"The weaver of gold" Folder

[Jan Hendrik]

I finished my biggest project to date, "The weaver of gold" sole authorship liner lock folder.
I have to give credit to Andrew Biggs, Brian Hochstrat and others on this forum that gave me their insight into the design aspects of the presentation side design. The other handle slab design I did on my own.
Some specs of the knife you may find interesting:
Blade: Sandvic 12C27 with satin finished hollow grind and mirror polished flats.
Handle slabs: Grade 2 Titanium with gold and silver inlay and relief engraving.
Hours spent on building the knife: 3 days
Hours spent rope filing the Titanium liners: 19 hours
Time spent on design: 32 hours
Total time spent on engraving and inlay: 101 hours
Total time spent on the project till completion: 176 hours
Gold inlaid: 6.9 grams of fine gold
Silver inlaid: 0.5 grams of fine silver
I know there is still lots of room for improvement and I will strive to work on my technique and design skills with each new project.
The engraving was done with an optivisor with x7 magnification.
The Bulino (Puntini) engraving was done with a hand held x10 loupe.
Thanks for looking!

 

[didyoung]

Looks great

 

[Omar Haltam]

that looks great Jan
i like the design a lot. And thanks for informing us of the time spent on it, gives us an idea

 

[Brian Marshall]

That's a great idea - listing the time and components for the total project!

Great execution too!

I didn't know that you were also the maker 'till I read this...


Brian

 

[gcleaker]

Great work, thanks for the breakdown of time and materials.
Skill comes from diligence

 

[henningssom]

Beautiful! Nice to see knifemakers around here.

 

[monk]

aside from a great look to this project, i think it's a lesson for newbs to take a serious look at your time sheet on this. time is money, and this proves it.

 

[mitch]

ok, Jan, it's my turn to be the mean guy...

First of all, let me say the spiders are exquisite. But... spider webs tend to follow orderly radial patterns (truly things of beauty) and even the seemingly more random types have a certain recognizable construction. At the very least, there should be continuously running main support lines with a lattice of interconnecting lines. if you're going to go to so much trouble rendering perfect arachnids, they deserve architecturally correct webs, too.

Secondly, the extra bold gold scroll backbones completely overpower the delicate spiders. Like putting a very heavy, ornate ormolu frame around a tiny, finely detailed pen & ink drawing. the beautiful spiders should be the main focus of the piece and the heavy gold scrolls dominate the view. all the work is well done, but the composition needs to be much more balanced.

 

[atexascowboy2011]

Mitch,
I Googled this spider right after Jan first posted his drawings and Yes this spider is dysfunctional !

 

[atexascowboy2011]

What would really have kicked ass would be to have done the web out of gold !
It would take some of that wire that Cover was talking about but would really be cool.

 

[Jan Hendrik]

aside from a great look to this project, i think it's a lesson for newbs to take a serious look at your time sheet on this. time is money, and this proves it.

Did I work too slow on this project?

 

[Jan Hendrik]

ok, Jan, it's my turn to be the mean guy...

First of all, let me say the spiders are exquisite. But... spider webs tend to follow orderly radial patterns (truly things of beauty) and even the seemingly more random types have a certain recognizable construction. At the very least, there should be continuously running main support lines with a lattice of interconnecting lines. if you're going to go to so much trouble rendering perfect arachnids, they deserve architecturally correct webs, too.

Secondly, the extra bold gold scroll backbones completely overpower the delicate spiders. Like putting a very heavy, ornate ormolu frame around a tiny, finely detailed pen & ink drawing. the beautiful spiders should be the main focus of the piece and the heavy gold scrolls dominate the view. all the work is well done, but the composition needs to be much more balanced.

Thank you for your input Mitch.
Your observation regarding the boldness of the gold in relation to the delicate spider and web I totally agree with. A mistake I made due to inexperience.
As for the web construction it is correct for this particular species of spider. In fact I copied the web layout line for line from a photograph in Corel Draw.

 

[Jan Hendrik]

What would really have kicked ass would be to have done the web out of gold !
It would take some of that wire that Cover was talking about but would really be cool.

Ouch! Easily add another 60 hours of work to the project!

 

[mitch]

As for the web construction it is correct for this particular species of spider. In fact I copied the web layout line for line from a photograph in Corel Draw.

and one possibility is that some species are very meticulous about keeping a nice neat web, and others start out fairly orderly but get ratty and torn from use. a few years ago we had four identical orb weavers building webs over four panes of our sunroom windows (we called them the Marx Brothers, although they were all large females). for about a month one fall we watched all four weave a brand new web every evening, starting about dusk. then sometime in the night, they would take every strand down, starting a new one all over the next evening. it was a lot of work- each one was probably 20" in diameter and took about 45 minutes start to finish. mesmerizing watching them go round and round...

late this past summer, over the sliding glass door of my new house, a similar species of orb weaver made a web that covered almost half of the window- maybe 3' square, it was huge. she used the same web for weeks. it got so 'moth-eaten' from food crashing into it i started hassling her to clean it up. i'm guessing she lived here when the previous owner had this place. he never fixed a dang thing either!