Angle of grinding

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Jan 12, 2010
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After searching I found lots of methods, but I need to know regarding an old file I want to make into my first knife: There are always 2 slopes on the blade: a big one, about 8 mm and the one for the sharp edge. Can you pls tell me on what angle I should grind them both? Will 20 for the wide one and 30 for the sharp one be ok?
Thanks, Michael.
 
the angle of the main grind depends on the depth and thickness of the blade and where you start it. its just a little trig to figure out what you want to grind it at. think of the grinds as right angle triangles mirrored to make a cross section of the knife.

I dont know your files dimensions but lets say it 4mm thick and 40mm high, I am using metric just because of the simple numbers. so think of it as a pair of 2mmX40mm stacked rectangles

start.jpg


I will use a grind that goes to the spine for this example just because its earier. You need to leave about the thickness of a dime to protect the edge during heat treating. that would be aprox 1mm, so you know that your triangle has a 90 degree angle with one side of 40mm and one side of .5 mm. Using the Pythagorean theory of A squared + B squared = C squared you can find the length of the side hiden by the material that you need to remove.
So .5 * .5 + 40 * 40 = .25 + 1600 = 1600.25
to get the leangth of the hypotenuse that the square of 1600.25 which is 40.00312487793922

example2.jpg


With those numbers and the one angle of 90 deegrees you can either crunch out the numbers your self if you trig is good, or do like I do and use the internent to figure it out for you:D

Do the main gring on this example is: 2.15 degrees
as for the cutting edge I personally like 20 degree inclusive edges, but that is a personal thing.
The other route is to just grind away material till it stop where you want it, and you still have that dime thick edge for HT and not worry about what exactly the angle is:p

SO as long as my roundabout answer didn`t confuse you welcome to BF and happy grinding
 
I personally like to make the main bevels as acute as possible given the dimensions of the blade design, so I generally flat grind all the way to the spine and adjust the edge thickness and hone angle for different uses, very heavy use knives I leave the edge a little thicker and make it convex.
Knifemakers tend to have their own ideas about bevel angles and geometry so you may get many different takes on this question.
 
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