David de Groot 𓆉 @dadegroot@mastodon.social

This morning, I took the off-cut from the kitchen knife I'm making, and fashioned this little knife from it. The blade was hardened to about 50HRC and sharpens up nicely.
Handle is Kwila, with a copper rivet.

#blacksmith #woodwork #metalwork #knifeMaking

In theory, this is a gif. Hopefully it'll upload correctly.

If it doesn't just imagine this juvenile welcome swallow bopping along to some funky tunes.

Didn't like the excessive bend in the tip of the blade, so I cut it off.
It's now a 20cm chef's knife.
This also gave me a chance to inspect the quality of the forge welds. The piece below the stand of fluff is mostly spring steel, above mostly mild, diagonally left down towards the right (i.e. not sandwiched like I wanted, but just welded to one side with some overhang). As far as I can see, it's a clean weld, no delaminations.

#blacksmith #knife #metalwork

I'm thinking I'll trim the tip a bit. The forging process causes the excessive bend, which I should have anticipated really.

Options are:
1. Chef's knife (20cm blade)
2. Butcher's knife (22cm blade)

More progress. Initial grind to 120grit done.
Next I need to drill pin holes in the tang and then harden and temper the blade.
Then the final grinds and sharpening and handle manufacture.

#blacksmith #metalwork #knife

Work in progress.

Trying something difficult, mild steel knife body with spring steel cutting edge. All forge welded.

It’s cooling at the moment before I move on to the grinding.

#blacksmith #metalwork #knife

Mastodon Shortbread!

#baking #mastodon

Big Sam, of Big Sam's Funky Nation, hamming it up on stage at the Caloundra Music Festival.

#photo #photography

http://degrootphotography.com.au/stuff/BigSamsFunkyNation_1DX_6194.gif

Implemented a Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 2 this evening. Absolute doddle to set up and it's happily filtering our dns traffic now.
Hopefully will have at least some minor impact on the speed of our connection (not downloading cruft).
I was already using a range of ad-blockers myself, and a squid based script for the boys, but this is somewhat more thorough across the whole network.
#dns #adblock #piHole

Day three of the Caloundra Music Festival. It's bucketing down with horizontal rain. Admittedly, the festival doesn't open for another 3.5 hours, but the restaurant we eat breakfast at is about 500m down the road, so we're nibbling on biscuits, etc waiting for it to ease.

Today I had my first helicopter ride. Doors off, to shoot the Caloundra Music Festival from the air.
Very cool, 10/10 would do again. :)

#photo #photography #aerialPhotography