Rehandle Gallery

Thanks!

 

Fujiwara Teruyasu Denka in Ironwood Burl. Converted from full tang to hidden....

 

See you found yourself a way around the atrocious task of rehandling one of these.

 

Yeah, fortunately for me the customer asked for the conversion to hidden tang. These knives are by far the worst F&F of all the Japanese knives that I've seen.

 

This is one of the nicest rehandles I've done. I wasn't sure how it was going to go initially tough, the knife presented some problems.

First off this is the first one of these knives that I've worked on besides sharpening so I didn't have any expectations. I quickly found out that the maker does a nice knife but crappy handle/tang/bolster..I'll explain in more detail later. Also, the wood used is something I never worked with before and was supplied by the customer from an unknown ebay source, and as a lot of you know - I'm not fond of any of that.

So why is the handle/tang/bolster crappy? Well upon removal of the scales (which was quite the chore - unlike most Japanese knives) I found there to be paper liners glued in between the scales and tang and also the scales and bolster. I was puzzled by this as this isn't what is normally seen. Upon some inspection of the tang it became apparent that they had good reason to use these liners as they were being employed to fill in the gaps between the flat scales and W-a-V-y tang. Later on I found the bolster was also not square to the tang in any direction.

I gave this some thought and then went to the customer with options on how to deal with the problems and fortunately he chose wisely and went with a hidden tang.



I really like how this knife turned out as a package, I'd own this in a split second if possible, it's that nice.


Takamura Uchigumo 240mm Gyuto in dyed Russian Karelian Birch with nickel silver & copper accents.....

 

Wow Dave! That wood is unique and really amazing. Great craftsmanship.

 

Thanks!

 

Wow, that's a great combination! Nice work, Dave.

 

Thanks Warren

 

Beautiful work Dave. I love me some ironwood!!

 

Thanks Randy

 

Here's a couple of good looking Hiromotos destined for Christmas presents. One is AS (that I thinned & etched) and the other is damascus. Both handles are done in dyed box elder burl.

 

That's some good looking stuff there! Nice work, Dave!

 

More stinkers!

Looking great Dave.

 

Thanks guys!

 

Some of your best work yet, Dave. The box elder burl has some very interesting patterns, especially whey dyed.

 

Guess I'm a little biased!

 

Yeah you are. I'm glad you like them though.

 

Love the way that the flow of the grain continues across the tang. Beautiful work once again, Dave!

 

It's cool that you noticed that.

When a block is cut in half it's always tempting to flip the scales inside out to make the pattern look more symmetrical from side to side (like how wood retailers display scales to show the pattern off) but I prefer to go with the book end approach even if it is less symmetrical from side to side because I like to keep it naturally lined up, feels right to me.