Doyle/Gregory Collaboration #2 - Aikuchi Edition *COOP PHOTO ADDED!*

Matthew Gregory

Chief Executive in charge of Entertainment
Joined
Jan 12, 2005
Messages
5,997
Many moons ago, I threw my narrow butt in the car to make the trip west to John Doyle's house in order to witness his methods. I've always adored his attention to detail and sense of style. We ended up collaborating on one of his superb hunters. The path to that blade lies here, in this thread:

Matt Gregory/John Doyle collaboration project...

Last November, I retraced my path across the lower fringes of Canada to once again spend a week in the Doyle household, this time to work on a pair of blades in a style I tend to frequent, with the intention that we'd each take a blade and add our own signature touches to them. Along the way, we had lots of ups and downs, outrageously bizarre weather patterns, good discussions on cold morning hikes, cheetos ground into the seat of a loaner car, vegetables exploding... I even managed to demonstrate just how bad I am at bowling.



2019042011031673-IMG_3176-X2.jpg


The plan was to base a pair of blades on my large 'aikuchi' pattern, a Japanese fusion style featuring a smallish guard or tsuba. For this project, John suggested we use two of his favorite materials for hardware, bronze and black G10, and I provided some staggeringly beautiful stabilized Hawaiian Koa cut from a single thick block I acquired from Bladeforum's very own B billf

2019042011031673-IMG_3202-X2.jpg




As it happened, very little was achieved on either of our blades during the six days I was there. :p

Due to strange agents of fortune and elements beyond our control, we were forced to abandon the blades we'd initially started with, and John quickly profiled out another blade so that I could mark it while I was still present, and then I drove home to begin the process anew on a blade in my shop. Life got in the way for both of us, until a few weeks ago when John surprised me with a photo of his nearly completed blade, and I had to get my butt in gear!!!!!

2019042011071267-0321191646l~2-X2.jpg


I really get the best part of this, because as I was finishing mine up, John's completed blade arrived in the mail so that I could attempt to photograph the pair, once mine was completed. This gave me the opportunity to enjoy this knife for a while, before it gets shipped out for a REAL photo shoot and then on to their final home.

My choice of steel was .200" thick Crucible CPM-3v, which I'd initially applied a full hand satin finish to and despised - did not look right. Just looked formless, to me, so I reground the primary bevel and left it in a clean machine satin finish, adding just a slight touch of convexity to it.

My initial thoughts were to try to complement John's superb filework, but frankly that's a fool's errand - anything I could manage to do would merely look like third-rate work next to such fantastic detail. Instead, I figured I'd stick to my normal design elements, but add a couple unique quirks to it. The bronze seppa features a touch of 'neko gaki' or 'cat scratch', a first for me, but certainly not the last:

2019042010245849-IMG_4021-X2.jpg


Continuing with the theme, I made a small tsuba in black G10 to complement the seppa, and added a bronze spacer and a thin black G10 spacer before shaping the handle.

The handle is similar in profile to most of my knives like this, with a flared butt and a coffin shape, but this time I translated the scallops of the seppa and tsuba to the flats of the handle, producing a slight hollow at the junction of the spacers and tsuba and widening and flaring to the butt to match the lines of the handle. A simple black pin affixes it all together.

2019042011201267-IMG_4139-X2.jpg



Here are the final results - I won't kid you, photographing two blades with dissimilar finishes is, perhaps, the finest definition of 'futility' I can think of. With any luck, a good friend will agree to doing a better job of this than I have, and I'll add the results to this thread, should he choose not to tell me to pound salt. :D


2019041916063931-IMG_4061-X3.jpg



2019041916063931-IMG_4060-X3.jpg




This was a fantastic project - as John put it. "It's cool to see how both blades differ, but are still clearly a set."


Hopefully he'll chime in here in a little bit to add the details of his blade, but as it's a holiday weekend, I'm hoping he takes a while, and that he's having fun stuffing his kids full of Easter candy. :cool:


Thanks for looking!
 
This was a really interesting and enlightening project for me. Matt covered most of the experience pretty well.

Matt's a lot of fun to work with and a great houseguest. Our personalities are similar in some ways and just different enough in others that it makes a nice balance that works.....and I think that translated into this set of blades.

The concept and design clearly were in Matt's style, but our own personal flair is evident in each of our own blades.

This took me out of my comfort zone a little and that's always a good thing.

My blade is w2. The blade shape changed a little and that resulted in me having to adjust and tweak my entire design to find something that looked 'right' to me.....even though I had no idea what I was doing.

We chose black g-10 for the fittings, accented with bronze that played really well with the amazing koa. Some of my personal styling and embellishments are present on my blade.

I had a general idea of what Matt's knife would look like but he totally surprised me with the guard and handle shape which I like very much.

Each knife on its own is pretty neat, IMO....but the set together really shines. Enough similarity to clearly belong together as a set but enough individuality to set each apart.

It was a great learning and growing experience all around with a pretty cool end result with neither of us really knowing where it would go or what to expect.
 
Great work Matt and John - I noticed the piles of spent belt piles on the floor in John's shop - send me his address and I'll ship him a garbage can. :cool:

Ha.....the sad thing is, there's a garbage can right behind me (the belts are next to it) .........and that's the SMALL pile of belts. :eek::confused::p

I really DO need to throw them out.
 
These just arrived in the hands of a real photographer, so with any luck I’ll update this thread with better shots in the next couple weeks.
 
Back
Top