easiest grinding steel

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vikingextreme93

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Nov 2, 2006
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So I am ready to get my hands on some annealed barstock to take my first PLUNGE at creating my first blade but just curious which of the following are the easiest to grind? I narrowed down my choices to 1080 1095 0-1 and then a stainless like 440c or maybe ats-34 I have seen general remarks on 440c getting hot and soft grinding and I read in some general steel article posted that 0-1 was kind of tough grinding but not much for comments on general workability of these steels I would assume the 10xx steels to be the easiest ?
 
I've worked with O1, 10xx, 5160 and 440c. Of all these, I only noticed more difficulty in grinding 440c. I can't tell the difference on grinding O1, 5160 or 10xx. Maybe there is a difference but it's so close that I don't notice it.
 
I will second the suggestion of 01, as long as it is precision ground and annealed.
 
vikingextreme93 said:
So I am ready to get my hands on some annealed barstock to take my first PLUNGE at creating my first blade but just curious which of the following are the easiest to grind? I narrowed down my choices to 1080 1095 0-1 and then a stainless like 440c or maybe ats-34 I have seen general remarks on 440c getting hot and soft grinding and I read in some general steel article posted that 0-1 was kind of tough grinding but not much for comments on general workability of these steels I would assume the 10xx steels to be the easiest ?
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I like working with 1095, 1084, and 52100 in the ammealed state. It's great steel to work with. Hope this is of help to you.

Barkes:thumbup:
When I leave this world, I would like to be known by the one who make the knives from start to finish.

http://my.hsonline.net/wizard/knifeshop
1.812.526.6390
 
I would suggest the 10xx steels, easy to grind, easy to file to clean up the tang.

Will you be sending out for heat treat or doing that yourself?
if you are heat treating yourself stay away from the stainless steels, O1 will make a good blade, but it requires a soak to get the most out of it,

Good luck
Ken
 
I am just giving this a whirl to see what level I want to commit to so for the time being I will be sending out to heat treat but I may try my luck with the 10xx steals since that seems fairly simple and I have the means to do it.
 
When I made my first knives I used precision ground 01. It grinds nice, and is simple to heat treat. However, I went and put a nice satin finish on the blades and let them sit in the shop for a few days. When I came back there was a thin coating of rust on the blades. I had to completely refinish the blades. Because of this I work mainly with 440C. As a stainless it is easy to get and it works well. Its a bit finicky to heat treat so I got myself a Paragon heat treating oven, and since then there has been no looking back.
 
I've used most of the steels you are talking about. My first batch was O1 then I tried ATS-34, and finally 440c and 1095. For the first few batches, I had a 3rd party do the heat treating. I later bought three refractory bricks from Ellis Refractory and a JHT-7 torch. I use olive oil as my quench oil.

* 440c (it forms a small gummy orange spot where you are grinding but doesn't toss much in the way of sparks).

* 01 Doesn't toss much in the way of sparks, and drops large chunks of metal shavings.

* 1095 Gives off lots of orange metal sparks (chunks of molten metal). It leaves less steel wool on the floor, but if you have a wood base on your grinder, you may have to stop and get the hot metal off of it before you burn it. This has been my favorite metal to work with (proving that I'm still a kid I guess).
 
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