Hiromoto Aogami Super (AS) Steel Gallery - Full Spa Treatment

We've got another Hiromoto AS gyuto back from it's trip through the full spa treatment!

It's blade has been thinned, spine/choil rounded, & etched for effect. The handle has been converted from full tang western to hidden tang hybrid wa. The wood used is Ipe burl.

This knife gave me fits! From the wood (Ipe - never again!) to the etching, nothing went easy. In fact this Hiromoto took more than twice the amount of labor than the next worse one ever done. I can't say that I'm happy with the wood, its just not really that nice, but the blade finish I ended up with is the finest I've ever done on one of these knives. The scratch pattern is tight (running horizontal), is bright, and slick as snot....what else could you want?

I hope that the owner has more fun using it than I did working on it! LOL Still I'm grateful for the work and the experience, I learned a new trick or two on this one.

What do you guys think?

 

Beauty. The handle may have given you fits, but the end result...wow. I have been itching to try one like this since you first did it.

 

Thanks Matt! You should do one too.

 

Have to agree with Matt, very nice!
I do have a Hiromoto AS Santoku sitting in it's box doing nothing, maybe it will head to the Spa one day!

 

That'd be cool..thanks Warren

 

It's the prettiest Hiromoto i've seen. Good job, Dave!

 

Thank you Marcelo

 

Beautiful work!

 

Thanks Todd

 

I've got another Hiromoto AS freshly finished up from it's full spa treatment....

The handle wood is AZ Ironwood. This block is kind of unique from what I usually see. It gave off this really bright yellow dust that was so super fine it floated everywhere. The actual color of the wood is really orange though, with some gold. It worked very nicely and was easy to finish. Not a single hole/crack/anything to fill - the black dot seen on the top is 100% natural.

The pins used are all copper but the center pin is a mosaic with nickel silver inner pins.

I used my new technique to finish the blade and I like it a lot. It's a bit more labor intensive but the results are better than I had been doing so I guess I'll keep doing it this way.

What do you think?

 

Here's a Hiromoto AS gyuto that's been just run through the full spa treatment.

The core steel on this one was greatly off center and the cladding really hard in comparison to others and also unevenly ground making for a challenge to both thin and finish nicely. I think it came out OK in the end even, if not exactly as how I'd have wished it.

And who doesn't like ironwood?

Maybe the last we'll see go through this process, who knows....

 

Hiromoto AS Gyuto - thinned, etched, smoothed, and sharpened!

 

Nice result Dave.

 

Thanks Jim

 

Here's another Hiromoto AS that's just been through the spa treatment except this one had some additional work done to it.

This knife belongs to an old friend from back in the KF days. It's always both nice and a bit stressing to work on a friend's knife because my expectations go even higher than they should and I almost never meet them but in this case I exceeded what I hoped to accomplish so I'm actually happy for once...LOL

The knife came to me as a metal bolstered western configuration that I was tasked to convert to a bolster-less octagonal wa configuration so I ground off the old handle and metal bolster and made a new handle for it.




The wood was supplied by the customer, it's desert ironwood with sap wood. He asked me to include as much sapwood as possible and I worked to do this as best as I could. He wanted a metal spacer stack so I put together an 11 piece stack consisting of copper, nickel silver, and G10 spacers. I really love this handle a lot, it's one of my favorites that I've done.

I hope you like it as much Jay!

 

HOMERUN! She is a looker.

 

A hit a home run - finally!

 

Dave is that blade a bit shorter in height than most of them?

 

Nope, it's just that a wa handle makes them look shorter than the westerns do because a wa handle is slightly taller.

 

Haha... fooled again.