Project Builds

At 3/16 of an inch, the deflection on my first attempt at a work surface was enough to wreck every square frame I tried to assemble on top of it. That gap—barely visible to the naked eye—proved costly in time and materials before I scrapped the design entirely and started over with proper dimensioning and … Read more

Popular wisdom suggests that file steel makes a poor knife blank — too brittle, too unpredictable, not worth the effort. That’s backwards. In reality, most mill bastard files contain exactly the carbon percentage and alloy balance that bladesmiths have chased for centuries. My first three attempts went sideways not because the material failed, but because … Read more