Christmas presents

I don't know how it works on your country/family, but in mine, that is, Julia and me, we don't give presents to each other or to other people. So each buys whatever he or she wants and opens them whenever he or she fancies. I open mine as soon as they arrive, I was never a good kid.

Since we are reducing our footprint, I sold my iMac last week. Had spend the money of it in tools long ago... and almost all arrived this week :)

So, a small toolsumerist post for christmas

First, two planes I got from Junji.

A nice one:

And a fucking awesome one.

 with a poor uradashi.

The nice one had a horrible dai, with a rusted screw to hold it together. I tried to unscrew it but ended up cutting the whole thing off.

A nice staircase dai, perhaps a new trend?

I was playing with the other one yesterday, still need to sharpen more and fix the sole but it's already with her sisters

Yep, I also got some knives... the one on the right from Junji, and the 3 io the left from Jason, Thanks a lot!

Oh, yea, a few other toys on the picture... the saws I was playing with this week and a rosewood mallet I made in germany two weeks ago.

I really like Jason's knives. Mostly the small one. It has a beautiful skin colour.

I like the way you can almost smell the charcoal on it... a piece of time and will invested into matter.

The boy needs some practice, but I see a bright future here. He considers them as forging fails but except of the large pointy one which didn't harden (or lost carbon, I don't know), I see them as very promising and already useful tools. The small one is my to go knife to open ebay packages.

The steel seems somewhat flexible, like it makes a burr immediately and then the burr flips from one side to the other constantly. It's really easy to sharpen tho, and with this one I had it razor sharp after 2 minutes or so. Nice for a change after spending a few hours with those plane blades.

The shape of the marking knife is also very nice, lovely chamfers and good balance. Oh, and once you oil them with camelia oil they become like 10 times nicer to the touch.

Thanks a lot Jason, these are probably the best christmas present I ever got. (And you haven't seen the stone and the saw files it came with them... for a future post once I'm done fixing bodies and start making shavings.)

And in case you wonder if I spend my christmas fixing tools, the answer is "yes, thanks god".