"Knifely Done!"

To borrow from King Lear, because of habitat destruction, pollution and overfishing, salmon are “more sinned against than sinning.”

But this time, it was the salmon’s fault.

Last October, Sprouts Market had frozen filets of wild caught Pacific salmon on sale. Because the filet was three pounds and frozen, I wanted to cut it into single servings and needed a hefty knife.

My daughter Lily kindly lent me her large chef’s knife for this task.

However, despite her generosity, I realized I could not bother her each time a big kitchen job appeared. I looked for a larger knife and soon became disappointed. I would either have to buy a set with knives that I did not need, or buy a single, expensive knife.

Then, I remembered that a large chef’s knife was in our kitchen drawer. It was part of a set in an Omaha Steaks gift order that my mother had sent us some years ago. Trouble was, the hinges, the plastic pieces on each side of the knife handle, had come off. Why this part of a knife is called a “hinge” is a mystery.

A few weeks later, I was at C & E Lumber , where they cut down a walking stick to better fit my stride. On a whim, I asked Matthew, who cut down the stick, if the store sold hardwoods. He took me into a bay of one of the buildings and it was Christmas for hardwood aficionados! They had walnut. They had cherry. They had oak. They had some kind of maple. They even had exotic tropical hardwoods.

After seeing all this beautiful wood, I thought it would be great to rehabilitate the knife by putting hardwood hinges on it.   And after this idea surfaced, I thought the five most dangerous words in carpentry, “How hard could this be?”

After speaking to my friends Greg, Seth, Rob Fitch, Steve and Dennis, I decided that putting on red oak hinges would be doable. On YouTube, I found a video with a Frenchman, who may have had too much caffeine, showing how to do the work. And if it’s on the Internet, it has to be true - - right?

The Frenchman advised cutting the hinges and then securing them to the handle with epoxy and rivets through the wood and the handle.

Rob Selover and the people at Different Drummer's Kitchen told me that a typical chef’s knife has a three-quarter inch thick grip, consisting of the metal and the left and right hinge.

Victoria at C & E Lumber cut a piece of oak for me. Holding the oak meant that the idea was advancing. I could gaze adoringly at the wood but it was now in the house and that was one less excuse for not moving ahead.

Since the board was a bit more than three-quarters of an inch thick, I thought I could cut it in half and the two pieces - - combined with the metal of the handle - - would equal three quarters of an inch.

Using a handheld circular saw, I cut the two pieces.

The first try: A cut with a hand-held circular saw.

And then with the help of my friend Dean, I used a jigsaw to shape each hinge. The shaping worked well. But the two pieces were not the same thickness and that would have resulted in a cock-eyed grip.

The first try at the hinges.
The knife and hinges are resting on Dean's jigsaw case.

When I mentioned this to my friend Steve, he kindly offered to help me, by cutting the wood to a consistent thickness with his table saw.

No brass posts, like those in the YouTube video, were available. Then, Kevin at Robinson’s Hardware showed me a fastener called a “screw post.” Although the knife handle did not have holes through which to put a fastener, the screw post could be tightened to add some tension to keep the handle and hinges together.

The knife handle.  Note the lack of holes for a fastener.

The screw posts were an inch long, requiring thicker hinges. But that has made the knife easier to hold, in the way that those OXO “Good Grips” kitchen tools fit more comfortably in the hand.

To avoid having two uneven pieces, Steve suggested cutting a long strip of wood half and inch thick and then using a jigsaw to cut the pieces to the shape of the handle.

The red oak cut to one half inch
and ready to be cut to fit the knife

Steve’s idea worked well, but then I cut one hinge too close and it was back to the table saw and jigsaw to make a replacement.

We used half of the amount in a Gorilla Glue epoxy package to secure the hinges to the handle. Because so much glue was used, I used three clamps to hold the pieces in place and let the glue cure for 36 hours - - longer than the recommended 24 hour curing.

After the 36 hours elapsed, I used a six-inch disk sander on a drill and smaller pieces of sandpaper with a sanding block to shape the hinges. If I do this again, I will get a five inch disk for the first sanding, to get into more of the tight spots.

Top: the knife with the rough cut hinges ready to be sanded.
Bottom: a second knife of the same size, showing the plastic hinges.

I planned to start sanding with medium sandpaper and finish with a finer grade Steve suggested using only fine sandpaper. Even with fine sandpaper, it is sobering how quickly a person can remove a lot of wood. If I had used medium sandpaper, I might have ground away half the hinge thickness or done something equally as blockheaded.

Steve set up a drill press with a specialized bit to countersink the screw post heads. For some reason, none of the bits in his set were exactly the same width as the screw post heads. As a workaround, I covered the heads with crazy glue, to prevent water or food material from getting between the post and the sides of the holes. The result did not look as attractive as planned, but hopefully the glue will keep out the water and debris.

My friend Dennis told me about a product designed to protect wood, that is food-safe. I will get that item in the future; for now, I brushed vegetable oil on the hinges to help protect them from the water.

Someone suggested discarding the knife and getting a new one. That would have been easier and the finished product would have looked more put together. With drive time and the cost of materials, a mass-produced knife may have been cheaper in time and effort.

But rehabilitating the knife taught me a lot about woodworking - - and was another reminder of how friends rally round and help!

Thanks to Steve for the pun that is this post's headline. 

Travel Like A Canadian

An Air Canada Boeing 777 taking off. 
Photograph courtesy of Air Canada

In 1975, my father took me to British Columbia. From there we went to Washington, Oregon, California and Colorado. He spent time in California and Colorado. He was a big fan of Canada. The trip covered many bases for him and it was a great time.

After the trip, I was filled with recollections. In British Columbia, near Victoria, we saw the power of the Pacific Ocean. All along the beaches were enormous logs. If they were trees, they would have been giants. But they were casually cast up on shore in the way that smaller pieces of driftwood litter Eastern beaches.

In northern California, the Pacific flexed it muscles again. While driving to the coast one afternoon, the Pacific was a fog machine and it forced us to turn back. We crossed the Straits of Juan de Fuca from Victoria to Port Angeles, Washington on a large ocean ferry. Despite the size of the ship, the water in the Straits so rocked the ship that I was seasick - - an unpleasant surprise after spending time afloat on the Atlantic.

Traveling south, we had an atypical two days in Seattle - - it was not raining. We saw Mount Rainier, Crater Lake National Park and Mount Hood. We probably saw Mt. St. Helens but didn’t know it at the time. On the way to Crater Lake, big chunks of pumice were by the road. It was weird to pick up a big rock that was featherweight.

The trees along the way, redwoods and firs, were enormous. Along one Oregon highway, the firs were routinely six feet in diameter. They brought a pleasing scent of pine to the air. The sound of the wind in the firs was appealing. It was a low, constant whistling.

A view of the northern California coast from a historic postcard

We saw a golden eagle in Colorado. We saw where the San Andreas Fault went out to sea at Point Reyes National Seashore and ate the most amazing food everywhere.

Air Canada flew us from JFK to Vancouver, on a DC-9 and Boeing 727. Flying over Canada took us across the vastness of Lake Superior. Canada is so large that the flight included intermediate stops in Winnipeg and Edmonton before we landed in VancouverEach time, we landed and returned to the air, we had a new air crew and another meal.

Because of this congenial trip, I have always been fond of Air Canada. When, a few weeks ago, a fleeting image of an Air Canada commercial flashed across the computer, I wanted to see the entire thing.

I found the commercial on YouTube and learned there were two bonuses.

The first is that Sandra Oh is in the commercial. She brings verve and wit to the enterprise. The second bonus is that Air Canada has two commercials.

Both are appealing and are based on the theme, “Travel Like a Candian.” They are around a minute long and can be found by searching YouTube for “Travel Like a Canadian.”

To learn more about the commercials, Jennifer Wasley, Vice President for Integrated Media at Weber Shandwick Advertising Agency in Toronto, put me in contact with Christa Poole, Senior Manager, Media and Public Relations at Air Canada. Ms. Poole said the videos are not on television but are available online in Canada, the U.S., the UK, Japan, France and Australia.

She went on to say the Travel Like a Canadian theme “is an opportunity to share on a global stage how values like multiculturalism, diversity, openness, compassion and equality make Canadians some of the most accepted and loved travellers in the world.” The videos, she continued, are “a tribute to those values, and central to the story we are telling to celebrate our love for Canada.”

While waiting at the baggage carousel, Judy, played by Sandy Sidhu, is
trying to decide whether to help a fellow traveler, played by Margo Kane, with her luggage.

Sandra Oh suddenly appears and inspires Judy to
"Do the Canadian thing." 
Keep scrolling to see what happens.

The commercials also offer a short course on Canadian life. Ms. Oh and a fellow Canadian discuss “loonies and toonies,” one- and two-dollar Canadian coins. When two kids are bickering, Ms. Oh smooths things over by offering them “poutine,” a Quebec delicacy with French Fries, cheese curds and gravy.

Sandra Oh sharing poutine with two bickering kids

There’s also mention of “bagged milk,” Canadians typically get milk in a one liter bag instead of a carton, and “ketchup chips,”potato chips flavoured with ketchup. Of the latter, Poole advises, “think BBQ chips but ketchup instead of barbeque sauce. Delicious!”

The commercials are set on an airplane and in an airport. Despite both locations being cramped, high security settings, Air Canada had a leg up during filming. The airline has its own hangar where it keeps aircraft between flights. “When we need a plane,” Poole observed, “we don’t necessarily need to be inside an airport.” “We also have,” she noted, “spaces like our Maple Leaf Lounges in airports where we can have more freedom than you might in the rest of the airport.”

For the two commercials, Air Canada had access to aircraft
and airport spaces that are not readily accessible to others.

After seeing these commercials and recalling our travel on Air Canada, I went to the airline’s website, to see if I could fly with them in the US, instead of one of the grim domestic carriers.

Americans can fly Air Canada to Canadian cities and abroad from those cities. However, the airline does not offer domestic service.

The ads, Poole observed, are “directed at international travellers to position Air Canada as the alternative of choice to domestic airlines.” They are, she continued, “part of a wider strategy to add travellers to our growing global network of nearly 220 airports on six continents.”

If the ads inspire you to fly Air Canada overseas, the airline flies you from an American city to Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal; the international flight departs from there. When my nephew Russ Bielawski was traveling to Ontario on business, he told us that Pearson Airport in Toronto was appealing. If Air Canada fares, schedules and travel times fit your itinerary, it might be more appealing to fly with them, instead of flying from one American airport to another which offers international service.

Margo Kane gave Judy her bag first and declares,
"I've been TLCing before TLC was a thing!"

The Air Canada website said it will air future commercials with other Canadian celebrities. Poole said there’s not a date for the next ads, “You’ll have to stay tuned!”