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!
 
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