Merry Christmas

I wish merry Christmas and happy New Year 2012 for all my readers.
Have a peaceful Christmas time and take care your loved ones!

Jätkän kynttilä (finnish candle also called lumberjack candle) made and used novadays especially for celebrations like Xmas and New Year. This one I made from dry pinelog with chainsaw.

”Parang” from Philippines

My friend came to visit for Christmas in Finland from Singapore and she bring me a knife from her trip to Philippines cause she knew that I´m kind of “knife nuts”. She asked there parang and something handmade. So she got this and it´s somekind of mix of a parang and western style bowie with sawback and weird notch on back which is maybe decoration.

I can see that it´s definitely handmade due the unevenness, but I think blade is “machine cut” into shape and then heat treated and sharpened. Tang is stick tang and goes through handle. Handle is bent downward and have decorated head . Handle looks like ones parangs have. Handle material something hard black stuff I´m not so professional to tell what it is, but I think it´s somekind of natural material.

Blade is around 4-5mm thick and made of carbon steel. It have concave grind and secondary bevel just like bowies normally do. Sharpening starts quite far and there´s 2-3cm of unused part on the blade so I thought to make choil for fingers so I can choke up for finer tasks like whittling something or so.

 Sheath is cheaply made somekind of fabric / nylon riveted together with maybe carton(?) insert. I have to remake sheath definitely. Traditionally parangs have wooden sheath that is wrapped around waist with piece of cord.

Cause all my blades are users so also this will not end up on the wall so I´m going to test it today how it works. It´s anyway very interesting and different from my other blades so I´m interested to see how it works out for me.

Erätulilla tv-show again

Last week Erätulilla show contained interesting 3 minutes clip of blacksmith / bowmaker / handcrafter Ilkka Seikku making traditional longbow. In the video you can also see his great full tang bushcraft knives in action (Bush punisher in rough shaping and Bush prowler for fine carving) More information about Ilkka´s bows and his knives you can find from his website

Some of you might think why he uses plastic Fiskars axe to fell a tree for bow, but It´s not so much about the tools more important is how you use it and what you do with it ! That bow won´t be any better if Gränsfors Bruks axe have been used on felling. J

I enjoyed that short clip and it was better than the whole 40 minutes other content together. ;)

Recent Erätulilla-episodes you can find from: YLE-areena

Bow hunting

I got my first brown hare (rusakko in finnish) with bow & arrow couple of weeks ago.  I was wandering on area where I knew hares like to be. It was already getting dark when I noticed some tiny movement on distance. I walked calmly and as silently as possible to direction of movement rounding it a bit. Same time I slowly raised my bow and took good aim (hand bit shaking, so excited) at max. of 15 meters. Hare have noticed me but thought to trust his camouflage and lied on ground hoping I will pass it. Then I stopped for just nano second to release an arrow. It didn´t know what was that, death for immediate. (Sure I forgot to take good pictures after shot, damn)

After gutted hare I thought that was good end of the hunting day and head back home with heavy backpack.
At home I took head and front legs of and let it hang on my woodshed for few days cause there was just good few plus celcius degrees outside, so didn´t have to worry meat get frozen and cold enough that there´s no more insects interested of body.

After couple of days I skinned hare and butchered it to suitable pieces. Spine with some meat on it I saved for soup. Liver and heart we ate immediately after gutting.

I thought to save it´s fur for some future use so I stretched it round wood plate and cleaned. I left it to dry for overnight into my woodshed. Place was not so well chosen cause I forgot my cat and she devasteted it totally.. :)
Ok, maybe some fur works later in the future then..

Knifemaking

I found YP-taonta (http://www.yp-taonta.fi/) puukko-blade from my garage few days ago when I was rearringing stuff there. I was supposed to make knife out of it long ago, but that project had been buried somewhere so I thought to start it NOW.

First have to get handle some shape. I like traditional puukko handle with big knob that it´s easy to pull out of sheath so that was easy decision and handle material would be plain birch.

After made brass bolster and hole to handle knife was ready to build up to see what it look like. For handle hole I used drill bit and home made small saw you can see in picture. It´s made out of jigsaw blade.

Next step is to rivet tang into the handle and use epoxy to glue everything together. I like her slow epoxy so you can work without hurry and disassemble parts if there´s some problem without hassle.

Everything looked good so I needed somekind of vise which allow me to press parts together and rivet same time. I made a makeshift tang rivet, from shortened ammo cartridge of .222. I took the primer off from it and reamed the hole big enough for the tang to come through it snugly (saw it done before somewhere like that).
Vise I build up from trashes I found my garage and it worked pretty fine.

So after glue was drying 24 hours it looks like this:

Next step is to shape bolster and leather to fit the handle and oil the handle. Then it´s ready to use after I have made sheath for it. This was actually my first puukko I have ever made. I have made one knife with different technics about 20 years ago, but that´s whole different story.