Home Forums Gear Knives and Blades Any experience with Roselli?

Any of you knife guys have any hands on experience with Roselli UHC steel? I have a hankering to make some Puukko knives and don't really want to fool with forging right now. I'm considering using the Roselli UHC blades with a HRC of 64-66 without any reported chipping issues that I can find.

I haven’t used the Roselli blanks yet. I get my blades from https://www.ragweedforge.com/BladeCatalog.html

I’ve used the Karasuando blades so far in finished knives. It had been a couple years since I’d put s knife together. I called about a month ago and talked with him about blades. I was going to try one of the Roselli blanks. “Ragnar” suggested that I try one of the Laurin blades. I ended up with four Laurin and one Karasuando. I’m in the process of finishing two of the places now. His advice was that the Laurin high carbon blades rivaled the Roselli at a much better price. I’ll likely try a Roselli at some point “just because” will see how the Laurin blades holds up in the near future.

Have you tried a Roselli yet?

No,I'm going to get a Roselli Hunter UHC to try. I might even do a Sambar stag handle for it. I've made knives with the Lauri blades,Mora Blades,and Helle blades when I first started just to learn handle shaping skills. I also forge my own blades but I was interested in trying a blade with a 64-66 Rockwell hardness.

The Lauri blades make a good inexpensive knife but the blades are very narrow compared to American designs,and sometimes the grinds are a little off,but can be fixed with elbow grease,sandpaper and a piece of micarta.

I've made dozens of hidden tang knives.If you run into anything or need a tip or two about fitting pieces, shoot me a PM. I always love talking knives.

Thanks. I will likely send a PM.

I’m enjoying the process and doing some learning as I go with the help of YouTube.
Right now the biggest learning curve is recreating the dimensions of the handle at the pommel.
I’m getting there but not always satisfied. The nice thing is that it’s easy to cut a handle off and start over.

I recently saw what you mean about the grind being a bit off. I’m working on a Leuku 210 blank. The grind on one side of the curve/point is a bit off. I have it near where it needs to be and will refine a little at a time.

I look forward to seeing how your Roselli turns out.

The thing that gave me the biggest fit starting out was getting a guard filled to fit perfectly. I'm a bit of a professional and any visible gap drove me nutts,even though I could look at factory knives and see even more of a gap than on mine.

I learned two tricks to make the guard look as if a blade grew out of it. The first one was to file to fit as close as possible and then peen the entire top surface of the guard with a very small ball peen hammer. This works best with brass. what it does it to mash the surface of the brass into your filled slot so that you have a very thin layer that will fit perfectly against the blade. You have to tap the guard back into place with the blade in a padded vice,using a slot cut in a block to tap the guard into place. The thin layer that you peened into the slot will deform into the blade bit fit so tight that there will be no visible gap. If you peen the top surface of the brass guard and the pommel,and then highly polish it gives an attractive mottled finish.

The second trick is to use a dremmel and thin down the underside of the guard all around the edges of the slot and pound it into place. You have to be very careful as there is a fine line between thin enough to form to the blade properly and making a bigger hole.

Lots of tricks like this in hidden tangs.

Another is to coat the top of your guard and the slot area very well with Vaseline,so that epoxy doesn't get onto it during glue up. Epoxy can be very hard to remove from your finished polished guard top without making any marks.

Another when using multiple pieces in the handle is to made surfaces by sanding them against a piece of glass backed with sandpaper. This way you can get perfectly flat surfaces without any glue lines.You may need to sand by single strokes, in a single direction, depending on the material to keep it flat.

Another tip is to always create mechanical bonding points inside a block or piece of horn and on a tang for epoxy to bond the pieces together. That way you will not rely on glue bond,but you will have a mechanical bond. My favorite epoxy to use is original Accraglass. Do not use the gel but the original runny stuff. It has nearly zero shrinkage and will easily pour into a wood block or piece of stag.