We will now interrupt the regularly scheduled program for this good old Blades micro podcast. Let's talk stippling. Now, what's interesting about stippling is that it has a lot of different um presences or utilization in a lot of different art forms. Um stippling exists in nature, um and you know, especially with plants, but basically you're taking uh smaller dots that represent a larger whole. And you can see that all the way back in the 1500s with uh printing. Uh so printing presses and the way that stipple engraving was done is taking a bunch of uh very small dots to produce a a gradient uh for images, uh especially um you know prints of you know things, lithographs or whatever. Um and you can see it on artwork such as you know an enameling or jars or paintings. Um you can see it in dot matrix with uh with you know modern technology. You can see it in dithering or images are are turned from grayscale. Uh basically when you dither something, it turns a gray gradient or shade into small black dots that are of various sizes and positions away from each other to make your eye think that there is shading going on. Um in jewelry, stippling is used, uh you could probably consider it the the uh poor man's pave. And pave in in jewelry is a French term that is uh basically uh Pave means uh cobblestoning, uh where you take stones and set them in a way that it looks like a cobblestone path or road. And uh what you can use stippling for in jewelry making and uh how this kind of relates into knife making is uh to texturize a surface uh to give it uh you know contrast and something uh to uh make it look prettier, right? Uh there's lots of ways uh to do stippling in metalworking, and uh one of the easier ways, uh other than doing it by hand, and I've done it, I've done it both ways. I've used um uh hand tools uh such as uh you know round punches and uh you know peening hammers, um, all the way to hammer hand tools and engravers. Uh you can do a lot of different ways. Uh the probably the least expensive way for the uh average knife maker is to look into a thing you can find out on Amazon. It's called a turbine reciprocating grinder, and you can put different uh hand pieces in there and it hooks up to a you know your your air compressor, and it has a stroking mechanism that uh you know in in and out that allows you to uh use like an anvil or something uh in the end of the of the grinder to uh put small divots or textures into your bolsters, or you can do it into your knives while it's soft, or so on and so forth. Um uh Fordham and other uh flex shaft makers produce these hammer hand tools, which is a fairly similar mechanism uh where it's it's basically creating a short stroking action uh similar to an air graver uh that you can you know put a tool in and put the the anvil piece in and make them uh make stippling uh patterns. Lots of different uh stippling options out there. Um you find that uh you know again when you're looking at artwork and things, you can find all sorts of different kinds of stippling. Uh there's stippling that is done on the uh handles of guns uh to increase its grip. You can see stippling in scrimshaw and engraving where those uh same uh patterns or uh you know gradients of shade are applied. Uh it's done in artwork with uh with ink and paper. Uh there's there's so many applications. Basically, what I'm I'm trying to get at is if you want to provide an embellishment on a knife or some feature of a knife, stippling is a good way to do it. And I don't want to uh misrepresent stippling um as it you know only related to jewelry or knives, because there's a lot of great ideas out there as to how to apply it to your blades by looking at other art forms that utilize it, um, and especially in the natural world. Uh it really uh um requires you to do a little bit of research on stippling and look at you know different uh images, different uh art forms, uh the history of it, and then figure out how do you uh like how can you apply that to your to your knives. I think it looks really cool on bolsters. Umster material typically is a little bit softer, so it takes stippling easier. Uh, you can apply it to blades the same way as I mentioned about doing jeweling, so like on the flats of your blades or whatever, uh, but you'll have to remember that either you have to use uh some form of uh you know carbide uh tooling to stipple in, which you can you can get, um, or you have to do it when the blade is soft. Now the only uh thing uh you have to remember about stippling with carbide is that carbide is actually uh it chips off and fractures, and so sometimes if your blade is hard enough, uh it could cause uh you know repeated fracturing inside of your carbide, and then it'll chip off and it can cause some type of hazards. Um so just be careful of those things. Um, the good thing about hammer hand tools and the uh turbine reciprocating grinder is you're looking at a price range between uh $60 on Amazon uh to about $180 or $190 for the uh flex shaft version from Fordham. And you can even modify or make your own tools to go into the hammer hand piece to uh to perform different types of stippling operations. So there's lots of different texture options that you have. You can make uh big, big divots like similar to what you would achieve in a larger ball peen or peening hammer. Um, you can do small stippling, like very, very fine stippling that makes it look more like it's um it's been sandblasted or media blasted in some way. Uh so again, lots of options. It's a really cool embellishment. Uh, I think it you know it definitely warrants looking into, and I hope that helps.