critic my grinds please

The cheapest way to practice is to use some of those paint sticks from home deopt. They are 1/8in thick, just profile and then work on the bevels. They are easy on belts and if you screw them up they go in the kindling pile. The best part is they are free!
 
rickmenefee said:
Use sharp belts! Never get a jig, it will handicap you in the long run. Takes years to get good at it. Never give up and anybody can do it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Use sharp belts! Get a well designed jig, it will cut years off the learning curve. Takes about a month to be proficient. Never give up and not everybody can do it.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:thumbup::D
 
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I guess I can say that I've seen worse, if that makes you feel better. ;) There's definitely some potential there, and I can see what you were probably trying to do.

My advice:
Stay away from jigs. They'll hurt more then they'll help.

Use SHARP belts. You'll never have a chance of getting an even grind once the belt starts to dull. Use dull belts for rough profiling, and after that, throw them away.

Use quality steel. A poorly annealed file isn't going to grind as well or as evenly as a properly annealed piece of quality knife steel.

Start with a flat grind with clean lines and THEN move onto convexing. That, or ditch the convexing altogether. For small knives like you are making, there's really no reason for it. It actually makes them cut less efficiently, IMO.

Make sure you're starting with straight steel, and if you're using a flat platen, make sure it's actually flat. ANY deviation, blemish, divot, etc... will transfer to your grinds. If you can install a ceramic liner on it, that's all the better.

Grind with consistent pressures and angles, and with deliberate actions. Any minor angle or pressure changes will show up magnified in your grind lines.
 
Also, use QUALITY belts. Cheap ones won't last for more than a minute, and then they start grinding unevenly because all the grit comes right off. Make sure you're using ceramic belts, zirconia belts, or other belts that are optimize for grinding metal.
 
richard j said:
looking better charlie mike. jasonscarter, would you want to learn how to grind a chisel grind?
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Richard I really appreciate the offer, but I'm unable to travel at this point. I'd be happy to take you up on your offer prehaps at a future time :) and sneak a peak at how you sharpen using paper wheels :)

Jason
 
knife to a gunfight said:
I guess I can say that I've seen worse, if that makes you feel better. ;) There's definitely some potential there, and I can see what you were probably trying to do.

My advice:
Stay away from jigs. They'll hurt more then they'll help.

Use SHARP belts. You'll never have a chance of getting an even grind once the belt starts to dull. Use dull belts for rough profiling, and after that, throw them away.

Use quality steel. A poorly annealed file isn't going to grind as well or as evenly as a properly annealed piece of quality knife steel.

Start with a flat grind with clean lines and THEN move onto convexing. That, or ditch the convexing altogether. For small knives like you are making, there's really no reason for it. It actually makes them cut less efficiently, IMO.

Make sure you're starting with straight steel, and if you're using a flat platen, make sure it's actually flat. ANY deviation, blemish, divot, etc... will transfer to your grinds. If you can install a ceramic liner on it, that's all the better.

Grind with consistent pressures and angles, and with deliberate actions. Any minor angle or pressure changes will show up magnified in your grind lines.
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Your advise is sound and insightful.
Not using quality sharp belts has derailed more than one would be blade grinder.

Starting out by flatgrinding blades also makes seance to me. Convex bevels are not conducive to a sharp maintainable edge and should be avoided unless one is making a splitting maul.

The paragraph pertaining to grinding pressure and angles is also dead on.
How do you go about teaching a new grinder how to maintain the angles that are needed to produce a flat even bevel? What angles do you recommend starting out with and ending up with on any particular blade? Can a new grinder duplicate a given blade shape at some future time, using your techniques? Lets say months in the future.

My point in asking these questions has nothing to do with challenging how you personally grind a knife blade; my interest is in helping makers grind better blades from day one.

I have a small device, of my making, that weighs 2oz. that sits on each of my grinders. At any time I desire, I can attach this small tool to a blade and it will reference exactly, the angle the blade is being held, relative to the belts surface.
When someone new comes to my shop and wants to try their hand at grinding a blade, they are introduced to the two once teacher that sits on my grinder.
They are given basic holding instructions for a few minutes and then get on with making their first attempt at grinding a knife blade.

Here is one example of what they accomplished on their first effort:

metorite+dagger+027.jpg


metorite+dagger+029.jpg


Condemning any one technique or MO or choice of machinery in knifemaking can only close off avenues that might be helpful to people interested in trying their hand at making knives.

Just the view from my shop, Fred
 
I'm with you Fred.

I personally like jigs. I have a sled type jig that I use all the time for scandi grinds and chisel grinds. The jig makes everything headache free for me. It also acts as a file guide. The jig bumps right against the platen, and my plunge lines are really neat. I just clamp a long, flat piece of micarta to my work table, so I can give the sled some room to travel in either direction.

It takes some skill and coordination to get good results with them though. Certainly not easy.

I love the precision it offers. I'm not interested in making recurves, kris style blades or any of those in my shop. My jig works with most any style that I'd ever want to try.

I certainly can grind freehand, but alot of those attempts have gone in the big rusty file 13. I'm just not interested in wasting my money in steel, and slowing down my production.

I'm also not intersted in cussing, being pissed off, throwing a blade across the yard or even having my heart broken over having a knife 99% perfectly hand ground, and then completely ruining it on the last freehand pass. Thats no fun to me at all.

I think it's funny....we have jigs and fancy tools for every other damn operation in knifemaking, but the blade grinding jig gets no love it seems.
 
I fear this may end up being a long post which is hard to understand without showing in person, but here goes anyway:

The way I flat grind is as follows...

First, I scribe 2 lines on the front edge (what will become the sharpened edge side of the knife) of my profiled blade blank. This gives me a full length parallel section to grind each side to, and also gives me an initial visual reference of just about how thick my unsharpened blade will be at the edge.

Next, I grind 45 degree bevels up to the closest scribe line on each side. This removes the "corners" off of my blade blank and helps me to establish where my plungelines and ricasso are going to be located, based on where I stop these 45 degree bevels.

Sometime I will draw lines down the face of the blank, or wrap tape around the knife to show where my plungelines will stop. One could also use a file guide I suppose.

At this point, I'm ready to start flat grinding one side. Basically, I hold my blade at 45 degrees to the belt and match my previously ground bevels as if I were going to grind them deeper, but THEN I tilt the knife back about 4 or 5 degrees so that my scribe line on that side is no longer in contact with the belt. There should now be a very small gap between the belt and the top edge of the blade where your scribe line is. At the same time, the face of the blank should still be in contact with the belt around what I would call the bottom corner of your 45 degree bevel, or the corner opposite of your scribe line, if that makes sense.

At this point, while maintaining this angle, I grind back to my scribe line. I now have a 50 degree bevel (give or take) from the face of my blank to the scribe line.

Simply repeating this process (tilting the blade away from your belt) will gradually push your grind lines further towards the spine of the blade. Keep going until you have a full flat, or have ground as much as you wanted, and then repeat on the other side. The nice thing about this technique is that it works on any size blade, of any stock thickness, and any edge thickness as well. It's "infinitely adjustable" so to speak.

Now, how flat, even, straight, parallel, etc.... that your grind lines are during this process depends on several factors, including, but probably not limited to:

Flatness and smoothness of platen
Straightness/Flatness of steel
Sharpness of belts
Consistency of grinding pressure
Consistency of x, y, and z angles relative to your platen as you move back and forth

Here's a quick video explanation of some of the things I mentioned above. I made this for another forum discussing similar issues a while back:


[video=youtube;wZ-wMxFoZx4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ-wMxFoZx4[/video]
 
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Now as for a more indepth view on my thoughts on jigs:

I think they can definitely be useful, but I don't think they should be soley relied upon by any means. In my experience, I spend more time trying to adjust the darn things to get the results I'm looking for than I actually spend grinding the knife.

The time may also come when a knife doesn't fit or work with the jig you've relied on for so long, and then you're kind of out of luck.

If you can use a jig to get quick and perfect results on a particular (or even multiple types of) knife design, more power to you. At the same time, I think jigs tend to back you into a corner, or limit you to a "box" that you have to fit everything into.

Learning to free hand grind and how to make very small adjustments by hand to achieve a desired result or get a grind where it needs to go is so much more valuable, and not that difficult to learn with a little educated practice and trial/error grinding. Additionaly, a jig relies on everything being perfectly set up and your steel being square and straight on both sides as well. While freehanding, you can make those small adjusments as you go, without having to fiddle around with angles on your jigs, tables, and whatever else.

Now, I have made a few jigs, and used them with success (and failures) the same as with free handing. I can also say that they too take some skill and know how to get desired results with. I think a good knifemaker will have experience with both.
That being said, I'd put an experienced free hand grind against a beginner's jig any day of the week, and I might even say the same for an experienced jig user.

Jigs may (and perhaps even should) certainly be used as stepping stones, but at somepoint I'd recommend that any knifemaker take the "training wheels" off and open themselves to much greater skill and opportunity.
 
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Jigs are great, but it comes down to the type of knife you want to make.

I make one knife that has 8 separate grinds between both sides of the blade and the tang.

I would need to make at least 4 separate jigs in this case. Even so, I'm not going to get the exact look I want.

A jig is not going to work for this particular blade; it's too complex.

If I were making scandi blades, a jig would work great.

It just depends on what kind of knife you want to make.
 
BTW... I just realized the 2 oz jig that Fred was talking about was the infamous "Bubble Jig".

Now that jig I actually thing is a great idea, as it still makes you rely on "free handing" to an extent, and not just clamping a piece of steel into a fixture and letting it do 95% of the work.

That's a jig that you can use for a while, and then probably move on from with great success, since it merely references an angle and doesn't hold the blade for you. In otherwords, it helps to eliminate guesswork from ONE of the x, y, and z planes, but not all of them. Therefore, you're still getting a good idea of fine tuning angles and grinds by hand.

That type of assistance I would definitely recommend.
 
Since starting into knifemaking in 1999 I have elevated my skill level and have a much broader understanding of not only what I am trying to accomplish but in how to go about it. Knifemaking; what a demanding craft it is. To be truly accomplished at knife making, I'm still in the learning stage, takes many skills. Each skill requires more than a cursory understanding. It takes stick to it ness to become a good knife maker. There is so very much to learn.
I believe that is why we have such great discourse and input from so broad an array of knife enthusiast. We all want to learn.
There are shelves of folders containing different techniques and processes along my shop walls. There's no way I could keep them all in my head. My computers hard drive is loaded up with files on grinding techniques along with shared ideas on forging and hammering blades. The information seems endless.

We all benefit from the discussions that take place on the forums. Whether just starting out or having years of experience; there is always something new to learn.

Thanks for joining in, Fred
 
Looks like art work more than a useable knife, so it depends on what your trying to achieve. If this is art then it looks pretty cool. My two cents.
 
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