Congratulations to Thomas Kuzia, of Beacon Falls, CT with his wonderful Alamo Bowie knife, as the Shop Friend of the Month for November 2009! Tom wrote the following: "This is my first attempt at making knives with rock handles and gemstones.  This was very labor intensive work for me as I don't have the proper equipment to do the metal work.  Almost all of the metal work was done using a hacksaw, electric drill press, files, and a lot of different grit emery cloth.  The blade was sanded by hand and then buffed to a mirror like shine using Tripoli, Zam and red jewelers rouge.  The handles are made from a one of a kind Hickoryite which I think is gorgeous!  The handles were rough ground and sanded using my Genie (by Diamond Pacific) and then polished in my Lot-O-Tumbler, (by Bell Corp.)  The handles are epoxied to the blades tang using 2 ton epoxy.  There are 2, faceted 6mm clear topaz stones and 4.4mm garnets set into the guard.  Making the tiny tube settings out of sterling silver for the faceted stones was a first for me and something I doubt if I would ever attempt again. I bought the faceted garnets but the topaz were collected in the rough by Darren Jones from Australia. He had them faceted and generously gave them to me! This knife took me a little over 3 months to make working on it several hours just about every day. Although it posed a lot of problems for me and frustration set in many, many times, I just put one foot in front of the other and kept "walking" my way through it. This knife is a culmination of many things I learned throughout my life working in metal and lapidary, but without the help of a tutorial so very graciously offered by Michael Hoover of Art in Stone, Stone Handle Knives, Redrummd http://redrummdknives.blademakers.com