Finally got this one finished enough to show pics. It's a Viking age recreation based off of many finds dating from that period in and around Gotland Sweden. Final product is a 5" 1084 Carbon steel blade Roasted Curly Maple handle with faux ivory bolster and Brass back plate and pull ring. Sheath is 8 oz leather with hand tooled brass. Glued up in my fancy press After doing the test finish on this Maple I was quite excited to see the end result. This one has a smaller companion piece that's designed to hang from a woman's brooch (Fibula) I thought I was being smart and used a smaller than usual piece of the faux ivory for the front bolster to save material. Turns out, that wasn't the best idea I'd ever had. Ding ding! Round two This is pretty much my favorite part of the whole process with these knives, that first bit of oil on the handle when i'm sanding at 320 grit. When the magic happens you suddenly get a preview of what it will look like when it's finished. Finished knives. I really need to build a light box. And now onto the leatherworking portion of the week! I wanted to give these a bit more visual impact than other ones I've done so I carved out a diagonal checkered pattern. Wet forming the sheath to the knife. I need to make some thin micarta or something for this part I think. Finding scraps that are flat so they won't mark the wet leather is challenging. I do enough of these that I should probably have ready made pieces. Dried sheath punching holes for stitching. I also need to find a stitching punch with wider teeth, this one is 4mm spacing but I end up only using every other hole. Dyed red and ready for brass. Normally I would wax the sheath here with beeswax but forgot to do so on the big knife. Haven't done the brass on the small one yet so I'll wax it before I continue. One of the things I don't like about this process is it wastes a lot of leather, but I don't know how else to get the pattern lined up properly without starting with a rectangle. Punching out the inside curve on the front chape I cut the outside with tin snips. And filing it down to final shape before annealing, stamping and bending. Front chape, stamped, bent to shape and sanded before a quick polish on the buffer and a test fit to see if I need to adjust it at all. Test fitting the rest of the brass plates, some with ready made parts (which turned out to be too short for this specific knife) and a cardstock template. You can see my new Maker's mark on the brass plate that makes up the chape. It's upside down in this picture but it's an Elder Futhark (Runic) O and E which stands for my SCA persona's name, Oli Einarsson. New brass fittings that are a bit longer at various stages of polishing Fittings all laid out and ready for drilling and riveting The end result! Thanks for reading! (I still need a lightbox)
Yeah the sheaths take almost as long to make as the knife does. Put in 3+ hours on the brass for the Fibula knife last night.
