My Knives #19 Jamaica Theme Redemption Chopper ️️️🌎 😰

Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs

Oh, I didn't see you there!

Khm, khm!

Hello dear Steemians,

In this story I'll be presenting a custom build I did for a great guy who is a Jamaican chef living and working in London.
London babe - finaly

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You may think, wait a second there Doc, this knife looks awfully familiar. And you would be right.

Before you get overwhelmed with disgust and unfollow me for recycling, just gimme a sec to explain.
This knife does look a bit familiar because she was a perfect bitch and I have talked about how big of a bitch in one of my previous posts.

For the lazy ones who just can't be bothered to click on a link, let's just say it took me three tries to actually finish her, because she kept breaking in the quenching.

Anyhow, it all started with Anthony asking if one of my knives would be a good choice in his kitchen. It was actually the one none of you wanted to buy - this one.

So I've asked him - What do you actually need the knife for?
And he told me he would like a knife that could both be used as a chef knife and chop through the whole jerky chicken.

Now, if you know anything about knives, you'll know that making a knife that's good at different tasks is a knifemakers nightmare. I won't go too deaply into this topic since I've covered it in various posts before (sorry no link - now I'm lazy), but I'll explain why it's a pain in the but on this case.

Let's start from the beginning: a chef knife is a knife that has to cut like a laser. To achieve that it has to be ground as thin as possible. To give you a perspective my "top-shelf" gyutos are ground so they are around 0.7mm one cm above the edge (I have no idea how to conver that into imperials so I won't).

This is what such a knife looks like from the choil

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This will fly through onions like they don't exist, but if you take an edge that thin and try to chop a bone, even a chicken bone, it will break. It just doesn't have enough support for chopping through bones or trees or anything like that. It was made for slicing vegetables and cutting boneless meat.

In order to have a knife that can chop a bone, it has to be quite thick at the edge. Just think about what is the best tool that you can think of if you want to chop bones - a cleaver right? Well, that's just an axe with a fancy name.

So when you get down to the bones (see what I did there) he was asking me to make him a super thin axe. Well, that just can't be done.

After thinking about how to get out of this nightmare, I did realize I could try to make a kind of a hybrid - a knife that will have compound geometry and be thin on one part of the blade and thick on the other. That's far from a perfect solution but it was the best I could produce from my brain.
Just to mention, I had no idea at the time how to actually do something like that.

I gave him a few suggestions and a few design ideas, and after a while, he added another cherry to my, already full, plate.
He's a Jamaican and it would be super cool if I could make the handle in the Jamaican flag theme.
Well, the order just stopped being a nightmare and became just too ridiculous for me to pass out an opportunity to make my life a living hell.

So, I said - Yeah, why the hell not I'll make you the knife

And that is how one of the biggest bitches started her life and made mine an indescribable misery.

A few stats before we start the picture show

The knife was made in 1095 steel, and since the bitch broke two times before I ran out of the clay I use for my hamons, I was forced to do an edge quench.
So, it is a differentially heat treated but with a twist.
The handle part of the nightmare is compound of black & green G10 scales, yellow spacers, one green G10 pin, and two carbon fibre tubes I actually filled with died epoxy.
The ground is compound - the heel of the knife is much thicker than the tip, and it is convex that gradually becomes flat in the same direction.

The Blueprint

The Build

The fails

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Finally a sucessful quench

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Roughr grind at 40 & 60 grit and a test etch

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The handle materials

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Some hand sanding

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Dry-fitting the handle and gluening thing up

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Profiling the handle

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Finaly done

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The final product - it was a bit cloudy so the colours are not that great

Final thoughts

For someone who hates custom builds, I do seem to get stuck into lot of them.
Could it be that I actually like making myself miserable???

Anywho, thanks for stopping by and if you have some impossible knife that you would like to have, apparently I am a guy to talk to...