A little forging

Raymond Richard

Raymond Richard

Joined
Jun 17, 2001
Messages
5,705
The thing I enjoy most about knife making starts at the very beginning of the process. Hand forging. Taking a raw piece of steel and with just hand held hammers turning that piece of steel into a blade. Anyway I've been wanting to up date the forging page thats on my web site with something that makes sense instead of what is there now. I'll be using some of these pictures there.

Not much going on here yet. Got a stub tang forged first. I prefer forging the tang first. It makes holding onto the work easier plus I now have starting and stopping points. After I have the blade totally forged I will then forge the rest of the tang out.
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A lot has gone on since the last photo and a loss of about an hours time. The blade is pretty much forged now but still needs shaping and straightening. Sometimes this is something that goes real fast and other times you can lose an hour in the process.
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Got the blade straightened out and I just ran a normalizing cycle. Once this blade has cooled off its time to start grinding. Just hammer work till this point. A picture of my coat rack and the trash can bench in the background.
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Here's the finished knife. 9 1/2" 5160 blade, Buggy wheel iron guard, blackwood and walrus cheek bone make up the rest. 15 1/2" overall and weighs 16oz.

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................................DO WANT!

I love that knife. Very simple, but smooth and deadly looking. Make a matching wood and cheek bone scabbard for that one, no leather sheathe will work
 
Mr Richards
Another stunner, so that is bone not copper?
It has a nice look.
However the "little piggies" need a pedicure :)
 
Good start to a series here (and yet another knock out Ray Richard knife!).

It would be really helpful to see how thick the steel in in the first two photos.

A couple of revealing things from just these pics:

- How much of the forged width you ground away.

- The ricasso isn't perfectly clean and untouched by your forging :-)
 
Man, you never cease to amaze me. Thats beautiful. Thansk for posting it!
 
Ya, I'm wondering if that's required forge foot wear?! This is the second knife I've seen posted in the last few days using walrus jaw bone....and I gave Indian George mine. I swear that guy could out Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer and out Huck Fin Huck Finn!
 
you are going to send me a picture of that knife for the calendar and these are not the droids your looking for :D
 
Ray you make that look as natural as breathing, which I guess is why your knives always look so ideal. Thanks for sharing, I hope there are a whole lot more pics on your website, I'd like to see excruciating detail of your forging process! Who knows, maybe some day the hammerin bug will bite me!
 
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