Bushcraft Carving a Spoon & Kuksa

Hi there guys, it's Mike from MCQ Bushcraft here and I'm down in Dartmoor at the moment. A very damp environment, quite interesting and we're in a very beautiful woodland and I'm down here with Zed from Zed Outdoors and also John Mack who's a very established carver and he set up a camp for us very kindly and we're down here for a few days where he's really just going to be teaching us some of his techniques of his trade and I thought I'd film it for you in a bit of a video diary so I hope you enjoy the video. So you can see this is the setup I'm running behind me. I've got my DD 3x3, Coyote Brown, Ticket to the Moon hammock, Snugpak Softy 4 which is quite a warm bag for this time of year but it's the coldest bag I've got with a sleep mat and I've got my pack hanging here. Pretty nice setup, we're expecting some heavy rain and maybe some thunderstorms so I've gone for the diamond setup which gives me a little bit more cover on the edges and stops rain creeping in and getting to these lines here and just gradually turning the hammock into a bit of a sponge so it's quite a nice little setup which should see me through the next few days. Morning guys, beginning of day two and it's a really beautiful morning. We had some rain last night but barely rain at all, just a little bit of drizzle and it was a nice dry warm night very mild at this time of year so quite nice over here but the woods are really singing this morning and I got up quite early and did a bit of work on my spoon. You can see I've finished it off almost now, a lovely bit of alder with some coloration in it and it's come out quite nicely but today I'm going to do a little bit more carving and make a hopefully a nice looking bowl but I managed to get the fire going this morning there were some embers left from the oak I put on last night and with a bit of dry gorse and some dead standing hazel had a fire going in no time which was great and the guys are putting breakfast on for me now but we've been joined by Chris Grant and Chris Grant is a incredibly skilled knife maker he's been showing us his knives this morning and they are really beautiful so I just wanted to show you a few of those now. So we've got a couple of Chris's knives here you can see that they're absolutely beautiful some of them are prototypes some of them are near completion and he's been spending quite a few years in testing these designs with John Mack and really putting them through their paces. So Chris what have we got here? We'll start with the one next to it if I can. This is the Mackris which is essentially a carving knife that's been reverse engineered into a bushcraft knife which is the reason that it's full tang. This was the end result of designing and proof testing a design and we reached the point where we'd had we had a narrowed tang version of this knife with almost an identical profile and a slimmed down tip and we just said I just said no someone's not right so what we did was we decided to split the design in two so we have a reverse engineered carving knife the full size that John wanted it and the one that you started with here right is the result so we split the design in half the original design was a pin tang a narrow tang which is what this knife has resulted in so rather than throwing the kitchen sink in we split them in two this is much lighter it's essentially the same design and if you turn the edge down you'll see that the point's tapered there okay which is really just for delicate cuts mostly for chip carving but if you need to get into space to do any detail carving animals or whatever this is this is birch is it this is a birch burr that's been stabilized with metal acrylic resin okay and what what metal is this this is a 5200 ball bearing steel and you we were talking about it earlier you you really rate that as the absolutely years ago and I was mostly working in silver steel at the time that was my steel of choice but it's only available in round bar okay you have to forge it and and I was given massive bearing races by a friend of mine and had great fun forging them down it's difficult stuff to forge but when you get it down it's great but it's wonderful because rarely do you get a keen edge with really good edge retention and edge strength it's almost like the the holy grail and it's um it's not easy it certainly wasn't easy to find when I was first working with it and I managed to locate a supply of it and it's it's actually German it's German in origin it's not it's not made here actually anymore but um it's it's for me um as an ex wood carver woodworker and um as a blade maker in terms of quality of edge edge sharpness edge retention meaning how long it will hold the edge but also edge strength and how durable the edges is the perfect um unity of the trinity if you like and I'll just say these are not the standard sheaths these are a special ones for John I see John likes this full cover yeah yeah I've noticed he wears those on his belt quite a bit purely to go in a cargo pocket yeah yeah so they're absolutely lovely have a look at a couple of others thanks so we've got a couple of other knives here and these ones look uh look really beautiful Chris tell us a bit about these ones sure uh let's start with the lower one this one and this is my Cairngorm model and it's not per se a bushcraft knife I just call it a utility knife okay it's for everything you know it's it's uh you can it's good enough to slice with but it's got a nice strong back in it the original spec is actually for a six mil blade but this is a five mil blade okay and the materials are it's um vinland damasteel which is a pulver scented it's a powder metallurgical combination of two steels okay and that are actually cast together there's no forge welding in this and once it's cast in a big yeah it's then reduced it's then forged down I see you have here um two different types of metal that are there's no welding they are cast they are fused together at birth if you like yeah and um this is a like a special edition Cairngorm that's what I call it after the mountain um so in the regular model it would be six mil but there was no six mil in this damasteel as standard the tangs tapered for weight reduction reduction it's just nice it's a pretty flat handle yeah and very comfortable yeah it's for me you know ergonomics was was my thing back yeah yeah this style of knife originates with a gentleman called Lars Felt and Falkenhoven okay you could say it's my version of it and I tend to see it as the design is inspired by those and I have tweaked it to the point where the profile no longer resembles it and certainly the materials and the finish I'm doing are kind of a step forward of these two knives yeah yeah it's more or less become its own thing but I was really in love with the flat grind my own one actually has a convex edge but I was in love with the flat grind and I thought I'm going to try this handle and just find out how awful it is and how bad the it works it's comfortable it is actually very comfortable you could use that all day and I'll just say that's stabilized alder burr that's alder burr which was sourced by me yeah you went and cut that down out in the woods it was actually cut it was lying by the side of a road oh really yeah it was just lying there so what a find and um the small knife this is actually a set for a gentleman um and it's beautiful that one this is again the same materials vinland damasteel stainless damascus and that alder burr actually came from my garden and both of these are stabilized with methyl acrylic resin so they're essentially impregnated with plastic and you can still have the all the qualities of wood but they're waterproof you could do everything with that absolutely well the sean mulhall the gentleman that designed this um you know he wanted this go-to skin and knife something that was large enough to do a deer yeah something that was delicate enough to be comfortable to do rabbits something light so again it has the tapered tang it's made from four mil stock but it's really nice and thin it's got what you call a full distal paper so it fins right to the point you've got a nice delicate point you could do an awful lot with that yeah a lot of people pick it up like him uh folk that um folk that that are not nice people pick up and say oh that's really nice i like how wide and how yeah yeah i got a friend that's like a stalker and he said you know that that's all you need you know yeah and then it's a nice people keep coming back to for that purpose so um in addition to the other two these are um this one is not in full production because i'm still currently sourcing the metal to use for the standard version but um this one is in sort of semi-production and i used the lighter steel in the alloy rwl 34 these sheets are amazing as well you've got this part here you were saying yeah um it was like uh i kind of adapted from the old mountain man sheet it was actually a sheet i made for myself yeah and the fella saw it and he said i like that and the next thing i know there was paracord around it and you can carry 19 meters of paracord oh nice um and it looks nice and all the rest of it yeah yeah and then i'll just say um i not everybody does this this is my own method of fixing i think it looks rather neat to have brass in here yeah you notice that the d-ring you it fits there it doesn't hang loose it clips in there clips in the back i like that i just noticed it yeah this is a type of fixing called a chicago screw okay which is essentially a screw together rivet and and they are designed to be removed but i super glue them to to fix it and the reason for that is if the d-ring if somebody decides they don't want the d-ring that can be removed and replaced i see rather than having to cut the whole sheath open so it's really just for versatility but i think it looks pretty neat i think it looks really nice um on the inside is it um sort of depressed in so it doesn't touch the blade countersunk and it's rebated so the blade will never touch it yeah okay i can actually see that by looking in it you probably won't be able to see it on the camera though yeah absolutely lovely thanks very much you're a pleasure thanks thanks for being interested