Hello All,
Here's the first entry from the drawing board at JDB Knives. A terrific young author named
Ty Schwamberger and I have entered into an exciting new collaborative effort. It's a knife to celebrate the publishing of his first novel. His novel,
Night School is in the horror genera and lets just say that it involves knives and a very twisted personality. Sound cool? Well, sounded cool to me as well. I am a knife maker!
It seems that Ty's imagination as a writer extends to thinking outside the box of marketing. Ty's idea is to produce a one of a kind, limited edition knife that fits his vision and offer the knife and an autographed edition of his novel to his fans and collectors.
See what I mean by out of the box? Well, after some conversation and design consulting we've decided on a knife for the project. That's what you will see here. I'm gonna let everyone in on a build-a-long kind of thing. As I build the first knife of the series, which will be
Numbered 1, you guys can watch the process I go through to produce each and every original knife design.
Feel free to ask questions, make comments and suggestions. Heck, there are lots of ways to do this stuff. You may have a faster, easier, smarter way of doing it. Maybe we can all learn something.
The actual first step was the concept art/computer rendering that I sent Ty for approval. There were several of those and several more Ty never saw. We're gonna skip that for now and start with my actual first step for building every new knife design.
All that said...here we go!
The first step involves spending some quality time at a drafting board or in this case with a cad (computer aided design) program. I start with a simple, single line scale drawing. This scale drawing is what I use to make the patterns for individual parts. That's what this first image is. A screen capture of the cad drawing.
Step 1:
Step 2 is to then print out the drawing and transfer it to a material I use for patterns. Carbon paper makes this step pretty easy. You can see the transferred drawing in the middle and the printout underneath in the Step 2 pic. I've gone back over the carbon lines with a fine point sharpie to preserve the grind lines.
Step 2:
Then for step 3...use scissors and Exacto knives to cut out the pattern. Now is a good time to mention that I trim the pattern slightly smaller than the finished size of the knife. I want to be able to grind down to the layout lines to get the finished profile. If I just draw around the outside edge of a full size pattern I have to grind away my layout marks to get it to finished dimension. Then I'm just guessing if I've gone too far.
Step 3
Steps 4 till completion will be added in installments later. Lets hear your thoughts.
JD,
