Forged W2 integral, the making of...

[Wulf]

Most of you guys know me as a collector but I've been dabbling in my workshop for a little while now too. Between a few other projects I've had in the works over the past few months, I managed to make myself an integral utility knife and took several pictures along the way. I always enjoy the "making of" threads when I see them posted by other makers, so I figured I'd post one myself.

I began this project on a cold night in late January, 2007. I put on an extra layer over my sweatshirt before heading out to the shop - the thermometer read minus 10. I walked out to the shop, kicked the snow off my shoes, and selected a 1/2" round bar of W2 steel. I cut off a small section with my chop saw, maybe about 5" long.

I heated the bar in the forge and gave it a couple of whacks with the hammer to establish the sides. Then I forged in a point. Every knife needs a pointy end.

I then used my homemade guillotine fuller to pinch the bar directly in front of and directly behind the area that would later form the bolster.

Then I ran into a problem. A big problem. The beer I was drinking began to freeze. I hadn't even been out there that long but I suppose it doesn't take much when it's 10 below... What's the freezing point of beer anyway? Whatever. I brought the beer over to the forge and held it outside the forge door for a moment while I brought the steel back up to a red heat.

At this point the ends were ready to be flattened out. I began with the pointy end (which will become the blade) and forged a slight downward curve into the bar as I flattened it.

Nope, still didn't look anything like a knife yet, but I finished my beer (yes, it was thawed) and went to work flattening and shaping the other end.

Now that I had the approximate dimensions established, I got started forging the bevels into the blade. I did so by hammering on the edge inside the curve, with each hammer blow squeezing the steel out laterally. This caused the edge to "stretch" out a bit and straighten out that curve. All of a sudden, that little bar of steel actually began to resemble a knife.

Much to my delight, it was about that time that I also realized my stash of bourbon wasn't frozen. Coincidentally, it was also about this time that I called it a night. Fourteen below on the thermometer

 

[Wulf]

On the first night I had gotten the blade mostly forged, so I went back out a few days later to refine it a bit. It was a little warmer that night, only about five below when I headed out. So I fired up the forge and warmed up the blade. I used one of my lighter hammers to clean up the edges, flatten the sides, and straighten everything out.

Looks decent. But my damn beer was beginning to freeze up again. Time to wrap it up. I gave the blade a few more thermal cycles to reduce some of the internal stresses that the forging process may have created, slowly brought it back up to its critical temperature and then stuffed it in a bucket of screened wood ash so it would cool very slowly (this is called annealing - a process that makes the steel relatively soft and easy to grind).

The next evening I went back out and got started on the belt grinder. My first priority was to smooth out the profile a bit and clean up the flats. I also rummaged through my stash of exotic woods and picked out a nice block of stabilized red mallee burl for the handle.

At this point I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the knife to look like upon completion. In other words, I had already begun the critical task of setting myself up for disappointment.

My next night out in the shop I got to grinding some more. I tried to establish the planes a little better with my disc sander and cleaned up the profile on the belt grinder. It was a little warmer that night. It only dipped a few degrees below zero.

But I wasn't taking any chances with my beer. Earlier that night, I had come up with an ingenious scheme to keep my beer from succumbing to the cold. I gave it a little coat and hat!

After doing some more grinding, I drilled some holes into the tang to lighten it up a bit and improve the balance. After that, I clamped the knife in a vise, grabbed a file, and started cutting some bevels into the spine. I thought a slightly beveled spine would look and feel better than a sharp edged flat spine...

From this point on, each successive step would require greater care and precision. Banging out the approximate shape with a hammer and grinding out some of the high spots with a low-grit belt won't build a fine, precise cutting instrument. In order to turn this piece of steel into a quality knife, I'd have to refine its form, heat treat it properly, give it a smooth, uniform polish, put a handle on it, and give it a keen edge.

This is where I hold my breath and take my time.

 

[A C Richards]

Cool Wulf Will be looking for more on the progress. Ya beat me too the post. That is looking really great. I've been attempting and integral but have not gotten nearly as far along and as nice as yours is. Great job.

Chuck

 

[Kevin Jones]

Thanks for sharing. Interesting :thumbup:

 

[wayne37]

Nice work. BTW you can get insulated covers for beer.

 

[Wulf]

I needed to clean up the transition from the bolster area to the flats of the blade and the tang, and to do so I used the small wheel attachment on my belt grinder. I also cleverly took one of my daughter's insulated snow boots to keep my beer warm.

It actually worked! Liquid beer! I may just have to keep this little boot. And if my kid complains, well, she'll just have to suck it up. She can hop! It'll give her character. And when she's older she'll be able to tell her kids that when she was young she had to hop to nursery school in two feet of snow. Hop!

OK, so I took a sip of my not-frozen beer and turned on the grinder. I got a bit nervous when I did this part because the last time I tried to make an integral I ground the radius too deep and pretty much ruined the blade. So I took it slowly, using a 120 grit belt and keeping the pressure fairly light.

Unfortunately, I ground a little too deep. I reached deep into my vocabulary of expletives and let loose with some high-level profanity. Fortunately it wasn't a complete disaster. I had left the blade thick enough to allow for a slight margin of error. I would just have to grind the blade a little thinner.

A wise man once said that in knifemaking, there are no mistakes, only smaller knives. Well that little pearl of wisdom has been repeated by about a thousand bad knifemakers since, and I'm proud to include myself among that not-so-distinguished bunch. So here's to small knives!

So back to the disc sander I went. Once that little problem was taken care of, I took a few more passes over the spine with one of my files and took a closer look at the knife.

The bevels looked pretty good. I decided the knife was just about ready to be heat-treated.

Then the snow began to fall. And boy, did it come down. The Valentine's day blizzard dumped almost three feet of snow in my back yard and it took us days to dig ourselves out. Somehow the shop seemed a lot farther away from the house with all this snow on the ground. Eventually, after doing some serious sledding with my daughter (I even gave her back that boot she had been asking about), I dug out a passage to the shop.

 

[canineforge]

Enjoying this! Careful with the GWI (grinding while intoxicated), but looks like you have everything under control.
It is looking good!! Keep us posted.

- Joe

 

[Wulf]

I headed back out there a few nights later to do the heat treating. The snow had settled a bit, but there was still a lot out there.

I fired up the forge, and very slowly brought the blade up to a dull orange, being very careful not to overheat it. Once it reached its critical temperature, I let it cool down and repeated the process. These normalizing cycles allowed the steel to "relax" a bit. It's always good practice to put the steel in a pleasant disposition before asking it to undergo a full martensitic transformation. It's like giving your wife a soothing back rub before asking her if you can buy that new powerhammer.

Satisfied that the steel was ready to be hardened, I slowly brought it back up to critical temperature, and then plunged it into a fast-quenching oil (a product called Tough-Quench, by Brownells), that I had pre-heated to about 150 degrees (preheating the oil allows for a more rapid quench).

W2 was designed to be a water-quenched steel (hence the "W" designation), but water cools the steel very rapidly, and can be too violent a quench for a thin blade. Quenching in oil cools the blade more slowly and is much less likely to cause the blade to crack. However, thicker sections of steel won't cool fast enough to fully harden. I tested the blade with a file to make sure it had hardened, and sure enough, the edge was hard, but the spine was still soft. This is not a bad thing. The part of the knife that cuts will get sharp and stay that way, while the rest of the knife will be flexible.

I brought the knife inside the house for its first tempering cycle. I made sure to wash all the residual oil off the blade before placing it in the oven so it wouldn't stink up the house. I made that mistake once... Once. And let's just say the wifey didn't let me buy any powerhammers that night...

After tempering the knife I gave it a closer look. I noticed that the blade had a slight twist to it, and was curved ever so slightly. It had warped during the quench. So I did what any rational man would do. I threw myself to the ground, kicked and screamed until I grew tired, and then went outside and broke some stuff. After about twelve days of breaking things, I reentered the shop and lit the forge. Upon heating the knife back up to a dull orange heat, I clamped it in a vice and, with a small pair of tongs, I very delicately pushed, bent, and twisted the blade back to its proper shape. Satisfied that it was mostly salvaged, I heated it back up to its critical temperature, and plunged it once again into the oil.

 

[Wulf]

The first thing I did upon removing the blade from the quench tank was to inspect it very closely and gauge its straightness. Much to my delight, it looked dead straight, so off it went back into the oven for a tempering cycle at 410 degrees. The next day I tempered it again, this time at 425 degrees. Normally, one would temper W2 blades at higher temperatures (450-500 depending on the intended purpose), but this is a small utility knife, something that won't ever be used for chopping down an oak tree, and I wanted to keep the edge pretty hard.

It was now early March, and the weather had finally warmed up a bit. In fact, we even had a bit of a thaw. I took advantage of the warm weather by getting back into the shop to get started on the handle. I retrieved the block of stabilized red mallee burl I had picked out and cut it down the middle with my bandsaw. I then flattened the slabs on my belt sander and radiused the inside edges to match the curvature of the transition from the bolster to the tang. It was a bit tricky getting the curvature right and required frequent checks and adjustments to ensure there would be no unsightly gaps. Once satisfied that the slabs would fit tightly, I scratched up the inner faces to accept the glue, mixed up some slow cure epoxy, and smeared the adhesive all over the wood slabs and the tang. Then I stuck everything together, clamped it up tightly, and brought it into the house to cure.

Once the epoxy was fully cured, I removed the clamps and showed Jane the completed knife.

What do you mean it isn't done? OK so the handle is a bit, well, blocky, but the kids these days really like those straight lines and sharp angles. It's "tactical."

No?

Fine then. Back to the shop I went, and began the work of shaping and contouring the handle, first on the bandsaw and then on the belt sander. Once I had the wood trimmed back to the knife's tang, I took a closer look at the fit.

I saw no gaps or voids between the tang and the handle slabs, which made me happy, so I went back to shaping the handle with the grinder, files, and sandpaper until it felt comfortable in my hand. Then, I drilled some 1/16" holes through the handle and cut some pieces off of a 1/16" stainless steel rod, which I would use to pin the handle in place.

Not pictured is the hole in the middle of the handle. I screwed that one up (I drilled it crooked), which was a problem easily solved by drilling a larger hole. 1/4" in this case.

 

[Wulf]

I then mixed up a little more epoxy, coated the pins I had cut, and stuck them in the holes I had drilled. The 1/4" hole got a piece of tubing instead of a pin. After the epoxy was cured, I ran the handle and blade over the grinder one last time, and started to polish things up. First, I sanded the flats of the blade with some 400 grit sandpaper and followed that with some 600 grit paper.

I then sanded the handle, and even made myself a curved sanding block from a piece of micarta to help sand the concave areas of the handle.

Once I was happy with the handle, I went back to work on the blade, rubbing it with 1200 grit sandpaper. I decided to etch the blade to bring out the hardening zone that had begun to reveal itself. I had some acid (ferric chloride) handy, so I cleaned up the blade with acetone, then rubbed some of the FcL on it with a paper towel.

The acid revealed a pretty interesting pattern in the steel. I put some Hendrix on the CD player (Live at the Isle of Wight) and went back to polishing. Etch, sand, etch, sand, etch, sand...

The etched and polished blade revealed a wispy hardening line, demarcating the area where martensite had formed. I could clearly see which areas within the blade steel had hardened, and which areas had remained soft.

Neat. I liked it. I sanded the handle, tang, and spine a bit more and then decided I was pretty much done. All the knife needed now was one final polish, a good sharpening, and my mark.

I snapped a few more photos and kept the best one. Unfortunately, "the best" for me is pretty mediocre. That's OK though. A professional knife photographer, like my friend Jim Cooper, would be able to produce an extremely high quality image, with superb lighting, artful composition, perfect color and crisp lines. Such an image, however, would also reveal every detail - and every flaw! Once I make a knife worthy, I'll send it to Coop. Until then, I'll consider my lack of photographical skill a blessing.

Now it's back to making a few more simple knives. It's spring, the snow is melting, and I'm ready to kick back with a frozen margarita and a nice, traditional stick-tang knife. I'll just need to figure out how to keep the ice from melting while I'm forging...

 

[ptgdvc]

Great thread. Make the next one with a hidden pin and sell it to me!

P

 

[Keith Montgomery]

I must say, I'm very impressed.

 

[Bruce Bump]

I enjoyed your thread, Thanks for sharing your methods.

 

[Stephen F]

I'm impressed Derrick, nice design and execution.

Stephen

 

[Toni Oostendorp]

Great knife and great thread!!

 

[Jared Stenoien]

I love everything but the hole in the middle I think it'd look nice with a mosaic pin there

 

[shappa]

That was fantastic.
Very informative and fun.

 

[RogerP]

Dude, you got skills! Great thread, great knife, well done!

Roger

 

[Kevin Jones]

=Wulf;
Now it's back to making a few more simple knives. It's spring, the snow is melting, and I'm ready to kick back with a frozen margarita and a nice, traditional stick-tang knife. I'll just need to figure out how to keep the ice from melting while I'm forging...

You should keep with the complicated projects. As you have the talent to go far and these challenging projects will take out there.

We really appreciate the progressive photos.
It must add lots of time and destractions to the making of the knife.

 

[Don Hanson III]

Super cool Wulf, you have talents my man!