cutting steel

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dozuki

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Apr 4, 2006
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I am trying to split a piece of 5160 down the middle and it is driving me crazy. I am trying to use an angle grinder with cutoff disks but it just eats them up in a few passes. I think a hack saw would take about three months. Any ideas would be apreciated.
Thanks Paul
 
Freehand cutting with a cutoff wheel is not only hard on wheels but very dangerous to the operator/I know! I used to free hand on a 14 inch cutoff till I nearly cut off my trigger finger...fortunatly a glove and a Helping Hand from above left me with only a nick which still took a long time to heal... sooo I thought a while about how to do it right with the big cutoff and came up with a little table the goes in the clamp on the table of the cutoff as in a piece of large angle iron with a slot cut in it and a piece of flat stock welded on to add clamping surface! With a new 14 inch wheel you can cut flat stock fairly long like a table saw ...just got to watch when the wheel wears down to where it wants to pull the metal through at supersonic speeds! Keep moving the table up as the wheel wears down! Bill A.
 
That is a dangerous thing to do. I would not want you to get cut doing something like that. It would be better just to buy more steel. Have a safe day in the shop.
 
How thick is your 5160 and how thin do you need it. I would grind it down unless it was way over the thickness I needed and if it was way over I would fire up the forge and use the old hammer and anvil. Other method would be to get some in a thickness more suited to your use. You will spend more on grinder wheels and sweat than the steel is worth. I can not imagine something like cutting a piece of 1/2 down to get 2 pieces of say 7/32.
 
I've done a lot of that with small (7" and less) cutoff wheels on 300 series stainless sheet. Even at less than .125 it eats up the wheels and is scary/dangerous when it lets go. Mostly, I had problems like that when I'd use a 7" wheel on a 4.5" grinder. Its a bad habit I was cured of. Stick to the smaller wheels on a 4.5" grinder and go slow. Even then, that little wheel can sometimes let go on you so you might want to think about a face shield and some heavy gloves.


Or, for the price of all the wheels you've been going through, you could buy a HF bandsaw for cutting barstock.
 
dozuki said:
I am trying to split a piece of 5160 down the middle and it is driving me crazy. I am trying to use an angle grinder with cutoff disks but it just eats them up in a few passes. I think a hack saw would take about three months. Any ideas would be apreciated.
Thanks Paul
Click to expand...
What Bill says works good if you haven't got a metal bandsaw. I've been using a 14" cutoff with a small table built right at the center of the wheel. Like he says, keep the table with a bare minimum from the wheel at all times. It will try and pull it thru the smallest crack. You can cut close to 10" or so, then turn it around and cut from the other end.
 
I just cut a billet of 6-6 Titanium into nice folder sized pieces. Once I started getting into smaller pieces, I JB welded them to an aluminum plate. That way I could hold them on the plate and run them through the bandsaw to their final dimensions.

So, I'd glue that stick, on edge, to an sacrificial plate, then split it on a horizontal band saw.

BTW, it is possible to induce stress into the skin of a metal bar in such a way that it warps during HT. Happens sometimes when machining with dull cutters etc. If you're getting it much hotter on one side, or beating the $hit out of it on one side, you might be setting yourself up for trouble down the road. Not saying it's gonna happen, just saying it is possible.
 
Well, I don't know how thick this is, or how long your cut is, but I've split 1/8" 1084 with an angle grinder. I cut it too long, clamped it down to a 2x4 positioned at waist height and ran the cutter under the bar. Only cut about 7" of 1/8" stock, but it didn't use up a whole disc. I did *not* make passes, I started at the end of the bar stock, cut all the way through and then fed forward. By the way, I clamped the crap out of the steel, I'd suggest doing it in a vice, if you can fashion it. If you can use a vice you could cut across instead of under, which is much more stable in my opinion.

Braced with both hands the angle grinder isn't impossible to use. As with everything we do in knifemaking, this is more dangerous than a stroll through suburbia, but with a bit of caution I don't think you're in too much more danger than many other steps in the trade.
 
dozuki said:
...I think a hack saw would take about three months. Any ideas would be apreciated.
Thanks Paul
Click to expand...

I just cut out my entire 3/16'' knife blank out of 01 (pending pin material though) with a hacksaw. its pretty fast with enough effort, 3/4" per min at least.



bladsmth said:
A metal cutting band saw is a lot cheaper than a trip to the ER.
Stacy
Click to expand...

I told myself I wasn't going to mention my Canadian heath care system...
 
thanks for all the pointers. it was a kind of rough freehanding it. I might just look into a metal cutting bandsaw
 
I'm dumb, when you say "split" a piece of 5160 down the middle, you're talking about cutting the barstock in half correct? Otherwise it sounds like you're actually trying for instance to make 1/8" inch into 1/16" inch thickness or thicker depending on what you're actually using.

Buy a new piece of steel! (if you are trying to make the stock thinner and not just shorter) It isn't like ripping a piece of wood in half with a bandsaw or table saw.

If you are trying to make it thinner, sounds like a hell of alot of work and probably cooking the daylights out of the steel in the process with an angle grinder, etc etc.

So what is it exactly that you're actually doing?
 
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