Damaged Knife restoration??

[Phil705]

A friend of mine asked if I could restore a favorite hunting knife. It seems that one of his kids tossed it into a campfire with some firewood, and it was not noticed until the next morning. It was a leather washer handle, all gone of course.

If I can figure out what the steel is, is it possible to restore it to functional knife? How? What challenges would you expect?

Thanks,

Phil Millam
Winthrop WA

 

[SteelSlaver]

The problem would be to try to figure out what steel so that a decent heat treat could be preformed. There are a couple methods one could try to figure out what type steel. If you had access to a PMI machine like many salvage yards have or we use at work (refinery) it could tell you about everything, but, the carbon content. With the other alloy numbers one should be able to make a decent guess as to the carbon and try a HT cycle and see what happens. The knife would probably lose a little bit of thickness getting cleaned up. The leather washer handle could be replaced. If the guard or anything was soldered on that would need redone also.

 

[Reg ELLERY]

I would expect no challenges just get in and clean it up. There are tutorials for leather sacked handles. You can re heat treat a blade the same if it was .

If you don't have the heat treat gear there are professional companies.

If you want to send pics of the starting reminant someone here would probably have had more experience to step you through the leather stack but if know takers send to my private mail and I will get you through it.

If your have not seen how crappy a forged blade comes out of the fire it may seem worse than it is. It will obviously look like crap all cooked up but it will clean up a treat if you have some sand papers, time, elbow grease and some leather.

If no responce here rellery@iinet,net.au