Brass Bedbugs

Hi Folks,

Sorry for the long radio silence, I've been extremely busy getting various projects underway. There's been a ton of new things to work through for 2013 but I am slowly getting it together. I have a number of interesting projects going and I think everyone will be quite pleased as the winter goes on and new items are revealed.

Alas, I have some bad news for international customers...the US Post Office just raised their rates and it's not pretty. Priority International is now $24, Priority to Canada is now $20 and Express Mail has gone up to $38. Sorry guys, obviously this is out of my control. My understanding is there are some services that remail at a discount from the US so if you purchase a lot of items from the States then perhaps that is worth looking into but I don't know how they work or if they are reliable. I do know that several of my international customers have been doing that for a while with apparent success so maybe they will chime in on the comments.

So for today I have some brass Bedbugs finished. These are all stamped with my antique diemaker stamps. There are lots of the usual skulls, bugs, leaves, anchors, boats, owl heads, sword hilt, etc but because brass is a soft metal I was able to try out some new stamps that I have not dared try on harder materials. So in addition to the majestic eagle wings pictured below there are also quite a few new and unusual images such as a clipper ship, liberty crest, various shields, lion, sun god, Indian head, tiger face, sphinx, and many others. Some of these will come with a black NiteIze clip but I'm running low on them so others will have a stainless NiteIze clip.

The stamped Brass Bedbugs will run $50 plus shipping. The batch is sizable but not huge therefore I'll make it one per customer so that lots of folks have a chance at them. The order link is directly above the picture below, if there is no link then the item is sold out. Thanks again for stopping by and I hope everyone is staying warm!

Brass Bedbugs are goen for now, thank you so much!

           

           

 

And 4 More!

Hi Everyone,

Well, the SUSale rules clearly state that winners have 24 hours to respond with their payment. I had four people who did not contact me and I even gave them extra time until this morning...so unfortunately for them they are going to lose out and instead four other folks will get a chance. Here are the 4 alternate winners:

507  Secret Santa
890  Emfd
914  raymond
1036 afrankart

I'll send out emails now. Thanks again my friends and have a great weekend! :)

Surprise! Nineteen More...

Hehe, I wouldn't usually do this but I actually did have a total of 79 of these completed so nineteen more folks are going to luck out tonight. :D

72 Droc7683
119 Tindjin
155 Shermanator
182 brian l.
185 vittorio
331 endorian
347 rmfromm
377 Robsterk
519 stldagger
652 Bad13Luck
723 Marcrothe1
729 Jawbox
784 JustinV
806 jwvanvactor
816 ColoradoDO
972 wethera
1007 Seth
1019 amy
1021 alecia

Thanks again folks, emails will go out shortly! :)

Dace Winners!!

Oh my goodness, I am speechless! All I can say is THANK YOU to everyone who signed up. Well over a thousand entries, absolutely amazing...

OK, so drumroll please....and the winners are:


32 Crow
37 Nwomer
66 mojodoc
97 jhooke1
122 AtwOOd iz AwEsOmE
152 ralphdrocketman
162 1Artful_Dodger
175 Six String
177 Rick
192 howmuchwoodcouldawoodchuckchuckifawoodchuchcould
207 dregoth
226 kirb66
232 ken
253 Terrell Skies
255 edjelley
258 Jonnyfishstix
276 k4ih
289 DaceforBob
313 DD214
316 mrbrooks40
341 Greenline85
350 GGold
359 clarkedb
367 kangjin
380 Ironwood
384 frosty_1
405 AMGS55
423 Lmbc2
450 LovinLife87
473 Mahoney
482 ixbrian
496 JWest
528 magic95vert
551 Apprentice101
559 Epoch
561 mike cartwright
573 Customstockz
589 Graham
608 Toyroom-ah
614 Nyteshayde
617 chimes13
659 Ted Gorbachev
743 lag1980
794 phantomK
798 ddewey
807 Lurch104
808 Drahkis
820 Moose
821 Tyge
830 sherriman
842 biglittletony
851 brebrenet
873 sdshootist
874 Peachy
902 indabayou
921 Dave1234
945 KKNoDoubt
969 Jennie
1024 Frankv
1027 kelly

Big congratulations to everyone and once again, thank you SO much! I will send out emails right now...it's going to take a while so please bear with me.  

Dace SUSale!

Hi Folks!

Can you believe it? It's true...I FINALLY got around to finishing a few of these little Dace knives. The story behind these is a long one but after seeing them sitting around the shop for a couple of years I decided that they needed to be rescued and sent out into the world.

What happened was this: These were supposed to be a neat little midtechy kind of keychain knife. I had a local company which shall remain nameless cut them for me. I then spent a bunch of time doing the rear grind, name stamp and profiling the edges. Then they were CNC V ground by the same nameless company. Initially everything was looking good but there were some problems with the grinding machine and the grinding wheel and the results were not what I expected at all. The grinds were very poor and the pieces did not tumble out well after heat treat. At that point I didn't feel the knives were saleable and I was looking at a hell of a lot of work to try to fix them. So, absolutely disgusted, I threw them into a box and put them onto the shelf. I seriously considered writing them off and scrapping them but couldn't bear to do it.

So fast forward to last summer, I was looking at them again and I decided to try fixing some of them up. Now, the original wheel used to grind these looks like a giant donut and is about 18 inches in diameter. I can't duplicate the original grind shape exactly because my home equipment is totally different. What I ended up doing was to regrind these all by hand with a handheld die grinder and small wheels. Essentially these are now all hand ground blades as a result. Since this is a very imprecise and difficult to control method of grinding, the final finish is what I would call "rustic". So be prepared for some bumps and waves because the Dace definitely do have imperfections but with the raw bar finish I think they manage to achieve a certain overall harmony that is rather pleasing.

These are tiny knives. The V ground blade is just over 1 inch and the overall length is a hair over 3.5" The material is .166 thick S30v steel with a heavy raw bar finish. The vacuum heat treat, cryo and tempering to 59-60 Rockwell was done at S&W so they are perfect. They pop bottle caps like a champ and the pry tip on the butt end works very well. For safety, please keep the knife in the sheath when using the tool functions! And speaking of sheaths, the final piece of the puzzle is the great kydex work which was done by Kip from the Toolbook community. A big thank you to Kip for the nice job on these!

This is the first wave of Dace Knives. While I do have more I'm really not sure just how many I will ultimately finish. Some of them may not be worth saving and others didn't make this cut and will have to be refinished yet again. I have no idea if or when I will have time to finish more so please don't pester me about it, I'm just happy to finally get a few of them good enough to offer this one time. In the future I may make more midtech type knives but I certainly will go about it differently and hopefully avoid the pitfalls that I met with this batch. ;)

So, this SUSale is for 60 Dace Knives. They are going to run $190 each plus shipping. I will let US customers choose between insured Priority Mail for $10 or Express Mail for $15 but International customers will have to use Express Mail International for $35. Obviously these are one per customer and any duplicate entries will be discarded. This is a very large SUSale so it's going to take a bunch of work for me to get the results up tonight and to send out emails. For this reason I think maybe 6 PM Eastern time is a good time to end it as I will be working for hours afterwards dealing with it all.

As always, thank you for stopping by!
 
Sign Up is over, results will be posted shortly. Many many thanks  to all who signed up!


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