We will now interrupt the regularly scheduled program for this good old Blades Micro Podcast. In Odeda's 1956 God's Gonna Cut You Down, the lyrics say what's done in the dark will be brought to the light. Uh Johnny Cash also sang this song, and more recently I've thought about that in terms of knife making. Lighting plays a very important role in the finishing of knives as well as the viewing of knives because light plays against all aspects of a knife. The finish, the bevels, the symmetry, the finish on your handle material, all of that is brought to beauty through light. And it's important for us as knife makers to understand the versatility and the benefit of light as a tool in order to try to remove as many flaws and facets from a knife as possible. One thing that I learned and greatly benefited from when I was going through the knife maker's guild process was how to use light in order to be able to detect two-inch scratches or marks inside of the blade, facets, and areas where the finish was not consistent across the entire surface area of the blade. That's true not only on the bevels, but on anywhere else where the flats are or the handle material is supposed to be finished consistently and may not be. You might see this play out inside of flats on slip joints where the flats and the areas that are supposed to be contoured and rounded blend together. The light plays a very important role in being able to distinguish the flats on a blade from the contours on a blade. And you can do this by holding a blade up to the light, a source of light that is usually a daylight, like a 5000K or higher, and twisting it around and seeing how the light plays off of it. Eddie Ray, who's a custom fixed blade maker, will use a light box and photograph the blade. And if the blade does not photograph correctly and beautifully, he will take it back and rework it. That's one way to use light to your benefit. Maybe for me a little bit down the road from the initial build process, but I get it when Eddie's doing it because it does make a lot of sense that if it doesn't photograph beautifully, it's not really going to look the most pleasing to the eye in person either. So when you are equipping your shop with lights, there are several different ways you can do it. LED seems to be the most cost-effective option for lights in your shop, and you can run banks of them in series, and you can find them fairly cheaply on Amazon and Harbor Freight. And if you don't want to hang lights everywhere on your shop, especially on the ceiling, you can use more powerful LED lights on your machines and on your work areas so that way you can do a certain operation like grinding or finishing on your handle material and hold it up to the light and look at it in a few different angles. And then if you need to make adjustments, you can do that pretty quickly. Detachable or magnetic LED lights are also very beneficial on your grinders and milling machines and things like that because you can very precisely see where your scribe lines are or your traces or things like that, and you can get very, very close to your pattern tolerance by using brighter light when you're working. And I would highly recommend this because the magnetic or LED lights that you can snap onto your machines are actually pretty inexpensive holistically, but they make a lot of difference in the end product where you don't have to chase lines as much because you can see where you're supposed to grind to. Kind of on that note, optivizors actually make a large difference in getting up and close to your work in order to be able to see what you're doing. They have many different magnifications, and you can have different optivizors with different powered lenses to be able to see what you're doing. That combined with very bright and frequent light sources around your shop will make a world of difference in your end product. But if there's one takeaway from this, hold your knives up to the light in many different orientations, bend it around, twist it, front to back, side to side, and inspect closely what that light looks like on all the facets of your blade. If the goal is to have flats that are really flat and contours that are contoured appropriately with the finish that you choose, make sure that the knife is executed that way because it is very easy to go in and fix some of those minor flaws. It just takes a little bit of time of inspection and introspection as to how far you want to take that knife when you're making it before you release it to the public. Build sheets. There are a lot of different ways when you're making knives to organize and lay out how you're going to prepare them. One way I've found that's very beneficial is to use what is a sales order booklet that has carbon copies. And you can usually pick these up at Walmart or office supply stores, and it gives you an a place to put like a customer's name, the date of the order, address, things like that, uh, how much they're supposed to pay, and then a quantity or a line item basis for materials, right? So if the knife is CPM 154, you could put it in one slot. If it's supposed to have mammoth Ivor, you can put that somewhere else. And you can actually build the the price next to each one of those as well to total out the amount. Additionally, you can also build build sheets on a computer if you have a specific methodology that you want to follow for each pattern. All right. So sometimes that might be the specific technical details or steps that you go through to execute Damascus, right? So if you have a piece of Damascus, you might surface grind it, you might profile it, you might test etch it, whatever the etching process or um finishing process is that you need to follow. You can make a build sheet that walks you through those steps so that way your preparation matches the operation that you're going to execute that knife on. Eventually, you can get to a place in knife making where all of that becomes pretty intuitive and you don't need to worry so much about making build sheets. However, I will say that after almost seven years of making knives, I still use them regularly. Especially when I'm getting into more complicated builds or I'm making slip joints or lockbacks, there are times when I want to really track certain operations that might not necessarily be intuitive to me, like polishing the back square and kick and blade tang, right? Uh, or the spring. There are operations within knives that if they're bolster knives, I want to follow certain operations. So you can do that with sales orders and carbon copies for initial orders, and you can even build custom build sheets on your computer and print them out so you can follow along. Another really good thing about build sheets is that I have dividers that I got from Harbor Freight, the little plastic dividers for tools and parts. And what I will do is I'll take the individual components and I will put them in each one of the little compartments along with the build sheet. So that way if I get distracted or I'm making multiple knives or I have to quit for the day, that I can pick up where I left off and I know on the build sheet where I was supposed to go next. So there's there's really not a lot else to build sheets. It's a quick tip and it really does help with organization and it allows you to check off things as you go down the list. So, very similar to grocery shopping. You know, there's a lot of things that you might need at the grocery store. You build a list and then you check them off while you're picking them up. So that way everything at the end is the ex uh it meets the expectation of what you planned out in the beginning. I hope this tip helps. Ask if you have any questions. This is another Good Old Blades Micro Podcast.