Grinding Tapered Tangs with AEB-L

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Ricky-O

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I’m a fairly new knife maker and recently told someone my knives seemed rather heavy to me, and he suggested I try making some with tapered tangs. I watched a few youtube videos, and wonder what to do before and what to do after heat treatment. I’ve only used AEB-L so far, and do all my grinding of the bevels post heat treatment. From watching the videos, it seems like for tapered tangs I should do the following.
  1. drill several holes in the tang
  2. hollow grind out an area containing the holes
  3. grind the taper (and make sure it is flat.
I know that I can’t drill the holes after heat treating, so that will definitely have to be before heat treating. My concern is that if I also do the hollow grind or the full taper before heat treating that I’d get a lot of warpage during heat treating. So when is it best to do the heat treatment?
 
I have done a few tapered tangs :)

You will need to drill the holes prior to heat treat and tapering the tang. With AEBL I grind the taper post HT, however, I have not had any significant warpage issues with AEBL from Peters'. Regardless of steel, I clean up the taper post HT.
 
I've been mostly using .100, but have also made a few with .080". I suppose just drilling holes in the tang would lighten it, even if I didn't do a tapered tang.
 
Ricky-O said:
I've been mostly using .100, but have also made a few with .080". I suppose just drilling holes in the tang would lighten it, even if I didn't do a tapered tang.
Click to expand...

.080" thick stock, you will not notice much difference with a taper.....heck, you won't SEE much difference, either.

If you want lighter. Drill some larger holes in the tang, or more of them.

Try lighter handle scale material.
Some are heavy, some are light. Holds true with wood, too.
 
I grind AEBL tapered tangs on 1/8 and 3/32 pretty often. Sometimes I'll grind in a hollow pre-HT, but you need to leave the edges full thickness so you'll get good plate contact on the quench. I typically don't drill extra holes, and typically just hold the blade with a magnet. Final flatten on the disk.
 
I will address the main issue of doing a tapered tang to lighten a knife.
Yes, it will lighten it for balance, and it will lighten it in total weight.
However, the amount of steel removed in tapering a tang is small. Weigh a blade before and after tapering the tang and see for yourself.
The answer isn't in the tang, it is in the knife.

The answer to "Heavy Knives" is making the whole knife lighter. Few normal knives ever need more than .125" steel. Most are only .06" to .10". Grab a few of your favorite kitchen and hunting knives and measure the spine. You may be amazed at the fact most are barely over .06" thick. Making a knife out of thinner steel can reduce the blade weight by as much as half.
Next, take a look at the handles you make. Are they too big, too long, too fat? Again, look at some commercial handles you like and see how wide/thick/long they are. Proper shaping of a handle can reduce its weight by 25% or more.

I have a friend who loved to make knives. He made really pretty looking knives, too. Problem was they were made with 3/16" to 1/4" steel and have handles that would be a bit large for Drax. He made hunters with a 5" blade and a 6" handle. He couldn't understand why people said, "Wow, that is a heavy knife!" I tried to discuss blade size and thickness and handle size and made positive suggestions on how to lighten them, but he said, "This is how I like to make a knife".
OK, he is the maker and can make them anyway he wants. It also explains why he almost never sold one. Eventually, he stopped making knives because he said it was a waste of time if no one wanted them. Some folks just don't want to hear the truth about what they make.
 
Great point, Stacy. Another thing, the tapering and holes put the center of gravity of the knife a bit more forward, which puts the weight distribution closer to your front finger, which makes the knife FEEL lighter, even when it isn't.

If you put a tapered tang and a full flat grind on a 3/32 knife with stabilized maple/buckeye/box elder, it won't weigh much of anything :)
 
Tapered tangs look nice, but they create problems for drilling fixing holes in the scales. Not insurmountable, obviously, but can be a PITA until you work out a system that works for you.

If you really want to go light, but want a full size handle, go hidden tang. You can make a box tang handkerchief with Micarta the same thickness as the steel stock. Natural wood is lighter than stabilized, which is lighter than Micarta, which is lighter than G10.
 
Before having a surface grinder attachment I did my tapers pre heat treat. There are certainly ways to get them pretty even by hand but it’s so much easier and faster with a surface grinding attachment.

I don’t drill extra holes and while yes using thinner steel will certainly save you lots of weight a 5/32 thick knife with a tapered tang can weight as much as a 3/32 thick with no taper.

I happened to make two of the same model one time. One was in .07 stock no taper and a high saber the other one was in .156 stock with a taper and full height grind. The weight different was something like 12 grams between the too which was pretty shocking.

You don’t save much weight under 1/8th stock but I do have one customer that does it on all his 3/32 knives because he likes how it looks.
 
-make sure your non heat treated knife is profiled to the shape you want it to be
-locate your pin/fastener holes- looks best when pins are centered to the width of the handle and equidistant from each other
-make sure your blank is nice and flat aka no burr around its circumference, and drill your holes
-cut your handle scales to shape, and then fine tune the shape you want the front of your handle to be and mark the front of your handle on both sides
-mark at the butt of your handle where you want the tang to taper to
-using your platen wheel, grind a hollow on either side of your handle- from butt to the front of the handle- with the bottom of the hollow grind ending at the marks you made
-when you're done, the hollow grind will look like a triangle with the base at the butt of the handle and the tip ending short of where the front of the handle is going to be
-heat treat your knife
-a disk sander makes a big difference, aka; easier and more precise when you go to flatten the tang. Start at the butt and remove stock until you're just past the bottom of the hollow grind
-work your way up to the front of the handle, removing stock until you're just shy of where the front of the handle is going to be and check for flatness
-using double side tape, stick one handle scale to the tang being careful to line up the front of the handle scale with the mark you made, then clamp the scale to the tang
-clamp the blade flat to a 1-2-3 block and to your drill press' table with the scale facing the table and drill your holes through the holes in your tang through the scale material
-repeat on the other side
-grind bevels and do the other things you need to do, and when the time comes to install your handle fasteners everything will be straight and true
 
As for the issue of drilling holes in handle material, never really had any problems. I used to use a clamping jig I made with adjustable feet that held the scale tight to the tapered tang. Now I just use a few dots of super glue, shim up the butt end and drill away. Easy Day.
 
navman said:
As for the issue of drilling holes in handle material, never really had any problems. I used to use a clamping jig I made with adjustable feet that held the scale tight to the tapered tang. Now I just use a few dots of super glue, shim up the butt end and drill away. Easy Day.
Click to expand...
If you grind the bevels first, full flat, distal tapered, minimal ricasso, then go to drill holes, clamping the blade parallel to the table becomes harder.
It changes the creation process. If you already decide what handle you will have on a given blade before grinding bevels, much less problematic. If you want to see how the bevels turn out before committing to using that bit of special desert ironwood. It can be more difficult.

Once you have a system that works for you, the problem is solved. I too use shims, means the handle slabs don’t have to be perfectly parallel.
 
yep. That's why I went away from the clamping jig and use shims. I drill scales after the blade has been ground, heat treated and finish ground.
 
A knife with a really light handle can feel very lively and balanced... same knife with a solid handle often feels brick like or "dead" for lack of a better term.

Tapered tangs - did they come from Loveless? I like how he did them, grind a hollow in the center of each handle that extends all the way through the pommel area then grind a standard taper in the tang so pommel area is back to being a "flat" area for glueup. I think there is something to this...

Here are 3D printed glow prototypes of my current mid-tech lineup. They are all to scale... I like skeletonized tangs. I make an insert that accurately fits the tang if I want to do traditional scales, easy to do and solid glueup.
 

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Always big on the holes. These guys just finished getting their working hamons done. My knives are generally on the smaller side and don't greatly benefit from a tapered tang although I have done some. The holes do offer quite a few benefits as many have mentioned.

6AUMGQl.jpg
 
Daniel Fairly Knives said:
A knife with a really light handle can feel very lively and balanced... same knife with a solid handle often feels brick like or "dead" for lack of a better term.

Tapered tangs - did they come from Loveless? I like how he did them, grind a hollow in the center of each handle that extends all the way through the pommel area then grind a standard taper in the tang so pommel area is back to being a "flat" area for glueup. I think there is something to this...

Here are 3D printed glow prototypes of my current mid-tech lineup. They are all to scale... I like skeletonized tangs. I make an insert that accurately fits the tang if I want to do traditional scales, easy to do and solid glueup.
Click to expand...
Loveless popularized the tapered tang. He copied it from some ancient forged knives.

The story is that he had a knife warp in heat treating and he fixed it by tapering the tang.

Hoss
 
Ricky-O said:
I’m a fairly new knife maker and recently told someone my knives seemed rather heavy to me, and he suggested I try making some with tapered tangs. I watched a few youtube videos, and wonder what to do before and what to do after heat treatment. I’ve only used AEB-L so far, and do all my grinding of the bevels post heat treatment. From watching the videos, it seems like for tapered tangs I should do the following.
  1. drill several holes in the tang
  2. hollow grind out an area containing the holes
  3. grind the taper (and make sure it is flat.
I know that I can’t drill the holes after heat treating, so that will definitely have to be before heat treating. My concern is that if I also do the hollow grind or the full taper before heat treating that I’d get a lot of warpage during heat treating. So when is it best to do the heat treatment?
Click to expand...
I have similar concerns! I also grind post-heat-treatment and worry about warping if I go too far before. Drilling and maybe a light hollow grind beforehand seems okay, but I’d probably do the full taper after HT. Hopefully someone with more experience can chime in!
 
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