Marttiini puukko knife restoration

Despite being super busy with both work and moving-related stuff, I have managed to find a few minutes here and there to work on my latest project, a vintage puukko knife restoration. I picked up the 70s-era knife recently at a consignment shop for €18/$23.50, thinking it would be a perfect small companion to the leuku knife I restored last year. The handle wood is curly birch, the bolster is brass and the blade is, I believe, carbon steel and 8.5 cm/3.5 inches in length.

As you can see in the “before” shots, the knife had seen better days! The varnish had cracked and fallen off parts of the handle, and the blade…oh, the blade… Sadly, it looked like someone had taken some kind of rough grinder to it, leaving it with more of a dull saw edge than a knife edge (really). Some of the grind marks were so deep that I didn’t remove them completely, as I’d have to remove too much metal to do so. Over time, these marks will disappear with repeated normal sharpening. Also, there was a bit of paint (?) on the blade. As for the sheath, it was in pretty good shape, mainly showing signs of normal wear and tear, though there were a few small slits in the belt loop/dangler.

To restore this knife, I pretty much followed the same procedure used for its big brother, except that I used finer grits of sandpaper on the wood and metal:

• Sand off old varnish, then sand handle with progressively finer sandpaper (down to 240 grit)
• Polish brass bolster with progressively finer sandpaper (down to 800 grit)
• Restore blade bevel and edge (with diamond rod) and tip (I had to use a file to give the blade a slight drop point, as a tiny part of the tip had been broken off)
• Polish blade with progressively finer sandpaper (down to 1,000 grit)
• Rub handle wood with wax and heat it so it soaks in
• Oil handle wood (teak oil)
• Sharpen blade with stone
• Sew and/or glue small slits in sheath belt loop/dangler
• Cut off leather tag on bottom of sheath
• Sand sheath (240 grit)
• Put black shoe polish on sheath
• Saturate sheath with teak oil
• (I will replace the missing pommel cap when I get a chance to buy one)

Shoe polish and teak oil on a sheath?! I realize some of my methods are a bit unorthodox (i.e. amateurish), but I never claimed to be a professional knife restorer. I tend to experiment a lot and just use stuff I have on hand. Luckily, the end product usually ends up being OK. By the way, the teak oil hardens up the leather nicely, protecting it from the knife blade (there is no insert inside the sheath).

Here’s the end result:

I haven’t decided yet whether I will polish the blade and bolster with finer sandpaper. Eventually, it’ll probably bug me until I break down and do it.

Speaking of going back and finishing jobs properly, I realized that I had done a bit of a halfhearted rush job on the blade of the leuku knife I fixed up last year. I left a lot of the previous owner’s grinding marks on the blade and only “polished” it down to 240 grit sandpaper. Looking back, I feel it was pretty amateurish and did not look very good. Wanting to correct that, I spent some time polishing the blade with sandpaper down to 1,000 grit. Again, I’ll probably go to a finer grit with this knife as well at some point, but for now it’s OK.

A few “bushcrafty” shots of both knives in the new set :

I’m looking forward to wearing this set on my belt on upcoming outings as an occasional alternative to my BushProwler knife. It’ll easily handle light wood prep for small cooking fires as well as all sorts of projects using wood and other materials.

Ikea hobo stove – Initial modification

I really have to hand it to Ikea. Despite being a large multinational corporation with stores in almost 40 countries, countless products and almost USD $30 billion in sales in 2012, they still manage to find a way to cater to the hobo sector. I’m referring, of course, to their well-known hobo stove:

OK, OK. This product is not sold as a hobo stove, per se (it’s actually a cutlery drainer), but supposedly it works very well as a wood-burning stove thanks to its many holes, sturdy construction and size. I’m planning on using mine in place of a hobo stove I made out of a food can which proved to be a tad too small and potentially weaker than I’d like.

A few years ago, I contacted the Metsähallitus, a Finnish government agency which maintains national parks and does other similar tasks. I asked them about using a wood-burning stove for cooking in national parks, and they replied that it’s fine to take sticks and branches off the ground to use as fuel (but not dead trees or parts still attached to trees) and burn them in a wood-burning stove, as long as the stove being used is contained and does not allow embers, ashes etc. to fall out onto the ground. Problem number one:

Obviously, I was going to have to find a way to close up all those holes. After doing some thinking, I figured one way to do it would be to secure a piece of metal over the holes with some nuts and bolts. So I flattened out a lid from a food can and made some holes in it to accept the bolts. Interestingly, when I flattened out the disk it was not flat, but more like a large contact lens (concave on one side and convex on the other), but with a much less extreme curve.

Then I used one bolt and two nuts per hole to hold down the metal disk and to act as little legs which serve to keep the bottom of the stove off the ground, reducing the risk of dry material under the stove catching fire. I put the concave side of the disk facing downward so that it hugs the bottom of the stove snugly and will not allow embers, ashes etc. to escape. I put an extra bolt and nut in the center to put even more downward pressure on the disk.

I haven’t tried this stove out yet, but I will do so soon. I’ll see if any modifications need to be made to ensure a good burn. One thing I’ve learned about using hobo stoves like this in the winter is that they melt the snow they’re resting on (obviously), but I also have an idea on how to remedy that, which I’ll show once it’s complete.

Quick edit: I decided to remove the picture of the full setup with a kettle on top because it didn’t give the right impression of how stable the stove is (it looked like the legs were closer together than they are). The setup is actually quite stable (I did some stability testing with a full kettle of water). I have also used a similar setup with much longer legs before and it was also stable. If, if, it somehow proves unstable, I can always shorten the legs. I am always very careful with fire!

Traditional Finnish log construction

Sometime last year, Scandic Woodsman alerted me to an interesting vintage video on YouTube. It shows a group of men building a log structure using only hand tools in the traditional Finnish way. Apparently, it was still very common for people to build their own houses in this manner well into the 1920s/1930s. The video below is in Finnish and doesn’t have subtitles, but it’s still very interesting to watch, in my opinion.

Hope you enjoy it!

Vintage ice chisel

Two years ago, I found a vintage ice chisel (or tuura in Finnish) at a consignment shop and bought it for 12 Euro ($15.50 US). It’s used to hack down through ice to make holes for ice fishing etc. The handle on this one is old and badly cracked, so I will make a replacement handle for it soon in preparation for an upcoming ice-fishing trip. Nowadays, it’s much more common to use ice augers for this purpose, but I’m looking forward to using my (soon to be finally) restored old-timey ice chisel.

The Council Tool Jersey Classic Axe – Part 2

If you haven’t already done so, check out Part 1 for my overview of this axe and the modifications I made to it.

Before I tested the Jersey Classic axe from Council Tool, I decided to paint the phantom bevels because I could not get the patina dark enough to match the rest of the bevels. Hence the different appearance in the pictures below as compared to the previous pictures. Ultimately, I decided to remove the paint and smooth out the bevels to remove the drop-forging marks entirely.

I started the testing with bucking. The tree I chose was a spruce which blew down in a tornado a few years back and was well seasoned. It was also completely frozen (the temperature was about -17*C/1.5*F). The part of the tree I bucked measured 20 cm/8″ in diameter. It took about 50 chops to get through the spruce (I was not very experienced with an axe this large when I did this initial testing, which was about 2 years ago). I ended up bucking another section of the log half-way through in 20 chops. For good measure, I bucked another piece almost completely through. The axe showed itself to be quite accurate. The slight head misalignment proved to be a non-issue.

Next up was limbing. Most of the 2.5 – 5 cm/1 – 2” limbs were sliced off in one swing.

While cutting off the last limb, I heard a noise that made me cringe: tink! It was the blade kissing a rock.

Tsk-tsk-tsk. I thought there was only snow underneath the tree, but unfortunately this was not the case. To my delight, the metal deformed instead of chipping…and at -17*C/1.5*F! I’m sure some axes would have chipped. When I got home later, I spent a minute or two with a file to fix up the edge. I couldn’t fix it out in the woods, though, but I pressed on anyway.

I proceeded to split one of the bucked bolts next. This went really quickly, and I had six pieces of split wood from a total of 10 swings.

Finally, I decided to fell a small dead tree. The tree I picked was a 9 cm/3.5”-diameter dead frozen pine. I didn’t fell a larger tree because I was running out of daylight, couldn’t find a larger dead tree and didn’t want to fell a larger live tree without the landowner’s permission. Suffice it to say, the axe made short work of the pine. 3 – 4 chops on each side and it was down.

Throughout this testing, the axe performed well, was easy to handle and was less fatiguing to use than I had expected (having mainly used smaller/lighter axes up to that point). I was very pleased by how deep the blade bit into the wood thanks to its thin (in comparison to hardware-store axes) profile. Overall, I was very pleased with this axe.

In the months following this initial testing, I used the axe to process several similar trees into firewood. On one particular winter outing, I noticed that the head was creeping up the handle. After working some more, I managed to move the head halfway off the handle! I contacted Council Tool about this, and while my contact person was talking to the management, I got impatient and decided to fix the problem myself. Even if they had offered to fix it for me, I didn’t want to go through the process of boxing it up, sending it overseas, having them fix it and then wait to receive it (again). I had to cut a few inches/centimeters off the top of the handle after drilling and prying to get the aluminum wedge out, but this length difference didn’t seem to affect the axe too much. Since fixing the tool, I haven’t had any more problems with the head moving (I used wooden and steel wedges for the job).

It’s hard for me to say whether or not I recommend this axe, not because of the material quality (which is high) or the overall workmanship (which is good), but for the obvious reason of the head-attachment problem I experienced. If you can fix something like this yourself, then it’s no problem. If you can’t or don’t want to, it’s a different story (though if you use an axe a lot, you should be able/willing to). Hopefully, mine was just a dud! If this problem is not common on Council’s axes, then your money is definitely well spent when you buy one!

Puukko/leuku sheath firesteel attachment

Want to know an easy way to attach a firesteel to most traditional Finnish puukko/leuku sheathes without adding a firesteel loop? Attach a piece of elastic cord to the firesteel handle, slip the rod under the leather strip and pull the elastic cord over the end of the rod. The firesteel can be quickly and easily transferred from one knife to another if desired. An alternative using traditional materials would be a leather strip strung through the firesteel handle and tied behind the rod on top.

Hand-made crooked knife

Hope you all had a nice Doomsday. Since the world didn’t end yesterday, I was able to make it to the local post office today to pick up a package which I had been eagerly awaiting. Upon opening the small box, I found this inside:

Removing the leather blade wrap exposed the super-sharp edge:

The attractive handle is made of rowan/European mountain ash.

This is a spoon-carving knife, or crooked knife, for carving curved objects like spoons, cups, bowls etc. It was sent to me by OZme of Bush n’ Blade, who made the entire piece from start to finish. Here’s the video he produced showing how he made it. I highly recommend subscribing to his YouTube channel, as he always has new interesting videos about a lot of different topics:

Thank you VERY much OZme! This is a fantastic gift. I can’t wait to use it!

Happy Holidays everyone!