Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Elmax PieceMakers!

Hi again my friends!

Well, it was a wonderful holiday weekend here, and now there are some more lovely days ahead for us. It will be getting quite hot this week though and will feel much more like summer for a couple of days. I have planted out most of my garden vegetables and flowers, and all is going well so far.

Today I have something rather special for you! These PieceMaker captive bit knives were cut many years ago, probably almost a decade ago. But I'm finally getting around to finishing the first run...

The first batch of PieceMakers are made of Elmax steel. The broad, big bellied blade is 2 inches in length and they are V ground. Overall length of the knife is 4.25 inches. These are nice slicers and are comfy in the hand while maintaining a fairly small footprint. They also have a ton of utility as you can see, with a captive bit handle and rear pry tip. The large opening in the blade provides an excellent  forward grip point for fine work, and allows for good sheath retention, at the same time allowing the bit to be removed while the knife is sheathed. Of course, you shouldn't use any of the tool functions unless these knives are safely nestled in the sheaths. ;)

The Elmax ones are marked with an "L" on the back side since I didn't have a dedicated identifying stamp for this steel back when I made them. The CPM 154 ones will be coming in a few weeks and those do not have an "L" stamp on the back side, so that is how you can tell them apart. At any rate though, these are sweet little tool knives in either steel and they are shaving sharp!

This first run in Elmax is only four dozen pieces and will be $225, but the larger batch of CPM 154  coming shortly will run slightly less. The Elmax turned out to be quite expensive to make, both in material costs, and also Smith and Wesson had to run a whole special oven cycle for them in the heat treat as this steel has a different schedule than normal CPM steels. But I thought it would be worth trying something different for this one small batch....

The PieceMakers feature my usual wide variety of stamps, and since these were made a very long time ago I only used the older and smaller stamps as there wasn't much open real estate to play with. The entire batch is stamped, and there are no left handed specific knives, although with a V ground blade it doesn't matter so much. 

Thanks for dropping by today and I hope the rest of your week is fantastic!

Sold out, thank you so much!
 



 
 
 

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