So I bought a lurid green $8 Tomodachi Santoku knife at K-Mart, which was the first non-stick-coated Santoku-shaped knife I’d seen since that comment. It’s made by Hamilton Forge Ltd, one of those generic names that doesn’t produce any search results worth mentioning and so probably isn’t a real company:
The knife has a huge steel blade with a solid plastic handle injection-molded around a short tang, which put the balance point maybe 50 mm out into the blade. I didn’t like the feel when I waved it around in the store and really didn’t like how it behaved on the cutting board.
The way I see it, I can fix a too-light handle…
Pursuant to that post, I have a bag of tungsten electrodes, some complete with a glass seal:
Wrapping some masking tape around the glass, tapping it with a hammer, then sliding the tape-with-fragments into the trash got rid of the glass. The bulbous tip seems to be a stainless steel tube welded around a thin tungsten shaft, so I clamped it in the vise and whacked it with a chisel; tungsten is strong-but-brittle and cracks easily:
Of course, whacking a tungsten rod didn’t do the chisel the least bit of good, but it was about time to sharpen that thing anyway.
Why use tungsten electrodes instead of, say, ordinary drill rod? Tungsten has about the highest density you can get without going broke, getting poisoned, or dying of radiation exposure. That useful table gives elemental density in g/cm3:
- aluminum = 2.7
- iron = 7.9
- lead = 11.4
- gold = 19.32
- tungsten = 19.35
- osmium = 22.6
Can’t afford gold, not even I would put a lead slug in a kitchen knife, and I had the electrodes, so why not?
Waving a neodymium magnet over the handle convinced me that I could drill a hole slightly more than two inches deep without hitting the tang. I briefly considered drilling half a dozen smaller holes, but that started to look like a lot of work and I don’t have any suitable gun drills.
The business end of the electrode measures 1 inch long and 0.1375 inch in diameter. A hexagonal cluster of seven rods fits neatly into a round hole about 3×0.137 = 0.413 inch in diameter: quite conveniently a nice, long Z drill. So I clamped the knife between two strips in the drill press vise and had my way with it:
Actually, I spot-drilled with a center drill, then used a long step drill, stopping with the 3/8 inch step just kissing the low side of the handle, to get the hole mostly on center, before running the Z drill down about 2-1/8 inch. The handle walls became so thin that they flexed around the drill to produce an undersized hole, so I reamed it with a hand-turned 7/16 inch drill and the electrodes fit with no room to spare:
Yeah, that’s a crack in the top electrode: tungsten is brittle.
A dollop of epoxy atop the electrodes should seal them in place forever. I clamped the knife (in its color-matched scabbard) with the angled end of the handle water-level, so the epoxy settled in a neat, symmetric blob that looks better in person than it does here:
The epoxy forms a plug over the ends of the electrodes and (probably) doesn’t extend very far down between them, but they’re firmly jammed in a snug hole and (probably) won’t ever rattle around.
Seven electrodes weighed 32 g and, figuring the missing plastic rounds off to slightly over nothing, the handle now has 60 g of additional weight out toward the end, producing a knife weighing 185 g that balances near the narrowest part of the handle. It’s somewhat heavier than I’d like, but I can cope.
The edge came from the factory reasonably sharp; a few passes over the sharpening steel touched it up nicely.
Early results: it cuts cheese perfectly, drifts to the right in melons, cuts wafer-thin slices from a loaf of my High-Traction Bread, and dismantles fruit with some clumsiness. Overall, I like it, although I could do without the bright green color in a big way.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 