Sorry for not posting anything in a while. Believe it or not, I haven't bought anything especially interesting lately. I did order some more steel but it's taking an age to show up.

So in the meantime I've been staring at my offcuts and getting ideas.

Check these little tackers out. I've stuck a feather in my cap and called them Macaroni, after the most prolific and flamboyant of penguins. I can fit two of them yin-yang style across the breadth of the 3" stock I use to make my Emperors out of.

There's a wee little mini one:

And also slightly less wee than wee but nae as big as medium sized one:

The mini ones have an overall length of about 3-3/8" whereas the maxi ones are 4-3/4" or so. And lest you think these are just more dumb holdout micro neck knives or something, no. They're even dumber than that.

...Because they are a full quarter inch thick. I don't want to tempt fate here by saying this, but wholly aside from being outstandingly ridiculous that may also have the knock-on effect of making these functionally indestructible.

In fact these are so pequeño that I had to make a special downsized version of my logo. (No points for guessing that I immediately turned around and made this into the favicon on my web site.)

I will also draw your attention to that bevel. I'm quite fond of that, actually. These are a 14° per side Scandi grind finished with a 20° micro-bevel which makes them alarmingly sharp. This despite the overall geometry resembling an HO scale viking battle axe. I finished these down to 120 grit, and I could have kept on polishing but I decided I liked the effect of leaving the grind and its impeccable radius — if I may continue to toot my own horn — clearly visible. It catches the light in a rather pleasing fashion, if you ask me.

The handle scales are printed again, using the same bolts as the Emperor. You wouldn't believe how many of these things I have. Look, I've got to use them up on something.

Sheath making is quite easily my least favorite part of this gig. Don't get me wrong, I'm a dab hand at pressing Kydex and I've made oodles of them, even long before I was making my own knives. But it's tedious and winds up dusting my entire shop with nanoscopic polyvinyl dust and we hates it, hobbits.

So I spent probably nine times more effort designing and 3D printing the sheaths for these instead.

On the bright side, this allowed me to build the retention mechanism right in. Time will tell if this turns out to be a dumb idea.

The rivet spacing is as usual Tek-Lok compatible, or I suppose I could print up some simple belt loops instead.

---

This is not an ad. Here's why: Despite my having four of them all lined up on my desk in a neat little row, the Macaronis are not for sale. Yet.

That's because PayPal inexplicably banned my account after selling a grand total of one lousy knife on my website. At the moment they're holding a couple of hundred bucks of my money hostage, while outright refusing to elaborate why. I'm still fighting with them on that. Thus at the moment I can't take payments for anything from anybody, which is the sort of thing that really kind of cramps your style.

I'll have to get set up with some other payment processor, and truth be told I was only using PayPal because they were the path of the least resistance despite being overtly evil, plus they don't charge any fees until you actually make a sale. I explored other options that are purportedly specifically friendly to the knives-tactical-firearms market and they all seem to have per-transaction plus monthly fees that amount to basically my entire profit margin, which for somebody who might sell a grand total of one knife a month if I'm lucky seems like a raw deal. If any of you guys have any bright ideas on that front I'm all ears.

But he is red. One house finch, possibly one of the ones preparing to nest under my kitchen window awning.

Full size here.

My cherry tree, that is. I never see these guys in my yard at all. I have a thistle feeder hanging there just for them and up until now it's been categorically ignored in favor of whatever it is everyone else in the neighborhood has going on.

Well, yesterday I had four of them hanging around in my tree. I don't know where they came from. I don't know where they went.

This one also eyed the thistle feeder from the top of the shepherd's hook for a while but refused to strike a photogenic pose.

Full sizes here and here.

Since people wanted to see how it turned out. This is a 330x330 object that covers the entire purported print area of my machine.

I'm ashamed to admit that I undershot my filament usage calculation slightly, and I chickened out just before the finish line. I didn't have any more white in stock, so I switched to some grey of the same type from the same manufacturer by doing a mid-air refuel, shoving the end of the new spool in chasing behind the very tail of the old one. I don't think it looks too bad. I may just spraypaint the entire thing white later anyhow. I wanted to use a light color in order to more easily spot and keep track of screws and springs and such.

Oh, I'm a-doin' it.

This part is actually slightly outside the "safe print zone" dashed lines on my build plate. I put down like half a can of hairspray on it right before the nozzle descended. Wish me luck.

Stop the presses. Hold the phone, blow me down, and stone all the crows.

We can pack it all in. Completion is achieved. SOG — you know, the Seal Pup and Trident people? They've gone and done it. They've invented a better and cheaper Bugout than the Benchmade Bugout, and apparently nobody noticed. This despite the latter apparently living rent free in every manufacturer's head. And ours too, come to think of it.

I labored the entire span of my teenage years believing that SOG stood for "Special Operations Gear." Apparently it's the Studies and Observations Group, and I would have called that an April Fools' day prank if I hadn't seen it written on the box. This is their Ultra XR, which is mildly saddled by having a name that makes it sound like some startup's virtual reality gizmo rather than the spiffing EDC knife that it is.

Oh, yeah. And NKD, by the way. As if my still having the box kicking around my desk didn't tip you off. Now that I've finally gotten around to doing all the photography on this thing I can actually start carrying it without having to hyperventillate about getting pocket lint all over it.

The Ultra XR retails for about $90, so half the cost of a Bugout. And it's got a blade made of S35VN steel, so theoretically two notches better than the S30V that the base Bugout comes with. No, there's no compromise there.

As we all know, Benchmade's patent on the Axis lock expired in 2018. And as we all further know, this opened up the floodgates for every other knifemaker on Earth to nick the idea and run with it. This is well into becoming one of those exasperatingly repeated factlets, like did you know that Steve Buscemi was a firefighter who helped in the rescue efforts after 9/11, or that the US version of Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually a reworking of the Japanese game Doki Doki Panic? Did you know???

So while Axis-alike derivatives have been thick on the ground for the last several years, there's been one curious blind spot in the market. If you want a compact Axis folder, up until now your only options have basically been to give Benchmade some money. You can either buy a Full Immunity or a Partial Immunity, or a Mini Bugout, or you can go and soak your head. Everything with a crossbar lock from everyone else is seemingly pathologically in the 3" and up category.

Well, not anymore. For lo, here is the Ultra XR with an Axis-alike lock on it which in its various guises SOG as branded as their "XR lock."

None of this tells you much about what the Ultra XR's big headline feature is. In fact, even looking at it lying on a table like this doesn't do it justice.

This ought to give you a clue.

The Ultra XR is so thin, every cell phone reviewer in a five mile radius just got an inexplicable stiffie. It's only 5.57mm thick (0.217") across its scales, not including the clip or screw heads. They don't add much more, with it measuring up at 9.9mm across the button heads on the lock bar which is its widest point without the clip, or 0.390". Thanks to its single piece carbon fiber handle scales, it also only weighs 34.6 grams or 1.22 ounces — Around two thirds what a Bugout does.

It seems that ought to be an easy enough goal to achieve; just build your knife to be uselessly tiny and you too can enjoy a bunch of minimalist numbers on your spec sheet. But the Ultra XR isn't, and is still sized such that it's an actual Big Boy knife.

It's not that much smaller than an OG Bugout. 6-1/8", by my measure, not including the little part of the clip that sticks out. That's roundabout the same size as the Mini variant of the Bugout, itself a knife that costs twice as much. And that's just the pokey Grivory version, too. If you want a carbon fiber one to mix it with the Ultra XR's racecar materials cred, that'll be a full $325, thank you.

Part of what makes the striking thinness achievable is carbon fiber's high rigidity for its weight and thickness. Thus the Ultra XR doesn't require any liners beneath its scales, and they're constructed purely of thin slabs of carbon fiber. It's not totally unsqueezably rock solid rigid, but it's darn impressive compared to a bog standard old Bugout:

SOG have gotten clever with the XR Lock, as well. It eschews the usual "omega" hair springs that would normally reside in between the liners (or dinky plates, in the case of that-which-is-oft-named) and scales, the former obviously being something this thing hasn't got. Instead, the lock bar is driven by a tiny torsion spring that's wrapped around one of the body spacers.

You can see this easily in this highly uncouth and overexposed down-the-barrel shot that I took by shining a flashlight straight into the gap. Otherwise the lock works in the usual way, and is as ambidextrous as ever.

I took this thickness comparison shot but did not plan ahead to devise an appropriate segue to fit it into the narrative. Here it is anyway, for all that it's worth. The Ultra XR is visibly quite a bit thinner than either Benchmade's old 535 or its little brother. Why the Ultra XR is thus not the undisputed darling of, say, all backpackers everywhere remains a mystery.

The Ultra XR's drop pointed blade is 2-5/8" long or about 67.9mm, and only 0.0805" or 2.05mm thick. There's no thumb stud, since obviously that would add to the thickness. Instead, there's a slot cut into the spine of the blade for grip.

Of course you can still Axis Flick it open and shut all the livelong day. Nobody with an Axis locker uses the thumb studs for anything, regardless of how shiny and anodized they may or may not be.

The Ultra XR has a super deep carry clip that SOG suggest you could also use as a money clip. Despite appearances it is reversible. It sticks out the side more than double the thickness of the knife, but otherwise it's actually really nice. For once in history its not sprung so damn tightly you can't get it to friggin' let go of your pants. The draw is nice and smooth and very easy. I imagine that's largely due to the fact that the thing weighs so little overall that not much spring force is required to keep it clipped.

If you want to employ it as a keychain knife instead, there's no real provision made for that. I suppose you could pass some cord through the mounting holes for the clip if you removed it, or use the holes intended for reversal on the opposite side. You'd probably have to use dental floss, though.

There are two sizes of screw head on the Ultra XR, T6 and T5 Torx. It seems that SOG used T5s on all the things they didn't want you fucking with. The clip screws, for instance, are T6 and there are matching holes on both sides.

The Axis/XR/crossbar/whateveritis lock is a two piece design, and unscrews from one side. It's got T6 heads in both sides, but like everything on this knife is severely threadlockered so you have to stick a driver in each side in order to get it out. In its slot you can see the prong from the little torsion spring that powers it.

The pivot screws are T6 as well and of course also threadlocked. Believe it or not there is an anti-rotation flat in the pivot screw's shank and a matching D shaped cutout machined into one of the scales. It's anyone's guess as to which side is which out of the box, though, since the heads are the same on either side. So tread lightly. The blade rides on what appear to be Nylon washers.

The two carbon fiber handle slabs are separated by four barrel spacers with screws in either side, one of which acts as the end stop pin for the blade. They're also permanently threadlockered, and require a driver in each side to remove. I'm ashamed to admit that I only have one nice Wiha T5 driver bit despite owning oodles of the T6 ones (for obvious career-related reasons) and I snapped the tip off of my cheap T5 trying it. So, you won't get any photos of the back sides of the Ultra XR's handle scales. I'm sure you'll live. There's nothing exciting in there anyway, except the little torsion spring which I imagine has one leg slotted into a tiny hole drilled in one scale, and is probably prone to go "ping!" and get lost.

In case you forget what SOG actually stands for, they've helpfully laser engraved it in the back side of the blade. And speaking as the proud owner of a very nice laser engraver myself, I am now well versed in exactly what that kind of thing looks like. They used different power level or pulse width settings for the blade steel descriptor than they did for the branding. Cheeky devils.

I had a whole paragraph here speculating on what the blade was coated with to make it black, but I realize belatedly that it's all moot. The front of the box says right there that it's a titanium nitride coating, so undoubtedly applied via some manner of PVD process. I don't normally go for a coated blade but this one at least looks very nice for now. Time will tell if it holds up acceptably for a change, or winds up annoying me and I laser it off.

What I can tell you is that this thing is exceptionally sharp out of the box. The blade's thin geometry makes it slice through suitable materials very easily, although this will obviously never be a fighter or a bushcraft knife.

The Inevitable Conclusion

In case you couldn't tell, I'm just smitten with the Ultra XR. As SOG themselves tell it, it's the perfect urban carry or polite company EDC knife. It's short enough to be within the legal length limit practically everywhere, is made of a nice steel, and has a build quality that can't be criticized. It also weighs practically nothing and rides in your pocket so discreetly that, the marketing department actually being truthful for once, you may genuinely forget that it's there.

It doesn't hurt that it looks cool as hell, too. Even non-knife people can tell as soon as they handle it that it's something special.

I say this a lot, and in fact I might have made it my life's secondary mission to find all the myriad ways to prove this, but as long as the Ultra XR exists there's really no reason to spend the money for a Bugout. Like, ever. (My life's primary mission seems to have become to collect every balisong and screwball knife in the world.) Surely the big B has taken notice of this sort of thing, and all of the above probably has a lot to do with the rumors that the Bugout is finally slated to get a redesign for next year with purported aluminum handles plus a new thinner lock.

I think somebody's running scared. I'm still not in a big rush to buy one, though, because now I have this.

What I went and did was make myself a website:

https://www.flightlessforge.com/

We're going straight back to the Web 1.0 with this one. I haven't maintained a personal website since, oh, probably about 2002. It may thus surprise you to learn that my day job also involves maintaining a website, and one that's a heck of a lot more complicated than this. But given that I've already got one headache to manage I'd rather not give myself another one, so we're keeping this simple for now.

This is surely one of those personal vanity project things which will attract single-digit readership while I have a limitless forum to rattle on to myself forever about whatever off-topic nonsense is on my mind at the moment. If you lot think I type too much here, just imagine what I can get done when I don't have anyone around to stop me.

Anyway, several of you expressed interest in purchasing an Emperor knife. Not to deliberately play the FOMO card or anything, but I have thusly produced one (1) additional example of the same which is up for sale. It's serial number 1. I didn't make more than one because, uh...

I'm out of steel.

So this is seed capital; The sale of this knife will fund my purchase of enough materials to make several more, and eventually we can get to cooking. I'm also putting my Rockhoppers up for sale if any of you lot would like to get your hands on one of those and not have to buy a 3D printer. I figure this is probably a slightly better deal than giving me money via Patreon or Ko-Fi (nudge, nudge) whereupon you get nothing in return. I'm still building up my stock of those, so bear with me. I'll put some Adélies up later, once my printer is no longer busy on its current task.

We will return to our regularly scheduled shitposting, oh, hopefully tomorrow.

I employed my filament swapping plan when I printed the handle scales for this one, adding some stripes of a rather fetching green (if you ask me). It matches the pattern on the sheath, more or less.

I had some concerns about the fragility of the edge taking it down as thin as I did with my personal example, so on this one I left a lot more thickness behind the edge.

I heard you like clickbait.

This is my knife. There are no others like it, and this one is mine.

No, it really is. I made it with my own hands. As a matter of fact, I might have possibly taken the notion of making it with my own hands just a bit too far.

The Secret Of Show Business, Again

This all started fairly innocently. You see, I have this OG Böker Rold. Have done for years. I never got around to talking about it here.

The Rold is a fine knife. I was using it as my default camp knife for quite a while, hence the surface wear you see on its blade there. Böker themselves describe it as a "very durable Outdoor and Camp Knife," which in this business is a bold statement rather akin to standing on top of a hill in a thunderstorm with a copper tureen on your head while holding a flagpole, yelling about how all gods are sissies. That's because what with "bushcraft" still being so much in vogue amongst them as watch too much Youtube, you're likely to find dudebros attempting to use your creation for nothing less than hacking down the last of the sequoias and trying to baton rocks. It seems nobody thinks to pack an axe anymore or, heavens forbid, some type of folding saw.

But so far as I've been able to tell the Rold is the real deal in that respect. It's a Jesper Voxnæs design, he of previous fame around here for also coming up with the Gnome, which we inspected quite some time ago. So far mine remains resolutely unbroken, but as these are now out of production and apparently in ascendancy to becoming collector's items, mine doesn't see much use anymore.

There are a lot of things I like about the Rold, but then again there are some things I don't. On the positive side it's a bit of an ergonomic tour-de-force, with a clever forward grip design that allows you to place your index finger through the massive choil forward of the guard to choke up on it for control, or hold it back on the main handle to give yourself more leverage. It's also not exactly a small object at an 11" overall length, and it's made out of D2, m'favorite steel. But it's got a matte finish made of grey enamel or something that scuffs and scratches as soon as you look at it, the handle scales can't be dismounted, and with the best will in the world the sheath it came with is a bit naff. Mine required significant tuning with a heat gun straight out of the box.

Plus, for as large as it is I am still immensely covetous of my nephew's Scrapyard Dog Son of Dogfather for filling the same role, another currently unobtainable piece which has a similar jam as the Rold but is much, much thicker. Thus like a cat reading a newspaper, I concluded to myself one fine day not too long that I ought to make my own damn knife and see if I can marry the elements of these that are my favorites. Just then and there, on the spot. Just like that.

So, you see, what you do is you find an act that works.

And steal it.

How Hard Can It Be?

There are men in this world — and they are universally men — who will send away to have a blade blank cut, and then send away to have it heat treated, and then send away to have handles made for it and yet they'll still stick their thumbs in their suspenders and insist to you as bold as you please that they're a custom knife maker. Uh-huh. Sure you are, bud.

Thus at the outset of all this, I wrote one ironclad rule: I will do all of this in house, by myself. No outsourcing. This is Lemmy, after all; we love seizing the means of production around here.

And to as great an extent as possible, no outside research, either. You can spend all day watching videos or bickering on forums and never get anything done. I'm a bird of considerable resource and, let's face it, also the ownership of a couple of hundred knives. So part of that's got to rub off via some kind of horizontal osmosis to expertise in building knives as well.

...Right?

I've also got a quite broad selection of tools at my disposal amassed over the course of a lifetime. Surely this'll be a cinch.

The Plan

An individual with more enthusiasm and rather less hard earned cynicism would grab the nearest chunk of scrap metal and go at it with the angle grinder straight away. But not me. Much to my own astonishment as much as anyone else's, I sat down and planned this out.

In fact, I drafted my vision down to every last detail in FreeCAD.

I started with the general ergonomic plan from the Rold and got to modifying. With a whack-diddle-diddle-hi-ho, and a stretch here and a tweak there, I arrived at a first draft. I also made it bigger. Much bigger.

As you all are no doubt aware I am also the owner of a ludicrously large 3D printer. So I employed the same for, I think for the first time in my life, actually accomplishing one of the original stated intentions of the whole damn process, which was to prototype a 1:1 life sized replica of my blade blank.

Printing your plan out on paper is one thing, but actually being able to produce in less than an hour a real physical representation of your design that you can hold in your hand is an incredible game changer. There are ergonomic considerations you won't be able to make just looking at the representation of a thing on the screen. I was able to iterate on my design basically for free, so I went through several prototype stages before settling on the final shape. And when you hold it, it is real in a sense that no mere paper proxy can approach.

This is not a how-to column, and in fact may actually turn out to be a how-to-not piece instead. But if I'm going to offer one piece of advice, it's this one: If you're going to get into this sort of thing, get your hands on some manner of rapid prototyping system. It doesn't necessarily have to be a 3D printer. Something like a CNC router or similar that can reasonably precisely hack your design out of plywood or whatever material would also do. But you're going to want something. Trust me on this.

Instruct Me Not

I bought some steel.

Total bill of materials cost: $30.

Alas, it seems to have arrived upside down. No matter; I'm certain I can make it work anyway.

Truth be told, this entire odyssey actually started when I was noodling around on the internet and I read about the heat treating process for D2 steel. I'm not actually a total stranger to metalworking, and I've seen enough about how this works. Regular carbon steels, and a lot of other alloys besides, are heat treated by the typical medieval style heat-and-dunk method you may be picturing which results in a large hiss and a bloody great cloud of steam. You can do this at home, if you've got a forge or some other suitable way to get your metal cooking red hot — but D2 doesn't work that way. It's an air hardening steel, and that's exactly what it sounds like: Heat it up, and... That's it. Just let it sit there. I found this fascinating.

You still have to temper it, of course, because at the end of the hardening and/or quenching phase most steels are rock hard but also possess a glassine brittleness which is certainly not a property you want in your big old tree-mauling chopper of a knife.

But I watched someone do this and I immediately thought, "Hey, I could do that, too!" So I did.

And D2 is still my favorite knife steel in the world. This is just icing on the cake.

Step one here was to print a full sized template of my design. This is significantly less fancified than my replica prototypes, which had edge bevels and everything. This is just a slab in the complete outline of the final product. I traced this out on a chunk of my raw D2 steel which alas I neglected to take a picture of at the time so you'll have to use your imagination on how that works.

Actually, back up a bit. Step one was actually to figure out whether or not the D2 flat stock I just bought from some rando on eBay in trifling hobbyist quantities actually arrived in its annealed state.

D2, you see, can be hardened to an extreme degree. Like, a drill bit dulling and tool breaking degree. I had to determine if my metal arrived soft and annealed as it should have, or if I was going to have a heat treating operation on my hands right out of the gate.

I don't have a fancy Rockwell hardness testing machine, but I do have this suspiciously cheap set of allegedly Japanese hardness grading files I bought off of the internet for twenty bucks some time ago.

Trepidatiously, I started with the hardest one and worked my way down until I determined that, yes, the corner of my D2 slab succumbed to each and every one of them. So it ought to be soft enough to drill.

I also had some misgivings about being able to accurately locate the three holes I'd need to lance into the handle in order to put the scale mounting screws through. I devised a solution which I'm proud to declare that I think is clever, which was to make this set of printed bushings whose inner diameters match the business end of my centerpunch precisely, and which fit through the holes in my template in exactly the right positions, provided I manage not to move the template at all between punchings.

I have been told that starting your holes with a centering bit is actually the "wrong" way to do it. It worked for me, though. Thus I was able to bore all three holes without much trouble.

I ain't not no undummy; I drilled the holes first, whereupon I would discover whether I was bashing my head against a brick wall or not, purposefully long before wasting an entire afternoon hacking the profile of the blade out of the metal and winding up with a complicated chunk of scrap after discovering I couldn't put holes through it.

The astute among you will probably have realized that since D2 hardens by heating it and simply allowing the stuff to cool to room temperature, doing anything to it that creates heat will readily cause it to work harden. And this is indeed so, including the bits immediately adjacent to where you have, just for purest sake of example, just been throwing a nine foot long rooster tail of sparks off of it with your angle grinder.

I don't like to toot my own horn except in very precise and specialized circumstances. This is one of those. I am by my own recognition the king of all angle grinders. I can do damn near anything with an angle grinder, up to and including this, and all the things I couldn't I turned out on my little belt sander, the same one I use for reprofiling blades and getting nicks out of edges.

...Almost everything.

I quickly concluded that my weedy Harbor Freight 1x30" sander was absolutely not going to hack it for the blade's primary grind. Oh, believe me that I gave it a damn good try anyway. But after spending an hour and winding up with little more than just shining up the first eighth of an inch I boldly gave up. My stock is a quarter of an inch thick and I made the deeply questionable decision to put a full or at least nearly full flat grind on this thing, just like the one its inspiration has.

So.

I Was On The Internet This Week...

And I bought this.

Some manner of honest-to-goodness belt grinder has been on my shopping list for literal years, and today on this glorious day I was finally handed a solid justification.

Total bill of materials cost: $829.

This highly suspicious Chinese model seems to be built on the same pattern as pretty much all of them on offer around this size and price point. I picked one based purely on lead time, and here it is. I couldn't tell you who actually made it. Probably no one can.

It arrived in an alarmingly dense crate as if I'd actually ordered a Tasmanian devil. I had to break it apart with hammers and a crowbar.

To illustrate the true breadth of the cost cutting measures we're dealing with here, this thing is so cheap the manufacturer couldn't even be bothered to make a 120 volt version for North American consumption. Instead it comes with this yum-cha 120 to 240v step up transformer which I'm totally certain will not randomly blow up in my face and subsequently burn down my shop some day. I'll just keep this unplugged when it's not in use, I think, if it's all the same to you.

I'm also chuffed to bits to discover that it came prewired with this mountable VFD unit that would be right at home in an industrial control panel enclosure. Astonishingly, it worked right out of the box, although in my opinion by default the motor ought to spin the other way. I believe rectifying that is a simple matter of switching two wires, but there's also a reverse button right there on the panel and so for now I can't be bothered.

I'm much less chuffed to report that no part of the perfunctory instructions leaflet that came with this thing wastes any words on explaining how the hell you're meant assemble it. It also doesn't tell you the trick to correctly tensioning the belt, but I figured it all out readily enough.

I am given to understand that there is no upper limit to the potential bodaciousness of a belt grinding setup, and the true aficionados inevitably build their own. I'm pleased as punch to report that this one sure does it for me, though. The complete and utter lack of safety mechanisms, guards, or interlocks makes it feel right at home in my workshop. And my Harbor Freight sander feels like an electric toothbrush by comparison. For reference, that's the little green jobbie immediately to the left of this that looks as if you could just about stick it in your shirt pocket.

In sheer recognition of the extent of my talents, I also bought this handy jig for holding your knife at a consistent angle while you're grinding the bevel into it. Certainly I could do it freehand like a Real Man, I tell myself in order get to sleep at night, it's just that this will provide a more consistent finish. Yeah, that's the ticket.

What the hell. It was only twenty bucks.

Total bill of materials cost: $849.

Even with my shiny new toy I found that the primary grind was taking an inordinate amount of time. I eventually determined that this was because I was running my grinder entirely too slowly, out of a combination of misunderstanding the readout on the VFD's panel and also being afraid to wind it up too high lest the thing suck me bodily into the works and spit me out the other side.

The former was easy enough to rectify and the latter turned out to be a non-issue, since even at maximum throttle I actually found the process to be fully controllable. Except, now we were making real sparks.

Schoolboy errors made: 1.

Finishing the primary grind still took a much larger chunk of the afternoon than I would have liked. My troubles may come down to using the equally cheap and Chinese belts supplied alongside my grinder. Since this whole process is a learning experience, we'll chalk up that one thusly: For the next knife, buy a better set of belts.

This entire affair produced an alarming yet curiously satisfying amount of metal dust.

After taking this picture I placed a five gallon bucket full of water directly below the belt path on my grinder to catch the bulk of the shavings, which appeared to accomplish absolutely nothing.

With the primary grind complete, now it was time for the fun part.

The Fun Part

Recall, many paragraphs ago, that I said I would do no outsourcing of my production. I was not kidding when I said that. I was making my Serious Samurai face and everything. I absolutely will not send this away for heat treating. Get the fuck outta here with that.

I am now proud owner of my very own heat treating kiln.

Total bill of materials cost: $3804.

This is a Hot Shot Ovens 18K knifemaker's kiln, for knifemaking, by knifemakers. Which is what I am. Unlike my grinder it is a highly competent piece of equipment. Yes, I even got the one with the fancy "TAP" programmable controller. Hey, it was only a hundred bucks more. That basically fits within a rounding error by this point.

Actually, if I were to do it all again I probably would have foregone the fancy controller and just gotten the regular single stage one. The TAP controller is wi-fi enabled and theoretically offers smartphone control, but it's another one of those thrice damned things where the manufacturer expects you to pay a monthly subscription to unlock some of the features built into it, and I'll be stuffed if I'm doing that. You can still do multi-step programming of the kiln with timings and temperature curves and all right on the screen, so I'll be sticking to that instead.

Paywall or not, this baby will still do 2200° F. I don't need it to, mind you, but it's nice to know that I can.

Step 2: Bake at 1875° F for 40 minutes, then allow to cool.

It feels wrong doing a "quench" on a piece of red hot glowing steel by dangling it off of a chunk of round stock clamped in the vise and just leaving it there.

After cooling off the blade has this rather attractive patina on it.

Schoolboy errors made: 2.

The more sage among you are aware that I made a critical blunder, here. You see, D2 is a high chromium content steel and when you're cooking it at thousands of degrees you really ought to protect it from the atmosphere somehow, which I in my combination of exuberance and inexperience, plus being acquainted only with plain carbon steels, failed to do. That black stuff all over the blade is a layer of steel that's decarburized, and has instead allowed the chromium to come out of solution and form up on the surface to oxidize.

On plain carbon steel you also get forge scale all over it, or I guess whatever the equivalent of that ought to be called if you haven't actually forged the thing, but this is trivially easy to knock off with a quick trip back to your belt sander.

Not so with the chromium rich layer encrusting what was until forty minutes ago my beautiful and shiny knife-to-be. Even my meanest 24 grit belt would barely touch the stuff. You know what they make out of chromium oxide, right? The grit for abrasives. Like, it's the active ingredient in that bar of green stropping compound that makes it green. And it's the stuff that's in Flitz, too. That means it's harder than steel, Q.E.D.

Fortunately I had another brain wave, which was to try dunking it in acid. White vinegar, in this case, which after a 30 minute bath enticed the stuff to let go to the extent that I could blast it off with a high speed wire wheel.

Still and all, next time I'll use some toolmaker's foil to wrap my blade before heat treatment. I'd rather not go through all that again.

The final phase after tempering (500° F for two hours, chosen to prioritize toughness over hardness/edge retention) was to polish up all of the surfaces from the ugliness I imparted on them by being a dummy about the heat treatment. I stepped up through my collection of belts until I reached 180 grit which was the finest I had for my big belt grinder. I briefly toyed with the idea of switching to my little machine to keep going, since I have an array of specialty sharpening belts for it going all the way up to the equivalent of 2000 grit. But I ultimately decided against it because A) the blade is so damn big I'm not sure I could get even coverage with the little machine to begin with, and B) for a bushwhacking knockaround knife I'm not sure I want a satiny smooth finish on it I'll just fuck up in the first three seconds anyhow.

So the hell with it.

I also realized at this point that I'd forgotten to cut my planned jimping into the spine.

Schoolboy errors made: 3.

Life pro tip: Next time, do those cuts before hardening the fucking thing. I'll bet you it'll be easier.

I deftly avoided one other obvious pratfall in all of this. You'll note that at no point doing this treatise did I say anything about putting an edge on it. That's because I didn't until the very last step, in order to save myself from amputating all ten of my fingertips while I was grinding and tempering and polishing and all the rest of it.

I may be stupid, but I'm not crazy.

A Clever Dick

I hate making handle scales. I've only done it twice in my life, and it was a pain in my tailfeathers both times. I resolved not to do it again.

Fortunately, I already had a plan in place. The beauty of drafting my knife in CAD down to the last maniacal detail is that I can simply instruct my 3D printer to print out a set of handle scales for me. Perfectly formed, pre-holed, the same on both sides, and direct fitting. And you don't have to breathe a single molecule of Micarta dust.

Sometimes my genius is tangible.

Additional Financial Considerations

Throughout this procedure, several friends and acquaintances stopped by my workshop to see what all the noise was. The ultimate upshot of that is, I now have six or seven open orders for more of these.

In light of that, I made another decision.

Total bill of materials cost: $7403.

Do I need a $3599 large format 100 watt fiber laser engraver? No, absolutely not. Could I have made do with a lesser 60 or even 40 watt machine? Yes, probably. But I wanted a 100 watt fiber laser engraver, you see. And now I have a good excuse.

Plus, it lets me do this.

I don't envy people who have to justify their toy purchases to their wives. Not one little bit. Man, my life really is rad sometimes.

Laser engraving is another whole skill set I'll have to add to my repertoire. I'm getting there slowly and I'm sure I'll have lots to say about it later. For now, I used the offcut from my first piece of steel to figure out what the best settings are for my material, and had at it.

To celebrate this momentous occasion I drew up a new logo and everything. You know, now that we're not making knives out of plastic anymore.

The Review Part

I now find myself in the unique and somewhat unenviable position of having to present to you... er, my own knife. Foibles and all. It's not perfect, but to be fair it is literally my first attempt at this pattern, in this steel, with this machinery.

I would like you to meet the Flightless Forge Emperor. So named after the most humongous of all extant penguins, an attribute which it shares.

It is, without a doubt, fucking massive. Of course this is by design. It's 12-5/8" (320mm) long from tip to tail, with a 7-1/4" (184mm) blade with every little bit of it being usable as a result of the choil at the base that's big enough to fit even a gloved index finger into. All told it weighs 16.72 ounces (474.2 grams). Of course it does — It's a quarter inch thick slab of D2. If you are a wimp, this is not the knife for you.

Since my ISO standard comparison method would be close to useless, here it is next to the oft aforementioned Böker Rold. The latter is in and of itself not a small knife. The Emperor could probably cleave it in half.

The blade is a flat grind that's nearly the full breadth of the knife ending in a roughly 20 degree microbevel that should result in unparalleled chopping and splitting power. Opening your mail, fine whittling, cleaning your fingernails, trimming your arm hairs: These are all tasks that the Emperor is absolutely not designed to do. The Emperor is for bifurcating logs and fighting bears, and looking mean as hell doing it.

One of the things about the Rold that annoys me is its pronounced and slightly wonky plunge line separating the primary taper from the flat part of the knife, which bisects the front of the choil and leaves an unrefined stairstep there. Plus, with the best will in the world it's also not quite the same on both sides. Thus the Emperor has no plunge line at all, with the grind gently and at least mostly smoothly transitioning into the flat just before the handle. This leaves nothing to snag, and also no crevice for gunk to accumulate in.

A small ramp on the spine of the blade provides a forward endstop for your thumb when you're holding the Emperor in either position. This is jimped subtly for tactile feel more than any kind of grip, since the ramp and the finger guard should prove sufficiently proof against sliding up onto the edge. The edge which is, mind you, nearly a full inch and a half below the lower edge of the handle anyway. In order for the Emperor to bite you in any situation something must have seriously gone wrong, although provided only you can keep your off hand out from in between it and whatever unfortunate object you have underneath it on the stump.

(The blurry thing behind it in the shot is one of those telescopic magnet retriever tools, which I'm using as a kickstand to prop the knife up. It won't quite stand up on a flat surface and makes an almighty clang every time it hits the deck when you attempt to do so.)

This also means that every single iota of its cutting edge can be brought down on a flat surface. Not even the finger guard interferes with this. It's not exactly shaped to be great at, say, slicing tomatoes wafer thin. But because of all of the above, you could probably still do it if you were a sufficiently high caliber of nut.

The handle has a sculpted bird's head design with a pronounced flare at the pommel to prevent it from sliding forward out of your grip. You can hold it either fore...

...Or aft of the finger guard depending on what you're planning to do with it.

On the final article the scales are 3D printed ABS. This material is both heat and impact resistant, but also dead easy for me to print without driving myself into apoplectic fits. Unlike a depressing number of purported "bushcraft ready" knives, these are screwed rather than pinned into place so the scales are readily dismountable for cleaning, customization, or let's face it — replacement. One of the major knocks against the current crop of swanky Micarta handled models that are all the rage out there now is that you're forever afraid of fucking up your irreplaceable bespoke handle scales because they're permanently pinned into place.

I've long maintained that a fancy knife you won't use is automatically lesser than a ratty one which you will, so that's not how it works here. If, somehow, you manage to mar or even break the Emperor's handles you can simply take them off. The print job to make a new pair takes less than an hour, and they'll bolt right up.

Before I handled the first pair I was predicting for sure that printed scales would be stupid and terrible. Surprisingly, they're not. The inherent layer structure of the print results in a rather Micarta-esque texture or, if we're feeling especially charitable, one that's reminiscent of woodgrain. This results in a surface that's grippy but not too rough on your hands. It looks, feels, and acts like the business.

I deliberately sought out hollow handle screws for this so that those lanyard types of people could have something to put their cord through without doing anything so vulgar as punching a vestigial hole through the entire assembly that'd rankle you forever if you didn't use it. As it happened, such hardware was tougher to find than you'd think.

You guys will love the solution I came up with. Are you ready for this? These are stainless steel chainring bolts for a bicycle.

They're authoritatively rustrpoof, swank as all hell, and you can see daylight right through them. They're also readily undone with a garden variety 5mm Allen key, and you don't even need to stick a spanner driver in the other side. It's a bit of a squeeze to get 550 paracord through the hole in the middle although it can be done if you use a nail or the end of an awl or something as a pusher. 3mm cord, however, sails right through like it was meant for it.

The left hand side bears my new Flightless Forge logo, which you've already seen. Left hand, that is, relative to holding it in your right hand with the edge down, i.e. ready for use.

Just who is that handsome penguin, anyway?

The right hand side proudly proclaims that no robots, AI, underpaid child laborers, or CNC machinery (well, except for my 3D printer if you want to be pedantic) were involved in the creation of this knife. Mine is also a serial number that no one else can ever ever have. Neener, neener, neener.

I figure now that I'm working in steel rather than silly old plastic I ought to invent a new brand to illustrate that we're no longer fucking around.

Well, but we demonstrably are fucking around. This is just like playing store when you were a kid — we'll pretend to be a real outfit with a logo and a cash register and the hours on the door and everything. Except in this case, it's bad ass.

The Emperor requires what might possibly be the widest Kydex sheath ever concieved in history. The upper mounting screws are spaced such that it is technically Tek-Lok compatible, at least if you are stark raving loony enough to try it. Otherwise, the webbing belt loop provided is a much more practical option and is comprised of the fattest webbing I've ever seen in my life. It's 4" across!

With the Emperor dangling off of your belt no one at the campground, or hell, anywhere within half a mile of you will be able to doubt your virility or outdoors credibility.

The Emperor's edge is mirror polished at 2000 grit and thanks to the flat grind going nearly all the way down to the apex, it doesn't need to be very broad. The chopping power is phenomenal, which is half and half due to the geometry but also due to the monumental heft of the knife. The weight distribution is somewhat blade biased, with the point of balance being nearly precisely on the first bit of the edge forward of the choil.

Yes, it batons.

Hacking at the grain crosswise is likewise no problem.

As stated, the Emperor is a full quarter of an inch thick at the spine. This makes it absurdly robust at the expense, of course, of weighing over a pound.

On the left, the Emperor. On the right, the Böker Rold, itself not exactly a svelte object.

I spent all afternoon whacking every piece of scrap wood I could lay my hands on into kindling. This had no noticeable impact on the finish nor the edge, even after one ill-fated attempt to split a hardwood log that was about 10" across and got the knife so irrevocably stuck I had to use a rubber mallet to knock it free. I call that a success, I don't know about you.

I only filmed some of this. The bulk of it will surely remain lost to history since Lemmy only lets you post little snippets, although I might be talked into it if the weather's nice and there's any market at all for, say, a live stream of me and my stupid penguin face smashing random chunks of wood into toothpicks for hours on end. It can't possibly be any more insipid than what most of the kids seem to be watching these days.

The Inevitable Conclusion

This is my knife. There will some day be others like it, but this one will always be mine.

I've heard it said that for your first knife you should start with something uncomplicated, in an easy to work with steel, and above all small.

Um...

No.

I'm not even bothering to watermark this one. I was standing on the loading dock at work this morning and heard a distinctive squeaking coming from the power pylon on the ridge behind the building. Sure enough, our local bald eagle was sitting on it.

I did not lug my camera to work today (cue Dante's refrain) so this is the best my dinkum phone camera could muster. If you want a better photo of mine of an eagle, see instead here.

...Against my own better judgement, given my mission statement not to become a power mod like unto the other place.

However.

The sole existing moderator, @Photographer@lemmy.world, appears to have been completely inactive for just a shade over a year and we've got a spam/scam post ("Opportunity to Earn 30USD every week") sitting there gathering downvotes but otherwise going unaddressed because none of us can do anything about it.

If there's one thing you can say about CRKT, it's that they certainly let their designers fly their freak flags high. Their name has crossed our desks many times already with a whole array of the abstract and the absurd, several of which we've looked at previously.

There are gentlemen's knives in the world, and then again there's this. Here's the Michael Walker designed Model 4200 "Bladelock," an article for which no one seems to have been able to think up a snappier name.

Mr. Walker's résumé famously includes the invention of "over 50" blade locking mechanisms. This includes, apparently, the liner lock with which we are all familiar and has gone on to dominate the world. I imagine he could have stopped there, really, and in light of such boundless ongoing creativity I don't know if anyone's been around to check lately if he's possibly been inadvertently stapled to his drafting table and is thus unable to escape, or what. Regardless, this is a production item in a long line of CRKT produced Walker Bladelockers which I am given to understand originally sprang forth from a couple of custom knives built by the man himself, about which I can find scant information online. That is aside from e.g. this listing for one astonishing example, which can evidently be yours for the mere trifling sum of $38,500. (Screen shot saved here, by the way, in case this listing ever goes dark in the future.)

Has, uh, anyone got a line on what those guys who did the Louvre job are up to these days? I might have some work for them. Asking for a friend.

Meanwhile this Model 4200 variant is a production item and freely available, not to mention attainable by mere mortals. But even so, there's no denying it's a veritable work of art. The level of unnecessary details encrusting it are so confidently flagrant that the effect goes straight through gaudy and bursts out the other side, emerging as elegance instead. Take, for instance, the fact that lightly textured G-10 scales are not only so densely machined, but also retained on the forward end by four screws all in neat row like this.

Why four when one certainly would have sufficed? Because fuck you, that's why.

The pivot screw is encircled by exquisitely machined gear-tooth disks which serve no purpose whatsoever and exist only to look cool, and because Mr. Walker is flouting that he can. Look carefully at the heel of the blade when it's open and you'll see a section of matching texture, cut to a radius that precisely matches the round tips of the liners with apparently subatomic precision.

You'll also note the distinct lack of a liner lock in there, regardless of whether or not Mike Walker invented the damn thing.

The name probably tipped you off that this sports one of his other inventions instead. The 4200 is indeed packing the "Bladelock" mechanism, which is a clever arrangement that combines the locking and unlocking button with the thumb stud. When at rest the blade is locked in place with the same precision as the breech on Jesus' very own 1911 and with no apparent way to make it open. To unlock it, you press the thumb stud down into the blade slightly, at which point it can be pivoted to glide open in near silence.

Closing it is the same, but I find that the action of opening it is more intuitive and feels a lot less awkward. Due to the unusual spot you have to put pressure on given the location of the stud when the blade is out, it takes some effort and practice to smoothly shut the 4200 and this requires a specific manner of grip. Your natural inclination if you're not paying attention is virtually guaranteed to be a hand-jive that ultimately involves shutting it on your fingers until you figure it out.

I now know two things about Mr. Walker, only one of which is that he invented the liner lock. The other one is that he's right handed, and I know this because the 4200 is the most right handed knife in the world. There is a traditionally constructed pocket clip living on one side, and only one side. Like everything on this knife it's obsessively styled, and has an asymmetrical design. This precludes putting it on the other side which is just as well, because nobody was uncouth enough to sully the opposite side with a bunch of unused screw holes just for the off chance that someone would be gauche enough to show up being left handed.

The second clue is that because of how the mechanism works, there's only a single thumb stud on the right hand side of the knife. That's not reversible either, although mechanically speaking there really isn't much in the way of designing it such that it would have been, which we'll see in a little bit. Opening this with your left hand is thusly not technically impossible, if you roll a natural 20 on your dexterity all the time and you think you use your index finger rather than your thumb, but functionally it may as well be.

If you are a subscriber Jurassic Park Binoculars Object Density Luxury Index, the 4200 is likely to make you very pleased indeed. Despite being an eminently EDC-able 7" long overall when open and 4-1/16" closed, it's deceptively dense at 116.5 grams (4.11 ounces). It feels solid and chunky in the hand with its 0.540" thickness (13.75mm) which isn't hipster levels of thin'n'light, exactly, but also isn't too out of the ordinary in thickness compared with plenty of other knives.

The blade is 3" long (CRKT call it "2.93") and 0.139" thick (3.55mm) which ought to slot this neatly in to the legal EDC category in most places. It's 14C28N, so while not terribly fancy by today's standards it ought to hold a good edge and stand up to typical daily tasks of the sort you'll find in civilized society. I imagine the marginally increased thickness is necessary in order to fit the locking mechanism in there, but that also winds up having the next effect if making it seem a lot more stout than your typical EDC whatsamajig.

Just when you thought it was safe to forget about the CQC-6K, it's back.

The 4200 rides about the same and is a little shorter, but feels beefier somehow even though it plainly isn't. Believe it or not, it draws pretty cleanly as well despite the byzantine texture cut into the scales. It's got a nice balance of grab and release on the clip with the right amount of springiness, which for once in this damn fool world means that somebody probably actually put some thought into that for a change. Given everything else I can't say as I'm too surprised.

And, of course, no exploration of a funky knife is complete without a thorough warranty voiding in order to learn of its secrets.

I will say this about that. I own precisely zero non-ridiculous CRKT folders and as far as normal knives of theirs go I've only ever taken apart one Model M16, so my field of comparison may as well be nonexistent. But damned if this thing doesn't go together like a friggin' Swiss watch. No part of the disassembly overtly fought me in that none of the screws refused to come out, but all the parts fit together with a stubborn interference fit that is equal parts impressive and mildly aggravating. Not just the Bauhaus exposed cross pin between the liners and the broach for the main screw, but even the scales themselves which envelop and encapsulate the liners are ground with such precision that I literally had to pry them off with a guitar pick.

Every bit of the inside of this thing must be Mr. Walker having us on. The gear-tooth disks, for instance, look like maybe they ought to spin around like a fidget toy. And on a lesser knife they might, and forever be rattly and noisy as a result. That would be lack refinement, so in this case it's not how it works. There were also a dozen other easier ways they could have been retained. Broaching them for the same anti-rotation flat as is already found on the pivot screw would be favorite. But where would be the skill in that? So instead Mr. Walker decided to press a shiny steel detent ball into both handle liners, positioned exactly just so, which interfaces with just one of the holes drilled in each of the disks. Any of them; it doesn't matter which one when you're putting it back together.

This is a lunatic solution to what ought to be a trivial engineering detail. No one who is specifically dedicated enough to wrestle this thing apart would ever notice. It's pure, unadulterated showing off.

The 4200's action is so smooth because it's a ball bearing opener. As usual CRKT utterly neglect to mention this anywhere in the blurb. Here you can also see the two pockets into which the lock bar falls for both the open and closed positions, and some cruft I failed to adequately clean away.

The backspacer is screwed through on one side and the other side is press fit. The interference here was so tight that I couldn't get this pair to budge, so I left them as is. This is all you get.

Here are the real goods. The Bladelock system consists of a machined and presumably hardened steel bar with a little coil spring hidden under it, which seesaws on a pin which you can just see here has been driven into the spine of the blade and ground flush. This is permanent, and there's no matching reveal on the other side. Thus the bar can't be dismounted without enacting significant violence, which I'm not about to try. Without this, say if the bar were retained by a small screw driven into the same location, the locking system could have theoretically been made reversible by punching the requisite cuts into both liners rather than just one, and allowing the bar to be removed and flipped over. That's not the universe we're living in, though.

The Inevitable Conclusion

The 4200 Walker Bladelock may very well be a stylistic tour-de-force and a masterclass in elegance. Just not if you happen to be left handed.

This must be what the youngsters these days are calling drip. I really want to like this thing, and everything about it screams quality, luxury, and competence.

There's just no getting around the fact that ergonomically speaking the Bladelock mechanism is just a bit naff. It doesn't take much effort to press in the stud, objectively speaking, but the force it does take is still slightly too much. Locating where to put that force and not causing the thing to mousetrap shut on your fingers in the process results in a knife that you have to think about a trifle too hard in order to use which is, yes, not elegant.

I am fully aware that this gripe is pretty rich coming from a chump who deliberately carries a balisong knife on a daily basis. Quiet, you.

But despite somehow being less than the sum of its parts there's still so much left about it that calls to me, sings to me, whispers to me not to put it down. And what can I say? I'm still listening.

It occurs to me that while, yes, I was doing so in order to illustrate a point I also brought shame to my ancestors with my methodology for posting that picture of a jellybean earlier. Tinkering around for the grins is one thing but the effort was a bit naff, if we're honest, and we can do much better. I had to use a purple bean this time because alas I ate the original subject immediately after publication, and it was the best I could find out of the handful I've got vis-a-vis having the least mangled stamping on it.

So here's what a similar bean looks like if you use the lens the right way around. My aforementioned RF100, in this case. I'm given to understand what with one thing and another this is doubly on brand around here, both for myself but also for the Lemmyverse as a whole.

I took 100 (!) focus bracketed exposures for this one and put them together in Helicon as usual, which looks a bit like this:

Your effective depth of field gets proportionally shorter the closer you or more precisely your objective is to the subject. Linearly? Logarithmically? Hell if I know. In any event, it's staggeringly shallow at this distance and messing with the aperture really doesn't help you much. According to my calipers that bean was only 9.25mm thick.

Being one of the ISO standard colorful objects for this sort of thing, given that I am in possession of a handful of jellybeans I am also required by law at this juncture to provide you the following photograph:

This one was 150 exposures, but I discarded a few off of the end of the stack since no part of the field was in focus. The compilation of that looks like this, if you were wondering.

Yes, I'm being deliberately and maddeningly supercilious, here. Oh, look at me with my $1250 macro lens with which I can just toss off this trifle for the sake of fucking around. Well, yes. It's not like you could really classify what I do around here as much of anything else. But on that note, just wait until you nerds see what I've got on the cooker for later.

Full sizes of both are here and here, respectively. Feel free to use the second one as a wallpaper or something.