Barrytown

I would recommend this to anyone going to New Zealand. Do knife making. It is so much fun and you get a really good knife at the end of it. So you start off with a long piece of carbon steel. Then you put it in a forge and heat it glowing orange (but not sparking cause then its burnt). Then you hammer it on one side. This will eventually be the sharp strong side. The hammering puts extra carbon in that side from the coke on the fire. The guy there told you when you were ready to move on. Then you cut the handle to size and filled it down on 4 sanding belts. This is the first set of sanding. Then we drilled through the handle on the steal to attach a brass and wooden handle We could only do this because the rest of the blade doesn't have as much carbon and is soft enough to drill. Then we sanded down the handle to a better shape Then we went for lunch. In that time the main guy there tidied up everyones blade so when we came back after lunch they looked great. At lunch we had toasted sandwiches and got to see some especially short Shetland ponies and swing on an absolutely giant swing which took 5 people to pull back to the highest point. Brian also took a hand as some axe throwing. They said on average girls make better knifes than girls but all the knives seem to come out beautifully. After lunch we spend most of the time grinding down the knife making it shinier and shinier. At the end we had to sand the knives by hand with very finely grained paper. Then the handle was stained and detected with shoe polish. It took the whole day but it was brilliant. Everyone had a good time and there were only a few more guys than girls.