Carbon content??

J.Marsillo

J.Marsillo

Joined
Nov 8, 2000
Messages
1,255
clueless newbie question... i've been building up a scrap pile. can anyone name some common stuff thats good for making knives ?? i grabbed some big high strength bolts,old drill bits ,files ,hc rail spikes,wire rope,lots of rebar and some stainless shim stock(i need to read up on stainless) if anything it'll all make good practice. by the way to all the knife makers on this forum thanks for the constant wealth of info. :thumbup:
 
Hah. yer bringing back the good old days. Out of all the junk you listed the only thing of any value to me would be an old file..... preferably flat. Knife metalergy is not just about composition but heat treating as well. If you are working with a coal fire you are not hi tec enough to handel a lot of the junk you have there. With some understanding....or some reading up on the subject.....you can make a fine knife from a good old file. If you want instant success.....just go buy a piece of 01 tool steel. It is low tec enough to keep you out of trouble...easy to heat treat over coal. If using the junk is more appealing then grind all the teeth off an old file THEN start hot forging it to shape. Keep it hot or anieled while you work with it. Grind to finish shape....or not. Then aniel again more carfully. Then harden it.....carful not to shatter it. Then draw a temper to the edge. sharpen it up and see if it works right. If it passes the test make a handle for it. :) Get a good book on heat treating and study it. There is a lot of great information in just understanding how it is done and why. It will make you a better knife buyer.
Have fun. Wish I was still back there.
 
Old tools tend to be your best bet overall, auto springs and tortion bars tend to be good steel fairly often as well. You should do the quench test to figure out if your scrap is hardenable with your equipment. The stuff that doesn't harden can still be used for guards and many non blade smithing projects you might want to do. If you have forge welding capability the cable would be cool to weld up for practice, and you might get lucky and have it be good steel too. Be vary careful if any is galvanized though, the fumes it lets off is poisonous, personally I just toss galvanized scrap.
 
I've used files and I've been picking away at an auto/truck coil spring I have. sompleace around here I have a list of commonly found scrap items and the steel that has been commonly used in them but I'll be darned if I know where it is now.

I don't know if it's my grinder or me but I have a rough time telling anything by looking at sparks. To test a piece of scrap, I guess I'd heat it up, see how it acts under the hammer, aneal/normalize and harden. If I can forge it and harden it I suppose that I can get some kind of knife out of it. As some one else mentioned watch out for the galvanized stuff. Lots of wire rope is not only galvanized but has a fiber core.

I will say this though, I tend to agree with those who recommending starting with new/known steel. I've gained a helthy respect for the amount of work that goes into making a nice blade...even a not so nice blade. There are enough things that can go wrong without adding to it. What do you really save if you spend many hours fabricating a blade only to end up with more scrap?
 
I do have a small propane forge that gets hot enough to weld , i tried doing some cable last week and it welded nicely i just need to learn more about quenching/tempering.(it broke like glass)I'm not looking to save money buy using scrap its just so readily available at work (union ironworker) that its convienient for me,i think i'm looking at bruces frontier damascus too much!!
 
If the cable broke like glass then that means it should be good steel. You'd need to temper it afterwards to remove the brittleness, an hour at 400F twice is typical but you'd want to experiment to find what works best for you and the particular style blade you make. When you're done, etching it should reveal a cool pattern.
 
AwP said:
If the cable broke like glass then that means it should be good steel.
Click to expand...

Or, it could mean it was just severly overheated and lead to huge grains. Examine the ends of the broken pieces. If you're not familiar with what the grain should look like, just break a piece off the tip of that old file, and compare it.
 
the grain looked ok compared to a broken file,what i did was put the welded cable in a press we use at school to bend welding test plates as soon as i got a little pressure on it the peice broke.I didnt bother to heat treat it because i wanted to see if it was solid all the way through.hope fully tomorrow i can set up my post vice and fire up the forge,it rained like cats and dogs all day here in N.Y. :grumpy: thanks for all the help guys :D
 
valimas said:
clueless newbie question... i've been building up a scrap pile. can anyone name some common stuff thats good for making knives ?? i grabbed some big high strength bolts,old drill bits ,files ,hc rail spikes,wire rope,lots of rebar and some stainless shim stock(i need to read up on stainless) if anything it'll all make good practice. by the way to all the knife makers on this forum thanks for the constant wealth of info. :thumbup:
Click to expand...

There is a book out there called Machinist refrence or Machinist handbook, (small thick book gray cover) You can look up what kind of steel things like bolts are made of. A company I used to work for scrapped their whole inventory of socket head die bolts (a 4x4x4 scrap hopper full) after a series of bolt failures caused serious dammage to several dies. These were hardened steel bolts some as large as an inch in diameter. We looked up in the book and found out they were probably 3 series steels with between .60% and .75% carbon. They probably would have made a pretty good blade. I don't forge so I didn't bother, they were just dumped with our regular scrap.
 
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