evilgreg
Why so serious?
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2012
- Messages
- 4,092
After a recent thread made clear to me the dangers of powerful tanto blades made of Carpenter steel, I decided it was time to finally dive into knife making.
Having seen for myself, in that thread, the potential of a blade made using these materials, even a simple, unfinished blade, I was sold. This is all you need to see to convince yourself:
So I set about building a prototype model myself. Let me introduce the banana tanto:
As you can see, we've opted for a natural banana skin material for the handle and it's amazing stuff. Cold Steel will probably rename this to Banan-Ex when they start using it on their knives.
We're working out the optimal heat treat still, attempting to apply the crazy crystal weaving foundation thread's mystic wisdom to achieve high Rockwell numbers without sacrificing toughness. For now we're running them very, very soft to keep them super tough, so we're only going up to about two points harder than CRK runs their S35VN.
This is just a rough prototype, we were shooting for Emerson level quality on the proto (we figured we could achieve that with our eyes closed, drunk, in thirty seconds). Production models will be far superior, we're partnering with ZT to produce them. Sadly they won't be out until sometime next year, but you'll be able to get the Microtech version long before then, I'm sure.
Now I suppose it's official, I am a knife maker.
Having seen for myself, in that thread, the potential of a blade made using these materials, even a simple, unfinished blade, I was sold. This is all you need to see to convince yourself:
So I set about building a prototype model myself. Let me introduce the banana tanto:
As you can see, we've opted for a natural banana skin material for the handle and it's amazing stuff. Cold Steel will probably rename this to Banan-Ex when they start using it on their knives.
We're working out the optimal heat treat still, attempting to apply the crazy crystal weaving foundation thread's mystic wisdom to achieve high Rockwell numbers without sacrificing toughness. For now we're running them very, very soft to keep them super tough, so we're only going up to about two points harder than CRK runs their S35VN.
This is just a rough prototype, we were shooting for Emerson level quality on the proto (we figured we could achieve that with our eyes closed, drunk, in thirty seconds). Production models will be far superior, we're partnering with ZT to produce them. Sadly they won't be out until sometime next year, but you'll be able to get the Microtech version long before then, I'm sure.
Now I suppose it's official, I am a knife maker.
ig: 
