I made a head knife from a powder metallurgy steel (CPM 45VN) by machining the outline out of flat stock and then grinding the profiling with the help of an adjustable jig I made. For work holding, I glued the stock onto a plate and then, after drilling holes, bolted down the stock for more holding force. I was prepared for my hobby-ist grade mill to have problems but everything went beautifully.
Blade outline and adjustable grinding jig. The jig was too ambitious and in the future I would use ones with less adjustability.
I machined the handle from Delrin. This was actually my first time working with Delrin and I was really happy with how it looks and feels. However, it’s definitely lacking in scratch resistance so the beautiful finish gets marred quickly. This was also my first project with a slitting saw, but now that I’ve used it once, I’ll probably use it often in future projects.
Handle half before cutting off with a slitting saw.The black coating on the knife is from the heat treat process
I recently bought a bambulab X1C 3d printer. This was inspired by how long it takes to machine many small parts for hobbies that could be adequately done with a 3d printer for much less effort. Design is much easier when you can iterate with 5 minutes of work per iteration and a few hours wait.
It’s amazing that we live in a society where the full paint set with brushes was only twenty dollars and will be delivered same day.
Work has been really busy recently so I decided to take a break from hobby engineering and do less ambitious fun things in my nights. I’ve been interested in learning to post-process 3d prints the way people do for props, and also for better 3d printed molds. This was kind of an experiment in that – I used a well recommended filler primer from Rust-oleum to try and hide layer lines and turn the 3d print surface into a good surface for painting. It seemed to work fine, but when I tried to make a nice layer-less surface for casting into it was clear how bad PLA is for sanding. There’s a Bondo product I’m going to try next.
Anyway, I like mushrooms and I found a guy on cults3d selling very nice mushroom models (https://cults3d.com/en/users/gazzaladra/3d-models), so I bought a bunch, printed them and spent a night painting them with my SO. Painting is harder than I remember; I haven’t painted since I was a child and mixed colors always turned out different from how I expected. However these are mushrooms so it’s realistic if they look a bit gross.
Getting the brush in to paint the deep crevasses was hardSomeday these will cover my entire houseStill waiting to paint this one.
