# Visualizing What a New Handle Will Look Like



## wsfarrell (Jun 27, 2012)

I'm looking at having the handle replaced on a Shigefusa 240 kasumi gyuto. I scour the web looking for nice wood, but it's really hard to imagine what a given piece will look like on the knife. So I've set up a PowerPoint slide that allows me to do a lot of playing around with different woods on that knife. The process went as follows:

1. Take a picture of the knife and import it into PP, resize and position it.
2. Go to arizonaironwood, burlsource, eBay, etc., and download pictures of wood blocks. If a site won't let me "save" an image (like eBay), I use CaptureWiz to get it.
3. I use the IrfanView app to rotate and resize the downloaded photos, then import them into PP. 

In the end I get something like the slide below, with the Shig on top and various potential handles below it.







In this next screenshot I've put the black-dyed buckeye handle on to see what it might look like:






And in this last shot I'm trying the green-dyed box elder handle on for appearance.






It's far from perfect, but it helps me a lot. I'm leaning toward the black buckeye at the moment.


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## add (Jun 27, 2012)

Hey, very cool.

Seen it applied to paint colors on houses and wheels on specific car models... so why not knives?


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## Eamon Burke (Jun 27, 2012)

This is cool.


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## DeepCSweede (Jun 27, 2012)

Very cool process and buckeye burl is a great choice.


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## The Edge (Jun 28, 2012)

Very cool! Are you going to do a plain black ferrule, or are you going to download more wood and create more slideshows?


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## apicius9 (Jun 28, 2012)

Great! Have been meaning to do smething like that for years with my own wood stash, but just taking all the pictures would take me so long that I never really followed up with it. Using the available pics certainly makes it easier.

Stefan


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## wsfarrell (Jun 28, 2012)

The Edge said:


> Very cool! Are you going to do a plain black ferrule, or are you going to download more wood and create more slideshows?



Could get kind of busy with a figured ferrule. I'm thinking maybe plain black with a spacer--red, silver, I don't know. 

It would be great if someone would write an app for this. Problem is, the worldwide market would be like 6.


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## Deckhand (Jun 28, 2012)

Very cool idea and application.


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## richinva (Jun 28, 2012)

Great tool!


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## pkb (Jul 5, 2012)

Neat. I've done some work designing knives in CAD and there's always a gap between what I think of it in CAD and what I think of it when it's cut out and profiled in the physical world. Most of my final templates are roughly created in CAD and then adjusted when I can actually hold the steel and look at it from different angles. I'm sure there will be parallels between CAD blade design and the nifty job you've done. Good luck!


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## PierreRodrigue (Jul 5, 2012)

I don't see pics??


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## Crothcipt (Jul 5, 2012)

me either.


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## Johnny.B.Good (Jul 6, 2012)

Or me.


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## Deckhand (Jul 6, 2012)

Must be a PC issue should get a Mac:rofl2:



:justkidding:
Not working now. It did when he first posted.


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## GlassEye (Jul 7, 2012)

"The requested URL /photos/screen2.jpg was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."


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## wsfarrell (Jul 8, 2012)

My apologies. Server got hacked and I had to clean everything out. Pics are restored now in the first post.


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## Johnny.B.Good (Jul 8, 2012)

Very cool, thanks for fixing the pictures.

Have you settled on a wood choice yet? I generally like more dark/subdued colors on handles, but I rather like that green dyed box elder.


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## wsfarrell (Jul 8, 2012)

Johnny.B.Good said:


> Have you settled on a wood choice yet? I generally like more dark/subdued colors on handles, but I rather like that green dyed box elder.



I like the green too, but the black-dyed buckeye is sitting on Mike Henry's workbench as we speak. 

Almost forgot that I also figured out how to put "spacers" on the pics. I tried a red one and a silver one for the Shig, and decided on silver. Here's the screenshot of the final mockup that I sent to Mike:


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## Johnny.B.Good (Jul 8, 2012)

Well, maybe you can use that wild green on something else someday. Your choice is going to look sharp (if the picture is anything to go by!)

Mike does great work (I have two of his handles myself).


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