The importance of stepping out of your comfort zone

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S-grind Bunka

The Comfort Zone

I don't know about you guys, but I am a lazy bastard.
I kinda have this thing where I automatically find the easiest way to do something, then I do it that way and just lay back with my cig/coffee/book and enjoy watching others struggle.
This has always been my philosophy - why not spend few minutes extra to make things easier and save hours later.
This approach has served me quite well for some time now.
I am now at a stage of my life where I can do all my job-related tasks in half a day, and then I have the remaining 6 and a half days for my self.
I'm not bragging or anything, OK I am a bit, but the point of this intro is not to say that my life is good but that I have to make an effort not to fall into the same routine in all the other aspects of my life.

Namely, my knifemaking.
If you have been following my posts, you may have noticed that most of my knives are full-flat ground. I've explained what a full-flat grind is in one of my earliest posts, and the term is quite transparent so I won't go too deeply into it.
A flat grind is when the bevel is ground - you've guessed it - flat, and a full-flat one is when it goes all the way to the spine and it' flat. See, transparent.
Lately, I did a couple of convex grinds - that's where the bevel is (drum roll) convex.
So without any false honesty, I can say I've gotten quite good at grinding flats, and I'm getting there with my convex.
What I haven't been doing is hollow (concave) and compound grinds.

And, if I keep doing what I do best and make things easy for myself I will never progress to the next level.
Therefore, I've decided to do one of the hardest grinds there is - just to challenge myself.

S-grind

So what is an S-grind?
It is a term which refers to a compound grind that consists of two fullers or concave plains that are ground into the flat grinds, one on each side of the blade, on a slight bias - so that the profile of the blade from the heel looks like the letter S.

Aside from being a pain in the ass to do, and therefore a good chalenge, doing an S-grind does a few things to the knife which are, let's say, desirable.

Firstly, it reduces the overall weight of the blade - something that in a chef knife is a good thing seeing how it is plausible that someone will be using the knife for few hours. And, less weight equals less energy needed to move the object - you remember physics for high school, right?

Secondly, if you've ever tried to cut potatoes you may have noticed that they tend to stick to the knife and you kinda have to flick them off or move them with your finger. Now, this is not a big deal if you're cutting 10 of them a week, but imagine if you're cutting them for 5-6 hours a day. You could lose your mind over this.
Seeing how the two fullers act as a vacuum realise vents, the food shouldn't stick to the knife.

Back to the comfort zone! So in order to make things hard for my self, I try to make one of the knives in each batch a challenge. For this one, it was an

S-grind Bunka

Here it is before the HT

First "few" passes with the grinding wheel - as you can see it's all wobbly and croocked

First dip into the acid to see how the hamon turned out and to get a reference for further grinding

Hand sanding - a lot of it!

Final dip into acid and off to the handle

Since this was a prototype, and was not going to the market, I've decided to play around with a lot of things. One of them was the handle. I wanted to practice doing a slanted transition to the handle and I had an off-cut of a walnut with a live edge so I gave it a go.

Doing prototypes is always fun because I get to try things out that I am not sure if they will work, while not having a pressure of meeting the high standards I try to keep for my customers. I had a piece of bog oak that I knew had a hole in it, so I've used it and practised my cracks filling. And so on...

For some reason I haven't taken any pic of the handle before this one. Dry fit before the profiling