Hey Bruce
You surely are welcome here. Like all of us, you like a sharp knife and here are a bunch of us who help each other do just that. Plus it is a good place to make friends of a like mind.
You say you make grits...I would love to have your recipe if you are willing to part with it. Can you make hush puppies too. I have craving hush puppies ever since I visited the South a few years ago.
Anyway, look forward to hearing from you on the Forum!

All the best
Leo

Leo, if you saw the movie Forest Gump, you might remember Bubba listing all the ways one can cook shrimp. Well, cooking grits is sort of like that - many, many ways. Speaking of shrimp, that is one of my favorite receipts: shrimp and grits with shrimp gravy; furthermore, I catch my shrimp with a cast net on the coast of SC.

Still trying to figure how to include shots of the hand forged knife I referenced in my first post.

I see the one image did make it. I'll do the same thing with the others.

The knife was hand forged by Mike Hensley from O1 steel and twice tempered in oil and by color (you can see the temper line in one of the shots). The handle is Sambar Stag crown with a schrimshaw scene (whitetail deer hunting scene with hunter in ladder stand). You might notice that the tang has been roughed up to match the Sambar Stag handle. Mike even hand-crafted the sheath.

The edge is a single bevel at 25% (each side). I'd love to get a mirror finish on the edge (as you can see, it already has a mirror finish on the rest of the steel). I am hesitant to change the edge he established, and I just do not know enough to feel confident monkeying with it.

I think of it as a working piece of art; although it hasn't done any work yet.

Close up of scrimshaw:

"Roughed up" tang:

That is really cool!