Many of you know I had 2 surgical procedures at the same time, (essentially 2 separate surgeries on separate fingers with 2 incisions), on my right hand in June of this year. Many of you also know this was not the first time I have had my hands surgically repaired. I have actually lost count, but it is in the neighborhood of 17 surgeries on my hands or wrists going back as far as 1972.
As you can imagine I have spent a lot of time doing physical therapy on my hands to rehab them from the various surgeries. It has gotten to the point the doctors at the VA don’t even send me to PT for my hands any more. One doctor told me that I knew what to do better than some of the therapists do. There are basically four things I have been doing to rehabilitate my hand to get it back into shape so I can start doing knife repairs for customers again.
1- Squeezing a sponge rubber hand exerciser.
2- Limited typing (it fatigues my hands & fingers pretty quickly).
3- Playing a video game (Black). Believe it or not, pushing the buttons is good exercise.
4- Working on some of my own ‘project knives.’ That way when I made mistakes I did not mess up someone else’s knife. I did make a few mistakes.
These knives are some of my own knives I have been working on while recovering from this last hand surgery.
A Schrade 108OT with a broken spey blade. Converted to a single blade with stag handles added. This went into my store this weekend and has sold already.
An Ulster spear blade from a camp knife put into an Ulster stock knife frame and converted into a single blade easy opener. I did crack the bone at one of the pins in this knife.
An Ulster penknife that had bad celluloid handles on it. I took it apart, cleaned it up and put it back together with RV jigged bone, which is the closest to the peachseed jigging pattern Schrade and Ulster used. I put this one in my store this weekend and it has sold already as well.
This is a nice Kingston penknife also with bad celluloid handles. I tool it apart, cleaned it up and put on come colorful jigged bone. It currently resides in my AAPK store.
I did a customization of a Camco Barlow. It is unusual in that has the sheepfoot master blade instead of the more common clip blade. This knife was in extremely good condition when I got it. I think it still had the factory edge on the blades. I did rope filework on the backsprings and added stag handles. The stag was an experiment in dying stag. I used a two stage dying process. It was interesting to me to see how differently the two handles came out even though I did them together, using the same dye, same process, and same dying time. I guess there is no telling what you may get when working with natural materials. This reminded me of how many of the old WW II era knives had different colored handles. This one is currently in my AAPK store.
I have been doing a few other little things, but these are the best of the lot.
I hope you enjoy them.
Dale
