What I've Been Up To

Sorry for not posting anything in a while. Believe it or not, I haven't bought anything especially interesting lately. I did order some more steel but it's taking an age to show up.

So in the meantime I've been staring at my offcuts and getting ideas.

Check these little tackers out. I've stuck a feather in my cap and called them Macaroni, after the most prolific and flamboyant of penguins. I can fit two of them yin-yang style across the breadth of the 3" stock I use to make my Emperors out of.

There's a wee little mini one:

And also slightly less wee than wee but nae as big as medium sized one:

The mini ones have an overall length of about 3-3/8" whereas the maxi ones are 4-3/4" or so. And lest you think these are just more dumb holdout micro neck knives or something, no. They're even dumber than that.

...Because they are a full quarter inch thick. I don't want to tempt fate here by saying this, but wholly aside from being outstandingly ridiculous that may also have the knock-on effect of making these functionally indestructible.

In fact these are so pequeño that I had to make a special downsized version of my logo. (No points for guessing that I immediately turned around and made this into the favicon on my web site.)

I will also draw your attention to that bevel. I'm quite fond of that, actually. These are a 14° per side Scandi grind finished with a 20° micro-bevel which makes them alarmingly sharp. This despite the overall geometry resembling an HO scale viking battle axe. I finished these down to 120 grit, and I could have kept on polishing but I decided I liked the effect of leaving the grind and its impeccable radius — if I may continue to toot my own horn — clearly visible. It catches the light in a rather pleasing fashion, if you ask me.

The handle scales are printed again, using the same bolts as the Emperor. You wouldn't believe how many of these things I have. Look, I've got to use them up on something.

Sheath making is quite easily my least favorite part of this gig. Don't get me wrong, I'm a dab hand at pressing Kydex and I've made oodles of them, even long before I was making my own knives. But it's tedious and winds up dusting my entire shop with nanoscopic polyvinyl dust and we hates it, hobbits.

So I spent probably nine times more effort designing and 3D printing the sheaths for these instead.

On the bright side, this allowed me to build the retention mechanism right in. Time will tell if this turns out to be a dumb idea.

The rivet spacing is as usual Tek-Lok compatible, or I suppose I could print up some simple belt loops instead.

This is not an ad. Here's why: Despite my having four of them all lined up on my desk in a neat little row, the Macaronis are not for sale. Yet.

That's because PayPal inexplicably banned my account after selling a grand total of one lousy knife on my website. At the moment they're holding a couple of hundred bucks of my money hostage, while outright refusing to elaborate why. I'm still fighting with them on that. Thus at the moment I can't take payments for anything from anybody, which is the sort of thing that really kind of cramps your style.

I'll have to get set up with some other payment processor, and truth be told I was only using PayPal because they were the path of the least resistance despite being overtly evil, plus they don't charge any fees until you actually make a sale. I explored other options that are purportedly specifically friendly to the knives-tactical-firearms market and they all seem to have per-transaction plus monthly fees that amount to basically my entire profit margin, which for somebody who might sell a grand total of one knife a month if I'm lucky seems like a raw deal. If any of you guys have any bright ideas on that front I'm all ears.