Here's the first knife to come out of my new forge setup. This is the first knife I've forged since 2004.
edge is 4"
handle is 4"
4.25" overall
The steel is Admiral 1075/1080
The Turk's head is leather, the purple wrapping is synthetic tsuka silk ito, and the black is paracord with the center removed and done in hiramaki.
The shape of the blade wasn't really planned I just wanted to forge out the bar and see how the steel was going to behave. My forging technique needs a lot of work.
I normalized three times, annealed, quenched three times in canola oil, and tempered twice for an hour each at 400ºf. The blade warped a little bit at some point during the heat treat and I wasn't really sure how to fix it, so I left it. The file test seemed a little less than perfect, but I wanted to proceed to see if there wasn't just a layer of decarb. A couple of hours of sharpening later, it turns out it didn't harden properly. This is a little peculiar for me, after the knives I made in college. I didn't know much about steel then, but I got pretty good results with hardening and was able to go straight to sharpening without grinding off the decarb first (once I hardened W1 in stone cold transmission fluid and it held a great edge). Despite knowing more about working with steel than ever before, this is only the second time I've ever had a heat treat fail.
I had never done a japanese style wrap before, but I thought this turned out pretty well. As I feared, the omote knot started to pull the ito off of the end (what with the lack of a kashira), but I saved it with the liberal use of super glue.
And here's the ura knot just for fun.
Despite it being useless as a knife, I'm pretty happy with it I think I hit the look that I was going for pretty well. If anyone has any thoughts on what might have gone wrong with my heat treat, I'd love to hear them.
- Chris
edge is 4"
handle is 4"
4.25" overall
The steel is Admiral 1075/1080
The Turk's head is leather, the purple wrapping is synthetic tsuka silk ito, and the black is paracord with the center removed and done in hiramaki.
The shape of the blade wasn't really planned I just wanted to forge out the bar and see how the steel was going to behave. My forging technique needs a lot of work.
I normalized three times, annealed, quenched three times in canola oil, and tempered twice for an hour each at 400ºf. The blade warped a little bit at some point during the heat treat and I wasn't really sure how to fix it, so I left it. The file test seemed a little less than perfect, but I wanted to proceed to see if there wasn't just a layer of decarb. A couple of hours of sharpening later, it turns out it didn't harden properly. This is a little peculiar for me, after the knives I made in college. I didn't know much about steel then, but I got pretty good results with hardening and was able to go straight to sharpening without grinding off the decarb first (once I hardened W1 in stone cold transmission fluid and it held a great edge). Despite knowing more about working with steel than ever before, this is only the second time I've ever had a heat treat fail.
I had never done a japanese style wrap before, but I thought this turned out pretty well. As I feared, the omote knot started to pull the ito off of the end (what with the lack of a kashira), but I saved it with the liberal use of super glue.
And here's the ura knot just for fun.
Despite it being useless as a knife, I'm pretty happy with it I think I hit the look that I was going for pretty well. If anyone has any thoughts on what might have gone wrong with my heat treat, I'd love to hear them.
- Chris