Advice for a beginner on plate steel?

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ionicmuffin

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Hello, first time posting here. I'm working to help my friend get started in knife making. He's going to start by using plate steel you might find at the hardware store. Any advice or tips that he should be keeping in mind?
 
That steel is no good for knife blades. Order the proper steel.
 
So tempering and all that wont help with that type of steel? he doesn't have a ton of money to spend but if the quality of the knives from a hardware store's steel is going to be low then he may try to get some better stuff. What steel would be cheap and still good for knives?
 
Call Aldo and order some O1 tool steel. It's cheap and very easy to work. It makes a good blade too! :)
 
I would call Aldo and get some 1084 as a beginner. It's great steel, is easy to heat treat, and is very affordable. Really not much different cost wise than buying junk steel.
 
I have to agree there, I was looking at some of his prices and for 3.5" by 48" at 3/16 thick 18$ is not very much, in fact, based on the shape i would imagine he could get around 5-10 knives or more if he felt so inclined.
 
ionicmuffin said:
I have to agree there, I was looking at some of his prices and for 3.5" by 48" at 3/16 thick 18$ is not very much, in fact, based on the shape i would imagine he could get around 5-10 knives or more if he felt so inclined.
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yes sir.
Maybe go with 1/8" x 1.5" stock too.
1/8" is a way more versatile size than 3/16"
 
What you should do for your friend will cost both of you nothing. You should both read all of this:
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/1074288-Shop-Setup-101?p=12258065#post12258065


All of it.....Really.

Until you understand how knives are made, and things about the steel used, and about heat treatment, you will be spinning your wheels.
Once you understand it, then get some 1084 from Aldo or one of the other suppliers and start making knives.
It will take time to get to where you are making good knives, and you will make a lot of mistakes, but if you post the projects here you will get a lot of help in avoiding many of them.
 
Talked with him just recently and he said he agrees that price is much better than it looks for quality steel, he will be making an order soon :thumbup:
 
I agree with what everyone here posted. However, if you have time to burn and want an experiment that will burn lots of time (and money) you can take that mild steel and attempt to case harden it.

This isn't practical nowadays and I wouldn't recommend it if you want a little profit on the side, but it will be an educational history lesson on an old metallurgical technique and the effects off carbon content on steel. The basic premise is to pack the blade together with a carbon-rich material (bone char, charcloth, charcoal powder, etc) inside an airtight box (the "case") and heat the whole assembly until the carbon source begins to go into solution with the blade metal. The carbon uptake of the blade will be most intense at the surface and thin extremities of the blade, graduating to lower concentrations toward the center of the blade material at a rate proportional to the duration of the heat soak. The term "case" is thought to describe this concentric jacket of carbon enriched steel that forms in the blade metal.

Bear in mind, this technique takes lots of practice and the ability to estimate carbon content before treatment. Blacksmiths of old used this technique to adjust the carbon content of metal from their scrap pile which was a precious commodity as wrought iron was hard-gotten and steel even rarer, before industrial levels of production. I would almost say a period-correct "working man's" knife modeled after this time frame should be case-hardened as the practice was pretty common, but I don't think anyone is going to snap your knife in half to see- well, Ed Fowler probably would ;)
 
I have never seen a case-hardened knife, and I have seen a lot of old knives- so I doubt it would be "period-correct."
Case hardening is readily done with a product called "Kasenit." Red hot steel is simply dunked in the powder.
That said, case hardening penetration is extremely shallow and it is hard enough that the knife edge would be brittle where the hardening penetrated, and soft everywhere else.
 
Bill DeShivs said:
I have never seen a case-hardened knife, and I have seen a lot of old knives- so I doubt it would be "period-correct."
Case hardening is readily done with a product called "Kasenit." Red hot steel is simply dunked in the powder.
That said, case hardening penetration is extremely shallow and it is hard enough that the knife edge would be brittle where the hardening penetrated, and soft everywhere else.
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I'll bet you haven't seen one because most wouldn't have lasted for generations. They would have been inexpensive utility blades compared to a "good" blade of solid steel and returned to the scrap pile as soon as they couldn't hold up to their task. Case hardening was once common on swords as well, but only lower quality weapons which tended to deteriorate quickly -"brittle where the hardening penetrated, and soft everywhere else".
 
Not to derail this thread any more, but why would you suspect that a case hardened object would deteriorate into nothingness? Pure iron swords and knives survived, very low carbon swords and knives survived, and high carbon swords and knives survived. I doubt that case hardening would change anything except edge retention after sharpening. If they were junk and cast off regularly, they would be common finds in trash pits and old farms.
The only case hardening I am familiar with in knives was done on early pattern welded blades to increase the carbon content of the skin. These weren't cheap or low grade. They were the top of the line made for the best of the best.

Muffin, I would not waste time or money ( which he said he has little of) trying to case harden knife blades made from 1018 welding steel. As said before a few bars of 1084 or O-1 will make a good number of knives.
 
Please fill out your profile. If you are in Canada, I'll send you a scrap piece of 1084 to make a small knife out of.
 
Once again thanks for all the info guys, today he should be buying a good chunk of the 1084 from NJbarronsteel. He and I don't live in Canada Willie thanks for the offer though. He's good with math, he knows that if he were to sell a few for some money then he would make what he spent in no time.

And besides being good at math he also sees value in using quality material, the difference from before is the information you guys provided allowing him to know that welding steel is junk.
 
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this information really helped me too. and i am making an order of the 1084 right now. going with 1/4" x 2" x 36" gonna make one big ole knife for a friend. and then maybe the 2nd and third one from the material will become more refined.
 
Schleifstein said:
I'll bet you haven't seen one because most wouldn't have lasted for generations. They would have been inexpensive utility blades compared to a "good" blade of solid steel and returned to the scrap pile as soon as they couldn't hold up to their task. Case hardening was once common on swords as well, but only lower quality weapons which tended to deteriorate quickly -"brittle where the hardening penetrated, and soft everywhere else".
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Dude, please do some research before you post such utter fiction. Start with the Knives and Scabbards book

http://www.amazon.com/Knives-Scabbards-Medieval-Excavations-London/dp/1843833530

then do some serious reading on the evolution of steel and iron weapons, there has been a lot of great research by Anne Fuerbach (I may have butchered her name) on the history of steel, including the archaeology of the biblical city of Mirv in which almost half a million blade steel crucibles were found. I have participated in and performed several bloom smelts in which ancient iron was reproduced. I would suggest that you could find the subject quite informative and fascinating. For period sources one might consider starting with Urcker's treatise on mines and assaying, De Re Metallica, Gianbattista Della Porta's "book of practical magic" and of course "On Diverse Arts" by Theophilus. Oleg Sherby and Jeffry Wadsworth had some interesting articles in Scientific American back in the 1980s, and Mike Loades has some wonderful documentaries and books if you want some light but historically accurate entertainment.

Sorry to pounce on you like this, but I have spent a lot of time and effort researching and reproducing historically accurate blade construction and you hit one of my pet peeves

-Page
 
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