13" Wicked Dagger by George Cameron

[ILikeStilettos]

This is, I believe, the third 13" knife that George has built. It's based on standard 11" stiletto, but has been stretched on the y-axis to make a long, slender, and incredibly wicked knife. I supplied George with a block of "Rain Forest" Bear Tooth Woods Acrylic and this is what he built for me. It's not an exact match to the scale material that Roger used, but it's pretty close, and I was able to obtain a long enough piece to build a 'bottomless' 13". George flattened the button ever so slightly for me.

I should pass some comments along to you builders and manglers from George. He said that the acrylic is sturdy enough that he had no trouble peening and it polished beautifully. During sawing and sanding operations it generates very little dust, but that is of the 'high static attraction' variety, so you constantly have to deal with that. Cutting operations also generate a lot of heat quickly, if you don't cool the work, the dust melts and fills up belts and saw teeth. Also the heat will warp a slab. George said that the solution is to work slowly and have plenty of cold water at hand. Every five seconds or so he would cool the material and that worked great. He plans to build more knives with this stuff, especially since it comes in such wild colors and patterns. I know it's not traditional and I don't expect the vintage guys to embrace it whole cloth. To me it's gorgeous. I like my muscle cars with wild paint, too. Bravo, George, you're young at heart and that just thrills me silly.

The yellow cast that you see in the previous and the next picture must be some sort of reflection off the mirror polished scales. The colors here are all green, black and white. I didn't realize it until after George had worked his polishing magic that the green is a translucent metallic, very much like the hot rod 'candy apple green' so that as the knife is turned, there are different brightness patterns that move and reflect up from different depths.

George sculpted me some solid NS flat guards and left me a couple of big flat surfaces in case I decided to have it engraved later. This is a 3/16" O-1 blade and springs, .06 stainless liners, all stainless pins and everything mirror polished inside and out. It was built with black liners, but they're nearly invisible against the dark scales. I didn't think red would work, although George says that would have been quite a nice combination. We also considered white, but that seemed too close to the liner color for me.

He created a generous locktab to support the picklock design, and scribed in the traditional lines.

I asked George to make sure that the back edge was not so sharp that I had difficulty closing the knife. He accomplished this by taking 'a bit off the back'. It's funny that if you saw two blades side by side you couldn't readily detect that one was 1/32" more narrow than the other, but you would immediately detect the aesthetic change. In several of the shots it looks like the blade is very short, this is a combination of photographic foreshortening, and the effect of a highly polished blade against a dark background. In the last shot you can see that all the blade is there, but it is a very serious piece of steel.

I've long been a fan of George's work, but this is just over the top even for him. I sent the scales out on a Thursday and George started the knife the following Monday, completed and mailed it the this past Monday and today, Wednesday, it arrived. Maybe we should call him Flash!

Thanks for looking. My photography is still not doing the art justice, but I am getting there. Thanks, George, thanks a million!

[Miller Bro's]

Nice looking knife

to AAPK!

[knife7knut]

Nice knife! Tell George the next time he is cutting acyrlic sheet: I use a sabre saw with a laminate blade and have cut acrylic sheet up to 3/4" thick with no problems whatsoever. The laminate saw blade has teeth that cut on the down stroke rather than the upstroke as most blades do so there is no fusing of the material already cut. The blades are very inexpensive(I bought a package of 2 for less than $2)and last a long time. I use them mostly for cutting 1/2" optical grade Lexan. Iuse the high speed on the sabre saw but feed it fairly slow.