Burt Foster Handmade Knives® Kaleidoscope Bowie

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Like most of what I do, I almost never make the same mosaic Damascus twice.  There are just too many roads to take the same one more than once.  When I lay out my plan for a pattern there is a direction, but you really never get the sense of the final look until it’s finished.  I rely heavily on distortion, so forging the blade to shape introduces an element of the unexpected.  Everyone who has looked at this blade has seen different things in the steel, and like a kaleidoscope it seems to offer a new geometric effect with every glance.

Furthering my explorations with color case hardening, the thorned guard is case hardened wrought iron.  Wrought iron is an antique metal, consisting of a very dirty and soft metal with varying degrees of impurity.  Case hardening infuses carbon into the outer skin of the metal while leaving the interior soft.  When the iron has varying degrees of alloy, it is highlighted but the colors in a way that does not occur with homogenous metals.  The thin nickel silver spacer is fireworked and polished.

The handle is curly koa, stabilized and polished.  As usual the real beauty of this wood can only be appreciated in the hand.

The sheath is tooled in my faux inlay pattern, intended to mimic inlaid rayskin.  

The blade is 10″ long with an overall of 15.5″