One of my best pieces to date. For a good cause

[AllanBeasley]

]

This blade has a bit of a story to it, a fellow smith I respect a lot got hit by financial issues when his father had a lung cancer scare and his insurance decided not to pay out anything for it. Eventually it was discovered that it's scar tissue from a previous surgery that started growing aggressively. Tim at Big Dog Forge made a monster damascus billet for him to make a hammer out of to auction off to raise funds. He made a beautiful dog's head hammer and found an enormous crack from a delam. he was unable to get comfortable selling that hammer because integrity so I offered to make a knife that he could put scales on and sell to replace some of the lost funding on that hammer. He has a much higher profile than I do and will make more money listing it for sale than I will hence that arrangement. This is my second attempt at this knife. The first one suffered due to all the graphite being worn off my platen and making an even grind impossible. I lost way too much material to be comfortable letting it out of the shop. That one's under a pile of god only knows what on one of my horizontal crap magnets.

I used leaf spring for the knife and did a differential heat treatment by putting a thick layer of Satanite on the sides and spine before the final heat and quench. It was tempered at 400 in 2 1 hour cycles and I took it up to 400 grit and it did not want to take the polish on the buffing wheels so I spent a full day going back and forth between the belt grinder going up the grits, hand sanding and the buffer to get a halfway decent shine out of it. I know the mirror polish doesn't provide very much functionally, but pretty knives sell faster and for more money so I put the time in. I'm very pleased with how well this one turned out, hopefully now that I fixed my platen issues I can make more that are that quality.