A sleddingful season it is.

It's almost mid-March, meaning warmer days, birds singing in springy tunes, lot's of daylight. In February and March I'm pretty busy with dog sledding. So knife making has been in a part-time mode. It's good for a change to earn your living without a dust mask on your face.

This pair of leukus was finished just the other day.

Mornings at the husky farm start with packing the stuff needed on the trip. Safaris vary from 1 hour up to 5 days. All the stuff is transported in the sledges.

Dogs being harnessed. Leaders are the first ones in, as they should keep the line stretched out, avoiding mess-ups and tangles.

Teams are made ready before the clients arrive. On 2 days or longer trips clients always harness and unharness their own teams later on.

A short briefing about driving a sledge is an important part.  Using the brakes, keeping enought distance to the next team, balancing, paying attention to your team, and so on....

    Sledges packed, guides taking the snow anchors up, almost ready to go!

And out of the farm!

For the first few kilometers dogs are running a bit faster, especially if the track is well packed and without fresh snow.

Last team out of the gate. Balancing is important when curving from the farm to forest road!

 Relaxed driving on the great lake Inari.

Blue light of early winter in the northern Lapland's wilderness.

Guesthouse Husky's wilderness cottage on an island on lake Inari. This is where we stay on 3 and 3 day trip. Nearest road is appr. 15km away, and to Russian border it's around 20km.

Short break on a 2 day trip, we cover about 53km a day on these tours.

Preparing the fire for a lunch break. Feather sticks of course!

        Nice view of a glimpse of the sun suddenly between falling of wet snow for the whole day.

 Masa and Tuupo leading the second team. On longer trips the order of teams will almost never stay the same for the whole trip. Dogs are not machines who work exactly the same day after day. It's pretty much impossible to make several teams go exactly the same speed, so Sometimes we need to swap dogs from team to team or put more or less load in the sledge to balance them.

A beautiful day to be out on a husky safari. I'm driving as a second guide in between the teams, so the front ones have cut the trail through fresh snow.

Common behaviour of Conan and Ricky. At the farm these fellows live in the same pen, and they hardly seem to have any serious disagreements. Ricky, the one Conan is sitting on, is usually a bit restless and noisy during the breaks on safaris. If Conan get's enough of it, he just lays or sits on Ricky to make him quiet. Dogs are all individuals indeed.

We came from here just the day before this pic. Snowfall and wind during the night has made the track pretty much invisible.

A pic from nice snowy and sunny day ends this random set of random pics from random husky safaris.

They're Finnish puukkos, and for sale! (Sold)

So here are these maasepänpuukkos for sale. All handles in oiled curly birch. Blades 80CrV2 carbon steel. Scandi grind with tiny secondary bevel.

First one has a sheath ready, stained dark brown. For others I'll make their sheaths when the new owner has decided if it'll be red-brown, dark brown, or black. Slight variation in prices comes from the grade of timber.

Shipping costs plus possible PayPal fee will be added on total.

All sold, thank you!

No1  90 x 22mm blade. Handle 110mm long. 30,5mm wide and 23mm thick at max.

Sold!

No2   86 x 21,5mm blade. Handle lenght 110mm. 30mm wide and 22mm thick at max.
Sold!

   No3    81 x 21mm blade. 110mm handle, max 30,5mm wide and 22,5mm thick.
Sold!

No4    88 x 21,5mm blade. 110mm handle, width 29,5mm and thickness 22,5mm at max.
Sold!

No5   Blade 98 x 22mm. Handle 110mm long, 30,5mm wide and 23mm thick at max.

Sold!

No6    Blade 90 x 22mm. Handle 110mm long, 30mm wide and 22mm thick at max.

Sold!

No7   Blade 86 x 21mm. Handle 109mm long, 29,5mm wide and 22,5mm thick at max.

Sold!

No8   Blade 87 x 21mm. Handle 110mm long, 30mm wide and 22,5mm thick at max.

Sold!

No9    93 x 22mm blade. 110mm long handle, 31mm wide and 22mm thick at max.

Sold!

Pinky and Benji are curious to see how this puukko sale goes on..... 

Maasepänpuukko work in progress.

Life goes on, and so does the knife work. As you might have seen on my last post, blades for this set of maasepänpuukkos got ready, so it was time to work with the handles.

Maasepänpuukko is a basic, traditional type Finnish knife. It has only what a user knife needs; a blade, simple handle, and the sheath to carry it safely. This kind of puukkos were used for pretty much everything where man needed a cutting tool.

 

Fitting the blade in a block of curly birch. This time the work is done with a drill and needle rasps. End of the tang is pointed like a nail, and last centimer is hammered in.

Blades fixed in handle blocks. Shaping is done on a belt sander, followed by hand sanding.

Working in my knife laboratory, enjoying the luxury of air conditioning.

Handles shaped.

 Into an oil bath they go....

 And hung out to dry after several hours.

One has a sheath ready, to give an idea what they'll look like. Rest will have their sheaths when the new owner has decided on the colour. I'll post these up for sale on next Saturday, February 13th.

Heading towards the summer.

Days are getting longer fast, as the arctic is heading towards the midnight sun. We've had some really beautiful days with sunshine again, but has been snowing quite a bit too.

What would my wintertime post be without some pics from sled dog trips?

Just two weeks or so ago almost all the snow fell from the trees because of strong winds. Recent snowfalls made the forests pretty nice again.

January is supposed to be cold here. This year it's been like supposed. For quite a while it was constantly between -25 and -35 celcius. You have to keep you phone and camera near your body, if you want them to work for more than just a short while. 

Always when it's -20c or below, everyone is immediately warming by the fire during lunch or coffee break. When it's warmer, almost everyone stays outside stroking and keeping company to the dogs.

My team enjoys running on a soft layer of fresh snow on recently smoothened trail. Sometimes when tracks get icy you have to put socks on for the dogs, as the paws might start bleeding.

Arriving back to the farm at the Guesthouse Husky

Well, like usually, you got to spend some spare time outside too. So on the skis, and off to the forest on untouched snow!

And after the willow grouse tracks we go. Cloudy days don't make it easy for a human being to spot a white bird on snow.

 

Crafty young dog! He let's the other one to bulldozer his way in soft snow, and then follow the ready path... 

...So no wonder he's full of energy during the break, and has to find something to do.

The hatchet I made last year has been in use a lot. Quite light, but effective enough for my common use. Only change I made was to grind the bevels bit more acute. So far have been happy with it.

 In previous post I mentioned a set of puukkos coming for sale. Well, it seems like it'll go like with Olkiluoto nuclear powerplant in South-West Finland..... it was supposed to be operating in 2009, but still to this date is not. So with this I'm trying to say these knives won't be ready for saly by the end of this month. In this picture blades are roughly ground, and ready for hardening.

Here they're hardened. Easy to see the line of partial quenching.

Blades ready, and some blocks of curly birch sawn for the handles. Blade legths vary from 85 to 98mm. To be continued next week.....