Adventures in Fancy-Shank Making

I recently order a knife kit, from knifekits.com (of all places). While I got materials for making a sheath as well, this is only about making the handle. My friend Jared helped me out with it (we used his shop) and was a tremendous asset, and not only because he took almost all the pictures, which is something I almost always forget to do.

Here's the blade that I started with (I taped the blade to make handling it safer):


The material I chose for the handle was G10, which is interesting stuff. Here's my initial layout using masking tape:

The G10 comes with a "protective layer" covering the textured side. That's what peeling up there.

Cutting out the rough pieces with a band saw:


Handle bits are rough cut, ready to take the protective layer (no, not the masking tape) off:


Using the drill press to make holes for screw sets:


Once that's done, the rough handles can be attached to the blade for shaping and sanding:


The bulk of the sanding was done with a belt sander:


The dremmel was used for the getting in to those "hard to reach" areas.


The handle pieces where then taken off the blade and screwed together in order to make the blade-facing sides symmetrical and nice.


Sandpapered it all to get a nice finish. These are the nearly completed handles:


Finished product!


All in all, I think this came out super bad-ass! There's some more fine sanding to do (and Jared hooked me up with some sandypaper) and there's a few places where I took just a little too much material off, but those are mostly hard to spot. Jared's review of the process was "unadulterated success" which I completely agree with.

Prepare for the Worst; Expect the Best

Boy Scouts taught me to "Be Prepared." I find this excellent advice. Naturally, you can't prepare for everything. Nobody can. However, you can prepare for problems and issues that are likely to arise.

Typically, when looking into "disaster" preparation, most everybody (with any common sense anyway) will tell you to prep for the most possible thing first. Hint: Zombies are not the most possible disaster, no mater where you live. In my region, one of the most possible problems would be a blizzard. This basically means I have to have a way to keep warm in the home or car if I lose electricity. Sure I can plan for losing water, gas and sewer too, but those are a lot less likely.

There are other non-natural disasters to prepare for too. Like unemployement. Many people I know have been out of a job for months, if not years. This is much harder to prepare for, but I'll leave that advice for other places.

The problem with all this prepping when you get fixated on it. You worry so much about "impending doom and gloom" that you look for it everywhere. Any little bit of even slightly bad news is an omen to the impending apocalypse! Fear and paranoia take over and start making decisions for you. This is bad. That's not to say "throw caution to the wind" and go do whatever you want, but don't only focus on the bad things.

Prep for things because it's the prudent thing to do, not out of some irrational fear of the government, zombies or your neighbor trying to steal your magic beans. At the same time as all this prepping, remember to live your life. There's no point in surviving catastrophies if you've got no reason to live. Do the things you enjoy, spend time with the people you love and make sure you have something to fight for when the aliens show up.

I can haz summer nao?

Seriously, this cold winter bullshit is for the birds. If you're one of those freaks of nature that actually likes the cold, don't worry, I'll change my tune as soon as summer starts. I'll start complaining about the heat and saying shit like "Winter is better, because you can always add more clothes, you can only take so much off in the heat."

Yeah, that's not entirely true. Sometimes adding more clothes just reaches a point of zero return on investment. Also, while it's true you can add more clothes for warmth, that doesn't mean those extra clothes wont impede your mobility or keep you from doing something you'd like to do.

Take this last weekend for instance. I wanted to get some shoo'in (yeah, that's how I say it sometimes), so I ended up getting together with some of my son and some of my Zombros together and we all trundled up to a spot west of Jamestown to punch holes in paper.

The cold just made everything a pain. It's hard to load a magazine with glove on. It's harder to load them without gloves and your fingers keep freezing to the bullets/magazine/firearm. The cold was further magnified by my most despised weather pattern of all: WIND.

That's right, wind can just go fuck itself in it's on earhole. Seriously, it is the worst thing ever. More worser than paper-cuts, Justin Beiber, and a soccer ball to the testicles all combined. It's like having some annoying dude (like Justin Beiber) pushing you around all day, only you can't exact retribution with a paper-cut or a soccer ball to the nuts.

Yeah, I know, it's good for kite flying and wind energy, but wind turbines are usually much higher off the ground and the saying "go fly a kite" didn't come around because it's so awesome, now did it? (Besides, even flying a kite is hard in high winds).

So, in short: Fuck you cold. Fuck you wind.

We live in oppositeland.

Have you ever noticed how people quite often will say the opposite of what they mean? I don't mean in a sarcastic way either. I'm talking about when people actually believe the they're speaking the truth about themselves when they clearly are not.

Let me give you a few examples:

"I don't mean to tell you how to do your job but..." and then they tell you how to do your job.

"Let me be the first to say that I am all about technology but... " and then they say how they don't understand why we should use digital xyz instead of paper print outs.

"I'm not racist or anything but..." and then the most racist thing you've ever heard pours out of their mouth.

I think people lie to themselves to help reinforce the lie. I've noticed this several times with people who come to learn Karate but have had almost all of their training from one other school. They'll often say something like "I'm just here to learn." Or "I'm not here to prove anything." Usually they quit after just a couple of classes. Why? I have no idea, but I have a theory.

They don't actually want to learn something new, but instead want to have what they've already learned reinforced because they already believe what they've learned is the "best".

Now, because I'm self-centered, I look at this "opposite speach" and wonder what I'm lying to myself about. I mean, I already know that I'm the most handsome, awesomest, greatest person on the planet. Those are just understood facts, but what if there's something I "know" about myself that isn't true?

Why we need to invent the Star Trek teleport. RIGHT NOW!

No, it's not because we could then quickly and easily transfer goods and people across vast distances. No, it's not so we could meet with friends and family on the other side of the globe for lunch at the north pole. No, it's not so we could move emergency materials and aid to a disaster zone in a heartbeat. Nope, it's so that I don't have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Think about it. Well, er, think about the possibility, don't think about me going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Either a small teleporting device could be place in the bladder and "beam" it's contents to a designated spot, or a remote teleporting device could be used to the same effect.

How awesome would that be? You'd never have to use a toilet ever again! Not to mention that diarrhea wouldn't be nearly such a big deal, except for that whole dehydration think, but hey, why not teleport saline solution right into the bloodstream?!

Somebody needs to get on this right freakin now!

There is no teaching...

Here's a lesson I've learned in my (admittedly short) time working with people.

You can't teach anyone anything.

This probably needs some clarification. Let's say that I'm a karate instructor (which I am) and let's say that hypothetical person A (let's call them Balthazar) is my student. I can't present a lesson to them, what you may think of as teaching, but there is zero assurance that they've learned the lesson I'm trying to impart. Balthazar will most likely learn a lesson, but it may be completely unrelated lesson. Likely, in that situation it's (hopefully) close to what I was trying to present, but it is rarely, if ever, 100% of what I'm hoping they will learn.

And that is with a willing student!

I often hear the phrase "I'm gonna teach them a lesson!" Usually it's spoken in the context of vengeance. For example, watch this video:


The guy that steps out of the car with the bat was undoubtedly thinking "I'm gonna teach these guys to harrass people." I sincerely doubt that's what was learned by the other guys. If anything they probably learned something along the lines of "Huh, a douchebag with a bat isn't nearly as tough as I thought."

One last scenario. Let's say you're really good at something. Let's say it's llama herding. You think you're just the bees elbows when it comes to llama herding and you see someone who is struggling to herd llamas nearly as well as you. So you think to yourself, "I'm gonna teach this guy a thing or two about herding llamas!" And you go and show off. You think he learned something how to herd llamas better? I doubt it. He probably just reinforced something he learned in elementary school: arrogant assholes will be arrogant assholes.

Summary: You can't teach anyone. Sure, they can learn things, but it's all beyond your control.

So, my suggestion on all this? First off, try to present only positive lessons as they're more likely to be receptive to that. And if someone is not going to be receptive, don't even waste your time, just smile, nod and move on.

Now the question is, what did you learn by reading this? That I'm an arrogant douchebag of course!

I am SUPER clever. No Really.

I am most clever in my dreams. Well, not my dreams (which are indeed clever, but usually just plain strange) but at the times that I really should be dreaming but can't really sleep. Like last night. Maybe it was the full and fully eclipsed moon, the fact that I stayed up way to late to see it (and it was awesome) or that I'm psyched up for vacation tomorrow, but I didn't sleep very well last night.

Which meant I was clever as hell last night. Seriously, you should've been there. Well, maybe not there physically but mentally. Whatever, you know what I mean.

Of course, the problem is, I don't have any way to capture all my clever thoughts, so I can't really remember them, but I assure you, they were clever as hell. One of them had to do with zombies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, zombies are a now tired genre, but still this was pretty sweet. It may have been an idea for lego zombies. Not the lame little minifigs with just a zombie paint job, no. I'm talking about a variety of zombie lego dudes complete with sucking chest wounds, detachable forearms and unhingable jaws.

The problem with most "zombies" is they're just people with stuff added to make them look like zombies. Lego has a real opportunity to be more accurate and start with people and then subtract stuff.

See? Awesome right? And that was just one of 3 or 4 really great ideas I had last night. I have to find a way to document these things.