Spoon Hook Sweeps

Our spoon knives or spoon hooks have been one of our most popular tools for the last several years. We often get questions regarding the difference between our compound sweep and open sweep hooks. Sweep is a term that refers to the curve of the cutting edge. The photo above shows the two side by side. On the left is the compound sweep; the curve starts gradually from the handle and tightens up toward the tip. This is a great all round spoon knife which can carve quickly and make a wide range of hollows from coffee scoops to larger spoons. The open sweep on the right has a much shallower curve along its entire length. This is ideal for carving larger and shallower spoons, and leaves a smoother and more subtle texture. Using an open sweep knife is what finally helped me carve comfortable shallow eating spoons.

For a a long while we offered a choice of long and short handles, and a wide variety of hardwood handles for our spoon knives. This dizzying array of combinations of choices became unwieldily for both us and our customers to navigate. With the current batch of spoon hooks, we eliminated the short handle as well as the choice of wood. From now forward, we will make each batch with only one wood, and announce it on the store listing. We will only make the long handles from now on in order to eliminate a mostly meaningless choice (if you want a short handle, a saw and knife make short work of that job.)

Steel Sales

Being a small business has its joys and challenges, and of necessity you learn a little about a lot. We have been learning lately about steel. The steel industry is highly “sectored” as they say, and different grades of steel are handled through different supply and distribution chains. After a long search, Justin has found a steel company who would deal with a customer as small as we are, and late last year, we purchased 7,000 pounds of American steel. One way to look at it is a way to insulate ourselves from rising material costs. Another is how can we be of service to others.

We are now set up to supply our fellow toolmakers and blade smiths with USA production, hot rolled 5160 steel round bar in several useful sizes. We also cary 4150 in 2” round, and 52100 round drops in a wide range of sizes from a local industry. Check out our web store for complete details. Also, come see us in person at the following events.

Big Blu hammer-in, Morganton, NC. March 18 Hammer on the Hill

Fire on the Mountain, Spruce Pine, NC. April 29 Fire on the Mountain

Southeastern Blacksmiths Conference, Madison, GA. May 18-20 SBA Conference

Spoon Carving Kit

As a maker of spoon carving tools I occasionally get the urge to carve a spoon. I’m not too proud of any that I have made to date but have enjoyed tapping into the reminiscences of my younger self and picking up a slightly sharper knife than my original Swiss Army knife from over 3 decades ago. As a kid I enjoyed carving and did quite a bit, including learning how to carve interlocking wooden chains from an elderly man in my hometown in the mountains of Idaho.
So fast forward to this past spring, I’m the dad of five kids. We were on a family trip back up to Pennsylvania to visit relatives. My wife wanted to spend an afternoon with her aunt who has a kid about our children’s age. So the kids are running around having fun, my wife was in her element chatting with her aunt, and I’m there bored. You might relate to the feeling, and not being one to just sit and do nothing, I saw a pile of some type of olive wood branches, selected a nice one and began to carve. But I was missing a tool or two, and was struggling to use what I had to create the spoon that was in my mind. The finished spoon resembled more of what that younger self would have carved than what I know I was capable of making.
Not to let a good disaster go to waste I came up with the idea of a carving kit that I would like to have for these situations. It would include our Sloyd knife, hook knife, a push/pull shave and a small bow saw. When we got back home I proceeded to make a bow saw for my kit and was quite pleased with the way it turned out. I sewed up a leather tube with a lid, and now have a kit that I bring with me on trips for that moment of boredom. Not that I am blessed with those moments too often, remember I said something about being the dad to 5 kids (they are currently all under the age of 10) but when that moment arises, I’m armed and ready.

Drawknives

The drawknife is such a useful tool, capable of rough and fine work of every description. In the old tool catalogs of the early 20th century, you will find a wide variety of what appear to us to be very similar drawknives, but with very specific names. There are wagon-maker’s, coach-maker’s and carriage-maker’s drawknives. Even with the illustrations, I don’t really know the difference. The carpenters and the plough-makers each had their own drawknife, and how about my favorite? The saddle-tree shave. Talk about specialized! It’s obvious that no woodworker should be without one.

I have just posted my latest video to YouTube in which I describe and demonstrate our drawknives, inshaves, and cooper’s hollowing knives. Compared to the drawknife, the inshave is a much more narrowly focused tool, which today is used primarily by chairmakers in the Windsor/stick chair tradition. I discus the strengths and limitations of this deceptively complex tool. And the coopers hollowing knife… If you are not a cooper, you will not find many uses for this specialized tool, but my, how fun it is to make curved shavings!

New Website

This will be my 5th website since the late ‘90s when I started forging iron and selling my work. That first website I developed myself when a friend suggested I could write it in html. “It will be easy” he said. I don’t know that “easy” would be my description, but it worked. For my second website I used the Mac OS website editor, and that was so much faster. The main idea was to have an online brochure and gallery of my work. The third time around, I hired a web developer to build a site that I could add e-commerce to in the future. Before I could do that, the website and developer both mysteriously disappeared. Version 4 was developed by a friend, and I finally added e-commerce. This site served me well for over 5 years, during which time I added YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Today, we are launching my latest website using Squarespace. My goal is to give a more unified presentation, take more control over the design, and connect with folks in some different ways. Social media has served us well, but has some serious short comings. Lots of folks don’t use social media, and our experience with social media is governed by algorithms that change without our understanding. So, we are adding a blog page to give more thoughtful and detailed content that you can interact with on your terms. We are also finally launching our email newsletter to give product updates and other news.

To all of you who have followed our journey, purchased our tools, and appreciate quality handcraft; thank you!