy with a little practice. Frosty The Lucky. Quote
Daswulf Posted December 22, 2024 Posted December 22, 2024 Finally. Jim, it looks good. I feel it is simple to make good looking leather work in that you make good even stitching and burnish the edges. What you did looks good with the stamping. But, if it looks bad to you, make it so bad that it looks like it was made that way on purpose and people will love it. Lol Will these new ones be up on your web site? Quote
JPH Posted December 22, 2024 Author Posted December 22, 2024 Das: I stitch these on a Tipmann hand stitcher.. the edges I burnish using a smooth steel wheel on a buffer..I am just happy that these worked out as well as they did... To answer your question these should be up on my website this evening if all goes well.. JPH Quote
Frosty Posted December 22, 2024 Posted December 22, 2024 A Tippmann hand stitcher is hard to beat. I just looked it up, I was thinking it was something like a "Speedystitch" but holy moly no, it's the real deal! You don't do things half way do you Jim? Frosty The Lucky. Quote
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