Now it’s time to make some of the accessory items, including rivets and eyes for the scalpel.
Above, I’m using my Sherline lathe to turn a small piece of moose antler for the eyes. This little cylinder will extend through the entire knife, and is an important item in the knife structure, acting as a pin as well as being decorative.
Here, I’m drilling the hole through the antler pin to install the horn pupils.
Test fitting the moose antler pin/eyes before removing the antler from the lathe. If I remove the antler before the fit is correct, I’ll never get it reinstalled and centered if I need to trim a little more off.
Above, a small sliver of dark cow horn installed, ready to turn the tiny pupil cylinder. This cylinder will extend all the way through from one side of the sardine to the other.
Carefully turning the horn pupil cylinder to diameter.
Beginning to create the silver rivets. This is the top side of my tiny little blacksmith’s “nail header”.
The bottom side of the nail header. Note the larger holes partially drilled through to provide clearance so the rivet wire doesn’t bind tight and can be removed.
The 16 gauge wire with melted blob installed in the nail header
, ready to peen the rivet head.
The rivet head peened.
Test fitting a rivet in the front pin hole.
The rivet needs to be trimmed to proper length.
The rivet trimmed to length – a little more than one wire diameter above the surface of the shibuichi scale seems to work well for me.
And here are the moose antler pin, the cow horn pupil pin, and the two 16 gauge silver rivets ready to install.
All the elements ready for final assembly.
And, above, everything installed, epoxied, and peened.
Thanks for looking!