Has anyone ever experienced this before?

T

TheEdge01

Joined
Apr 3, 2015
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Hey guys, I started making knives close to a year ago. So far I’ve probably made close to 30 and sold, traded, or gave a majority of them away, and I get good feedback from folks that use them. Anyway, I make my knives from stock removal, and a couple folks have made snarky comments because I don’t forge the blades out. Has anyone else experienced this kind of reaction?
 
Some of the best blades made into knives are from stock removal. Heat treat is the key.
You know you can ignore a lot of what people say. (Yes, including me ;))
 
A lot of people assume I forge when my knives get brought up but they don’t seem to get judgmental when I explain I do stock removal. Most people I talk to don’t know much about knife making though, they just assume knife making is like forged in fire.
Knife makers I’ve talked to don’t seem to care at all.
 
I recently saw some comments on a maker’s IG post, who free hands his handle shaping.
The number of comments stating things along the lines of “you’re not a real maker if you use jigs” was absolutely unreal.
I mean, there were probably only two or three, but still... :D

Dont get me wrong... free handing generally takes more skill to make look good than fixtures or jigs (though both can still turn into a disaster), but the mental gymnastics you have to go through to say someone’s not a knife maker unless they do x,y or z is pretty incredible sometimes. 9x out of 10 it’s a comment from someone who’s never made anything to begin with, much less a functional knife.

Seems like watching Forged in Fire has made everyone a “weapons expert”.
 
And just to add to the forged vs stock removal question: a properly ground and heat treated SR knife will blow a poorly forged and heat treated knife out of the water any day if the week, and vice versa. In fact, I’d argue that the average new maker would make a better stock removal knife before he’d make a decent forged knife, all other things being equal, especially if starting out with proper heat treat equipment vs trying to “eyeball” temps in a forge.

At the end of the day, regardless, one technique will not inherently yield a better knife than the other. (Again, all other things being equal: steel, geometry, heat treat, relative skill level, etc...)
Steel is steel. Yes, certain techniques factor into the end product differently, but there’s ways to address those things and still achieve the same end result, more/less.

Give the worlds foremost armchair knife experts two identical blades (one forged, and one stock removal) and I promise they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, assuming they’re both ground and heat treated the same.

Unless, of course, the forged blade was quenched in proprietary “super goop” while facing magnetic north. Unfortunately that does change EVERYTHING.
 
Some replies I use when the need arrives:
I both forge and grind. Forging is fun, but does no magic. It allows some things that grinding won't, but the vast majority of forged blades could just as easily ... and perhaps better .. be made from a bar of high quality steel.

The bar of steel was already in good shape and the size I needed ... why would I ruin that?Every forged knife is finished by stock removal. Forging only shapes the blade.

In many cases all the forging does is make a basic shape.

Many serious issues in a knife an happen from improper forging, but few serious issues are created by poor grinding.

Some steels can't be forged without ruining them.
 
Every blade is stock removal. Some people start with a bar of steel some start with a knife shaped object they hammered out. No one outside snake oil salesman has ever proved any magic properties arising from forging a blade. Can you save some money? Depends how you offset wasting ground steel that probably costs more (stock removal) vs your time, effort and propane heating up more raw stock and turning it into a knife shaped object. Unless youre leaving legit forge scale all over your blades and hammer marks, you're gonna be taking em off the forge and grinding away 100% of the knife that would ever show it was forged anyways in the finishing process.

My $.02 but I see a lot more poor quality forged blades out there. Everyone needs to learn to grind, heat treat, fit and finish a knife and some spend a lifetime mastering it. Forging steel into the pattern you begin that process with is an entirely separate process with equal variables to screw up. Harder to get even grinds when you start with stock that isnt dead flat, for instance...just a different challenge. I think most new makers could benefit more from spending a few years doing basic stock removal and focusing on fit and finish, grinding and heat treating but I also realize for some, the forging is the primary interest/skill to develop and its a different focus.

IMHO most people dont and shouldnt really care if a knife was forged or stock removal unless they want to pay more for their appreciation for forging as a kind gesture :)
 
What Stacey says and then some...
I forge everything, because that's how I want to do it. I like forging. I like shaping things with a hammer and 30+ years ago when I started doing this, I was taught by a farrier friend of mine that forging conserves steel; i.e. material. If you look back in history before the Bessemer process, have a look at how sheer steel was made in Sheffield for instance. It was god awful expensive! You couldn't afford to waste anything, so forging conserved that valuable commodity "high quality carbon steel", by simply reshaping/moving the material around to shape a knife, that you would normally be grinding away into dust by stock removal. Whether it was 150 years ago or yesterday afternoon; the same principle still applies. and a thumbs up to what was previously said above, I've seen some tremendously well made stock removal knives, and some forge ones that were basically tomato stakes... except perhaps a little short.
 
This is a common type of comment by the "purists" who often don't do their own work & can't actually make a knife. A properly forged blade is really a work of art, but the finishing process is often done with stock removal shaping to refine the profile & give it the finished shape, thickness & edge required.

There are many ways to make a blade with "right & wrong" being an entirely subjective point of view. I would ask the next snarky customer how many blades they have actually made, then ask them show you an example of their best blade. I would also ask them if their blade was sharpened by forging, or with stock removal to set the primary bevel. I would then ask them to politely move along.
 
I still get, “but doesn’t edge packing make for a better knife? I love handing them Larrin’s book with page marks. I no longer have to go off on a tangent trying to explain, or throw them out of the shop.
 
Truth is, every blade is forged. Every piece of stock we purchase, whether round or flat, has gone through, presses, rolling mills, and the like. There has already been an enormous amount of drawing and reduction to get the stock to a suitable size for knife makers.
 
If I buy a piece of high performance steel like 3V, make a knife by stock removal, and send it out for professional heat treat, then the only likely flaws are my level of fit and finish.
Anyone less than an expert is more likely to have hidden issues in a forged blade.
CPK knives have a cult-level following because they are reliably machined and heat treated for reproducible performance.
Top level knives can be either. I don't think anyone is asking Peter del Raso why he didn't forge these pieces: https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/sub-hilt.1755750/
If you reach that level of finish, people will probably stop asking.
A main attraction to forging for me would be fancy pattern welds, and hamon activity. If you buy damascus and then do stock removal, then you are stuck with limited choices in patterns. The best art knives seem to have unique patterns that aren't available.
 
when your a stock removal maker who outsource heat treat, the worst is when friends and family suddenly want to "watch" make knives because they enjoy watching forged in fire ... ummm no you dont , no you dont lol.
 
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When I first got into blade making I got a lot of this from purists. So many knives I made got dismissed because I wasn't a "REAL" knife maker. It wasn't until I came here to bladeforums that I realized the old school purists I learned from may have been wrong about a few things. This isn't to say that I don't love forging blades, because I do, but now I can use stock removal without feeling like a fake.
 
My answer to 'Do you forge?' is, nobody can forge stainless or high alloy steels, only simple high carbon steels can be forged. That usually raises their interest in "high alloy steels", but i just started forging and it is fun!!!
 
Lol. We don't forge here. If there were a performance advantage to forging we would be doing it. The best stock removal knives can do things no forged knife can. Run circles around them. And they're consistently excellent without the variability of superfluous manual processes. Any romantic misconception about the superiority of a forged blade is misplaced in 2020.
 
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