A Botched Kiridashi Knife and Other Stories

 

I was thinking about many different topics for this blog. Some of them were political. Notably about there not being acceptance of voting reality. Or maybe the about Moderna's new vaccine-- or an even more nano-particle vaccine that does exceedingly well in mice.

I tried. I really did. 

But all of these things are tied together and whenever I pulled on one thread it unraveled back to things that depressed me and I felt like clutching my dog and weeping for my homeland.

No. It has to be better than that. 

So I'm going to talk about failure. 

To understand how something falls apart, you have to understand what the goals and intentions are. 

A kiridashi knife is a Japanese utility knife. (Though I have seen this knife in use in Chinese images.) They have different styles. Many of them are straight on both top and bottom with a steep, straight edge. The bevel of the knife is only on one side, like a chisel. It is used in wood carving and bamboo work. I have also seen it used in the kitchen.

The last knife I made from a file. I liked the heaviness of the resulting blade. It had a nice heft. There was some of the file steel left so I decided to use that. 

The file was the back portion where the file tapers down to a point. This is where one would fasten a handle. 

The last knife had a scale handle. This means it was two slices of wood with the knife blade sandwiched between. It was made with apple wood. I liked the look of the wood, though it's a strange wood to work with. The apple wood I've been working with is from thick branches. Consequently, I'm working both with the outer section of the branch and the inner sapwood. This is an interesting combination. It means that some of the wood is hard as hell and cuts nicely while other portions are softer and have a tendency to turn granular. It results in a very nice look but is a bit difficult.

But I didn't want a scale handle for this knife. For one reason, because it tapered to a point, there was no way to have scales all the way back. For another, I wanted to try to chisel out a seat for the blade. 

After all,  I didn't have enough opportunities to mess this up. I needed more.

My plan was to shape the blade with an angle grinder and then create the one sided bevel on the belt sander. Then, I would make the handle, fit the blade into it. Shape the handle and I was done, right?

Ha.

Shaping the blade turned out to be the easy part. I've been using the angle grinder for a while now and I've gotten okay with it. The biggest problem is to not destroy the hardness of the blank by overheating. I was careful. Then, I heated the blade at about 450F for a couple of hours to lower the temper a little bit. Now, the blade was normal knife toughness and hardness instead of file harness and brittleness. This would make it easier to work with.

Putting the bevel on the blade was a challenge. 

I had built a holder for it but it turned out I had made it too small. Or at least, not big enough in the right way. Most knives have a long bevel leading up to the point. But the kiridashi has a very steep, straight angle. So the bevel holder I had made didn't have enough to grip. It took a bit, but finally I fashioned a set of clamps to hold it and put the bevel on. Clearly, I need to build a new tool.

I ended up with a very pretty blank. This is where things started to go wrong.

I first was going to drill into the end of the apple wood and fit the blade into the shaft that way. But the shape was so odd I didn't trust it. Instead, I opted to cut the apple wood in half, chisel out the space for the blade and glue it back together. Using the Taymor Rule (From Julie Taymor where she says don't try to hide infrastructure, use it as part of the effect) I decided to put an ebony powder epoxy to glue the two pieces together, giving a black line.

First mistake: the apple wood cylinder wasn't even and I ended up a with an angle. Okay. I can adapt.

Then, I chiseled out the section and realized that because the two halves were uneven, I couldn't chisel out half the section. There was some fraction of the space for the blade that could be in one section and then in the other. I remeasured and found, luckily, that the offset was close enough to the thickness of the blade that I could chisel out one side and not the other. Yay!

I glued the two sections together and scraped off the excess. I wanted a cylindrical handle-- I'd seen pictures of this and liked the utilitarian look. But where the handle ended on the blade was uneven and the wrong shape. So I had to cut that out. I used a cylindrical sanding drum to cut it down to where I wanted it. I tried to protect my beautiful, shiny blade but I failed at it. There are a multitude of scratches and dings on the blade.

I also tried to use a brass rod as both ornamentation and to hold the two halves of the handle together. I messed up here, too. I didn't get them lined up straight. I messed up a hole. 

I finished the handle and tried to sand off the dings but they were too much. Eventually, I gave up and decided to chalk it up to experience.

Then, I discovered I had made a left handed kiridashi.

Because the kiridashi has a one sided bevel, there is a preferred side to cutting. Things cut are pushed away from the blade on the bevel side. One wants to cut with the bevel facing away from the wielder. Since I had put the bevel on the left side, the preferred direction of cut is to the left side. A right handed wielder is cutting with the objects cut being pushed towards the chest and face. 

So: I had not only messed up the implementation of the knife I had also messed up its intended use. 

That's a pretty well failed knife.

You don't learn to do new things without failure. Heck, people fail even when they know what they're doing. (I'm looking at you, Star Wars Episode One.) What's important is how to handle failure.

Bobby Duke, an artist whose work I follow, built a truly amazing sculpture only to have it fall and shatter while being photographed. (See here.) In that case, the execution and design was spectacular and the loss was from something stupid. A different kind of failure. He posted later how he was handling it and how he would take it make from it something even more awesome. That is a good handling of failure.

So what do I take from this? 

In the case of the knife, I know what I did wrong-- I have a few ideas how to mitigate my own inadequacies in these techniques. I'm still scratching my head on some of them.

More importantly, I want to make another kiridashi. I liked the knife, even though in all estimations it's a failure. Some parts were pretty. The idea is sound. I just failed at it. That's all. 

Failing happens all the time. Denying it doesn't change it. Denying it only makes it impossible to learn and to make something better. If you can't fail, you can't succeed.

Back when I was learning to fly, I found it difficult. I kept messing up. A helicopter pilot friend of mine said that was a good thing. She said I was learning all of the potential failures. I would recognize this if these ever happened while I was flying. If it all came easy to me, I would never learn beyond the normal case. I would never learn the failure case-- the case that kills you.

I'm not enthusiastic about failing. I'm a human, after all. But I can learn from it.

And maybe I can learn to cut my tomatoes left handed.

A Little News

 In my continuing attempt to actually have readers, I'm announcing a new book that's coming out on 12/15. 

That book is Jackie's Boy, shown at left. 

Jackie's Boy is a novelization of the novella that came out in 2010. I was asked by an editor of a publications house to extend it to a novel At first, I couldn't figure out how to do that. Then, I did. 

But the moment had passed. Between the time the editor approached me and I reapproached him, his ability to command publication had reduced. Or, at least, that's how he presented it to me. 

Jackie's Boy, the novel, has languished without a home.

Until now. On 12/15/2020, it is released.

You can pre-order JB as an ebook at Amazon, B&N, Kobo and Apple.

It's coming out as a print book from Amazon and B&N but I have no links for it as yet. I'll update when I have links.

So, to both my readers, go and get my new book. Make me proud.

State of the Farm, 2020: Staples

(Picture from here.) 

I was going to write some long eloquent essay on the election but, frankly, it's too depressing. 

The only thing I will say is that in 1984, George Orwell postulated a whole English industry and ministry dedicated to making people believe in untruths that were beneficial to the party and not to them. Here in America, all we needed were 140 character segments.

Suck on that, George.

*sigh*

One of the goals we've had going forward with the "farm" is to move from foodstuffs that we have to buy to those we can grow for ourselves. Complete self-sufficiency is not a goal nor would it ever be in the cards. Can't grow gasoline or pharmaceutical products. 

But there are things we can do.

As both my readers might have observed, we've had fairly good luck with fruit and greens. Not terrific luck this year, but not completely terrible, either. We had a good crop of apples, Cornelian cherries, persimmons, and peaches. A fairly good crop of greens and squash. Somewhat on the beans. Not so great on basil and tomatoes. Wretched on potatoes.

By this I mean we did alright on non-staple crops and fairly poorly on staple crops. By "non-staple", I'm speaking of crops that provide nutrients, fiber or flavor but aren't reliable for purposes of day to day calories. I put fruit in the category because though they supply a lot of sugar, they are relatively nutrient poor. One peach supplies about 60 calories. One potato supplies 160. In addition, fruit are much more difficult to store while staples tend to be more stable over time. After last summer's quite respectable showing, I had high hopes that this year's potato crop would do well. We expanded and ended up feeding a lot of rodents. I was discouraged.

But I had not taken into account another staple crop we have: chestnuts.

We've been harvesting chestnuts for some time. We have three trees. A mature producer, a younger tree that started really producing this year, and an immature tree that hasn't produced any so far. This year we had a bumper crops. We are still harvesting the nuts.

Chestnuts require a fair amount of processing. We have to first pull off the outer husks-- no mean feat since the spikes on a chestnut will go right through most glove material. Most people wait until the chestnuts do this themselves and drop the exposed nuts on the ground. Of course, that puts us in a scramble for the nuts with the squirrels. Then, we have to get the nuts out of the inner husks. Finally, we need to dry the resulting exposed nuts.

Wendy has developed over the years a good mechanism for getting to the inner nut once it's been exposed from the outer husk. 

This year we have managed to harvest in excess of 50 pounds of nuts. I'm guessing the final dried nuts have lost about 20% of mass so that's >40 pounds of raw, dried calories.

Chestnut flour is somewhat higher in fat and lower in protein than wheat flour. It has no gluten so cannot substitute for flour in bread making. They can, however, be used to make pasta. I've been making a lot of bread this pandemic and I've started substituting chestnut flour for regular flour. A 3.5/.5 cup ratio appears to get the flavor benefits of chestnuts without loss of structure. I'm still increasing the ratio. We'll see where the fail point is.

In addition, I'm looking at the hickory nuts we're getting. It's hard to find a hickory nut nutrition profile. I used the pecan for that purpose. Here's the comparison:

• Wheat flour/100g: Calories: 339, fat 1.87g, carbo: 72.6g, protein: 13.7g
• Chestnut flour/100g: Calories: 371, fat 3.67g, carbo 78g, protein 6.55g
• Pecan/100g: Calories: 691. Fat: 72g. Carbo: 14g. Protein: 9.2g

The problem with hickory nuts (as opposed to pecans) is getting the meat out of the shell. I'm running some experiments on that.

Given the above, our staples have become:

• Corn
• Squash
• Potatoes
• Beans
• Chestnuts
• Hickory nuts (Maybe)

We're pretty good at growing corn and beans-- not this year, so much. We did well on squash. Beans we did fairly well but we had a rabbit problem. We planted a bad variety of corn as an experiment. It was an experiment that failed. When we plant our preferred variety (Bloody Butcher) we get good yield. We have about ten to fifteen pounds of various corn varieties stored.

Given the 40+ pounds of chestnuts we have, 10+ pounds of corn and various beans, etc., we're not in terrible shape going into winter. 

(We did our apcalyptishopping earlier in the year and bought >150 pounds of flour. This will extend that.)

Given the above, how did we do this year regarding staples?

I have to say: not bad. If we go through about 150 pounds of flour/year-- the pandemic has given us good insight to our utilization of foodstuffs-- we can cut into that by about a third. 

Not bad at all.

So what do we do next year?

I want to try potatoes again. I haven't figured out how to protect them from rodents. One idea I've seen is to grow them in tall beds-- greater than three feet in height. Of course, if we can let our cat out, that might take care of the problem. Especially if we move the potatoes near the house. We will see.

We're going back to Bloody Butcher for corn. I want to see if we can get forty or fifty pounds.

Chestnuts, obviously. 

We need to industrialize our approach to beans. We get beans but we've never planted enough storage beans to actually have enough for the winter. That's going to take some planting. 

I'd like to expand the squash-- that's a problem for several reasons. We do have squash bugs. Also, squash take up significant square footage. (Though we have grown the vines up into interesting places. There's nothing more interesting than a pumpkin growing in an apple tree.) Also, we need to store them. I'm investigating what it might take to dry a large amount of squash. I'm not sure we can even do it.

If the experiments with hickory nuts pan out, I have some ideas on how to build nut harvesting traps that keep the squirrels at bay. Might work for chestnuts as well.

If we can get >100 pounds of staples, I'll call it a win.