The Wood Bee Carver has always been fascinated with whittling and knives since childhood and has blended these interests into a lifelong enjoyment of shaping a piece of wood using a sharp knife as well as making knives for the Whittle-Carving process. A part of this enjoyment has been searching at flea markets, yard sales and antique stores for old pocket knives, junk knives  and antique knives that could be salvaged to be transformed into carving knives. The key was to find knife blades that had the functional purpose of being salvaged, reshaped and sharpened into a blade suitable for carving purposes and not for collectible value.

Among the finds were the occasional Scalpel that was once used for medical surgeries with the assumption that the blade was made of good carbon steel. Scalpel blades sharpen very well into a good carving edge for carving wood.  The drawback was the narrow handle of the typical scalpel was not suitable for comfort in the carver’s hand.  A few scalpels had their handles build up by using a Plastic-Dip product that is illustrated in the photo with the blue handled scalpels.

Some of the older scalpels had small wooden handles that needed to be replaced with larger wooden handles utilizing epoxy as the bonding agent. The four knives in the two photos below are of the before and after the transformation.  The left photo are of the old Scalpels and one Ink Eraser knife (often confused as a blood letting fleam). The second photo is of three scalpel blades inserted into a whittled to shape handle and the ink eraser blade inserted into wooden handle awaiting the whittle shaping procedure.

Other Knives are made for personal use of the Wood Bee Carver and are examples of ways in which the wood carving hobby expands into other tinkering activities that brings an added pleasure of a creative mind and hands of skill experimenting with learning by doing. There is a simple tranquility in such an activity that grows the human spirit that wood bee.