Wood Duck

I’ve always admired wood ducks.   According to the ODNR they are sexual rabbits having two broods a year as compared to the rest of the waterfowl slackers.  That’s not why I like them.  They seem just too icey to me. 

My friend Leonard had a wood duck decoy with a ‘collectable’ knife inside.  After I moaned and kvetched enough he sold it to me just to get rid of me. Thank you, Leonard!  Every day I look at that duck and it makes me smile!

Inside is a United Cutlery 1993 Wildlife Series Limited Edition Trapper.  Limited to 7500, that is.  Mine is 2189.  It has the two typical blades found in a trapper, a spey and a drop point.  Under the clear plastic handles is a copy of original art by Larry Duke.

The knife, to my surprise was made in the USA.  Most of the UC knives are made somewhere else.  Frankly, I don’t consider then to be very high quality.

There’s another on the market today, but the wood duck isn’t nearly as nice.  The knife?  Well, let us just draw a charitable vale of silence over it.

I have a little insight for you, but you know this stuff,  

One:  There is no regulating body, any police or force of law that prevents a manufacturer from producing a second limited production run of the same product.

Two:  Mass produced limited editions seldom have real value and market growth potential.

Having said that, I’m really glad to have my wood duck!

Price

It’s a competitive world.  If you can consistently sell the same product as your competitor for less money, you could drive them out of business and make yourself rich.  Companies look for ways to do this: better manufacturing efficiencies, automation, cheaper materials and lower overhead.

It’s the overhead that worries some knife manufacturers.  They have, essentially two main customers, brick-and-mortar (B&M) stores and internet stores.  They like brick-and-mortar.  They understand them and anticipate a large order once, perhaps several times a year.  That means a large transfer of cash which makes it easier for them to operate.  Internet stores on the other hand can have very low overhead.  They could be a couple people in someone’s basement with a website.  Your order to them could be bundled in a largish order and placed.  Even if they have stock on hand, the overhead is low, no building, or sales force, and fewer employees.

They can sell cheaper and that affects B&M.  Suddenly B&Ms find they can’t compete with some brother and sister in Arizona who have website and a garage to work out of.

Some knife manufacturers, worried about lower prices "cheapening” the brand and losing the lump orders, have gone to MAP, Minimum Advertising Price.  Vendors, both B&M and Web based, sign an agreement to honor that price and frankly, companies enforcement these agreements with a stick.  Too many violators and the distributor or dealer will be dropped from the manufacturer's authorized buyer list.

Here’s an example of a very nice little knife:

Case Stockman Burnt Gray

        SRP:$83.95

        Your Price XXXXXX

        MAP:$54.99

You don’t need to know the wholesale price, but MAP is what you’ll often see on a website.  They frame it as a sale price, reduced from the suggested retail price (SRP) but it is really the bottom price they can advertise.  It’s a playing field leveler.

Yes, they can sell it for less, but it’s always an in-store special, something web-based stores can’t do.  Remember when advertisements would say “POR” or Price-On–Request?  It became apparent it was too expensive to have employees answering the phone to give a price to someone who may not actually come in the store.

So everyone went to MAP.

So, why don’t we cut the crap, knife manufacturers?  Just make the Suggested Retail Price the MAP price.  Some companies are doing it.  Deejo does.  Their MAP is their suggested retail price.  CRKT’s Provoke has a MAP five cents cheaper than the suggest retail.

This MAP ‘sale’ is not quite lying to the consumer.  But it seems a little too oily to me.

Carving Fruit

The trick or treaters gathered in homes around Akron and the burgs in preparation for what is a yearly rite of passage, Halloween.  Routes are mapped, evaluated, altered and re-planned.  Last minute adjustments to costumes and provisions for rain are being made, cancelled and re-adjusted even as I press my keyboard.  Moms have programmed a route in their GPS.  Their SUV will pull up to the driveway, the door slides open and kids will pour out like an incoming tide.

We too are ready.  Two years ago we ran out at 400 pieces and had to sneak back into the house, turn off the porch light and pretend we weren’t home.  We’re ready this year with an excessive but undisclosed amount of candy.  Dentists around the city have been sending us thank you notes.  Yeah, we have a lot of candy.

Two of my favorite knives:  Mickey Yurko and a Russian Fisherman 

It’s also a two pumpkin year for us.  We always make the mistake of buying the pumpkin and then deciding how to carve it.  Some designs work better than others, but we try to sandwich our last minute inspiration onto a pumpkin not suited for it almost every year.  What the heck, it’s about having fun.

Proto artwork

I selected two knives to work with.  I have an orange and black handled Mickey Yurco in D2 steel.  One of the cool things Mickey does is he gives all his knives a unique number.  I have the 3407^th knife he has made.  I bought it because of the blade and the handle.  It always reminds me of Halloween.  If a movie monster jumps me Halloween night, it is in for a bit of a surprise.  This knife cuts.

Russian Fisherman style knife, not a flay knife

The second selection was a Russian fisherman knife with a stacked wafer birch bark handle.  The blade is made from one of the Russian knife steels.  The Russians are doing some amazing metallography and developing interesting steels.  It is very much in the puukko style which has been interesting me more and more.   The long, simple lines of the blade are elegant.  But it is birch bark handle that attracts me.

Anyone who has carved pumpkins knows the biggest problem is manipulating the blade.  Too much pressure and the blade shoots through the fleshy pumpkin wall like magic and over shoots the endpoint.  Too little and the knife gets the idea that it is Excalibur stuck in the stone and you’re not King Arthur.

The two best tools

Look, I have knives.  There’s never a shortage of sharp edges around here, but in truth, do you know what works the best?

The thin bladed Victorinox kitchen paring knife and a dull, course saw-like blade made for children.  The saw gives you the most control shaping and cutting and paring knife lets you sharpen and open up features to make them transparent.

I’ve tried a lot of knives for carving pumpkins.  One year I tried to be edgy with a chainsaw.  It took me months to get the saw cleaned up.  Trust me; you'll be happier with the above recommendation.

I look forward to Halloween all year.  It’s one of the few times I feel comfortable talking to children I don’t know. 

PS:  It was rainy, cold, windy and we still had at least 300 kids.

BOO!

Custom

Making a knife doesn’t mean you have to start with a lawn mower blade and a forge.  A variety of steels in terms of grade and types are available.  Also available are knife kits which in which the blade is  pre-shaped and sharpened.  These kits also come in a variety of completion.  Some have all the components and you assemble your knife. Other require a little more effort on your part.

Woodcraft offers a variety of learning projects so I signed up for the knife making.  I wanted to see how they handled epoxying and pinning handles.  As you’ve seen on Forged In Fire, pinning handles onto your knife is one of the major stumbling blocks for contestants.  They need to drill through steel, align holes, hammer pin in place while the five minute epoxy is hardening. 

Basic kit plus wood handles

Here’s my kit and I’m using a light olive wood for the handle.  The first step is to turn a 3/8 inch thick slab into two slabs.  The second is to tape your blade with removable painters tape.  Use lots of tape to protect your hands from the edge.  Safety first.

Turning one piece of wood into two

We traced the handle on the wood blanks making sure a square end of the wood are in  complete contact with the bolster, then on to the band saw.  Removing excess wood is a time saver, but leave enough just in case your handle needs to be finessed a little.  But really, a hand coping saw would have worked just as well.  You could just sand it all away too.

Taped, trimmed, ready for epoxy

After you assure yourself each side of the knife’s handle has the correct cutout, the pins fit correctly and you’re happy with everything, dry fit it together again.  Can’t be too careful!

Clamped

Now get the clamps out and mix your epoxy.  So, Bunkie, five or thirty minute epoxy?  The class used five minute because it is fast and we gave it a half hour.  I like the thirty minute or longer.  I want the longer time for fixing an “Oops!” and I believe longer cure epoxy is stronger.  While I have no plan to destroy an elk’s skull or batter the hood of a 1948 Ford pick-up truck with my knife, stronger always seems better to me.

After the epoxy is cured, it is sanding time.  Woodcraft has a variety of terrific sanders, rotary oscillators with different radius, belt sanders, disk sanders but all you really need is any sander you have and patience.  

Sanding in process.

Your plan of attack is different from anyone else.  I like a rounded handle with a palm swell and flat top.  Start removing wood, but remember the Golden Rule of carpentry:  It’s easy to take wood off, very hard to put wood back.

Keep handling your knife.  How does it feel to you?  Too thick?  Too rough?  Edges sticking up?  Keep working.  And while you’re striving to make your knife, remember perfection is the enemy of accomplishment.  Experiment with it.  Do you want an asymmetric “D” shape handle or maybe oval facets?

Finished

When you get it to the shape you want, move to a finer grit paper.  Work your way down to a finish you want.  How about polishing to a 4000 grit finish?  The wood starts to come alive the more sanding dust you create.

The wood finally explodes to life with a finish.  You can stain it, wax it, linseed oil it, urethane it.  That’s up to you.  I used a coating of flax seed oil.  Just a fancy name for linseed.  That a drying oil, so I left it outside in the sun to help cross link the finish.

Just one variety of the steel and blade shapes available

It’s not perfect, but the next one I make will be better.  I know what to look for and what to watch for.  And I know how much fun it was.