Some crafts etc.

Springtime have been very busy as always, a lot to do around house and my woodsproperty. Also I have spent quite a lot of time with Bushcraft Finland Forum which I moved to commercial operator from free service cause free server had a lot of problems and downtime. Now everything works well and we have very active finnish group there and not so active international side, which we hope to get more chatters in the future.

Knife

I have been long time wanted to make very simple knife commonly called "maasepän puukko" in finnish. Idea of that knife was that blade is hand forged (this time I got it readymade), handle simple carved with knife without bolsters and no modern glues used. Only electric tool was a drill cause I simply don´t have any hand drills yet. I´m curious to see how this thing will last of fair use (not abuse, but normal knife use), cause trend seems to be that bushcraft knives should be overbuilt-fulltang-jack-of-all-trades-workhorses. :)

So here we go:

First step was to get some wood just from the woodshed and start to shape it after drilling hole and shaping it with saw-bit.

Blade and piece of wood. That piece of brass was not used on project. And tang was shortened around 7cm long.

Rough shaping with knife that I made earlier here. Blade is just pounded into woodstick, no glues.

Work continues..

Oh, wood cracked a bit when it dried on warm garage. :(

But I´m still going to continue despite of crack.

I decided to weave some strong line around the crack and made same other end too just for more nice look (maybe it strengthen the handle too)

Now handle is ready and fits my hand perfectly.

I thought to make birch bark sheath for my knife so next thing is to make wooden insert (lesta). I´m going to make rectangular insert to fit better on birchbark weaved sheath (let´s see if I can get it done, cause my weaving skills are not so good and also birch bark pieces I have are bit small..)

I draw blade lines on woodpiece with sharp knife.

Used chisel and knife to hollow area for blade.

When it fits perfectly I made coverpiece and hollowed that a bit too.

I thought that I want to without commercial glues so I thought to make some "pine pitch glue". I will need some pine resin and fine ash atleast. I went to collect resin I found it from spruce nearby and make mix.

spruce resin collected into tincan.

I cooked it on fire carefully (don´t let it to combust) and added some ash and coal, quite sticky stuff and good smell..

When got glue ready I tried to glue wooden insert halves together, but mix was not quite right, glue dried very fast and glass hard, so it didn´t make strong seam at all...I abandoned that idea and thought to experiment with thist stuff more later. Have to solve that problem some other way.

Solution was use same strong line and I just weaved parts together. Suppose to be OK, It will be inside of birch-bark sheath anyway.

So that´s it. Part II "the sheath" will follow later...


Awl

Another small project I thought to make is awl for leatherworking. I found some very old awl-blades so got the idea to make my own. Here we go:

First I shaped handle with knife using same wood that on my knife project.

After shaping I treated it with old school tar oil which gives nice color and smell.

Handle fits into my hand very well and I strengthen it a bit with same method that  on my knife-project.

Awl ready to use, I kind of like this kind of rough carved finish instead of vey smooth sanded finish. Like that it have much more characteristics, don´t you think so?