It may help to add a little about your tooling and process. Are you annealing the files and heat treating them yourselves after shaping and grinding? Do you have a belt grinder or are you using hand tools only?
It's a bit hard to tell everything from the pictures, but it looks like you don't have any plunge lines. Which is totally okay, by the way. What's the geometry of the blade? What I mean is, do you have a gradual taper from the spine down to the edge? Is the edge ground or filed in just a short distance up the blade from the edge? As you progress, you'll find different design aspects can effect the cutting ability (how thick/thin is the blade) and your process and techniques employed will open different construction options to you.
There are some folks out there that do some amazingly cool looking handle wraps. I've never done one myself, but many people like them. There's quite a bit (I imagine) to those wraps and hiding all of the ends. It's only an aesthetic thing, so please disregard this comment if you're satisfied with it-no offense meant.
I think some of the best advice I ever got was try to make every knife the best you've ever made. Whether that's the blade finish and getting all of the scratches smoothed out and looking nice or focusing on a given handle or guard or whatever. Each time I try another knife, it's identifying the little details that could be better and doing everything I can to get it as good as my skills will allow. Unfortunately, that's not always satisfactory to me....
What do you see in these knives that you like? What do you see that you'd like to be better on the next one? Sometimes I see what I don't like on my knife, but I'm not certain how to make it better. Thankfully, that's when I can bark up the tree of those much smarter than me
. Sorry for all the rambling.
Jeremy
Topic: New to this. What do you guys think? (Read 1321 times)
