You should run out an buy the 50 dollar knifeshop by Wayne Goddard.
I think the decision to forge or not is personal. This is a hobby, so what do you want to do. Forging is not a basement proposition in my view, if you have lots of rough or exterior space then you have a place to put it. I live in a city neigbourhood, and will be doing a little bit of forging this year. I got a donated anvil, and am working my way up through various gas forges. My biggest expense was to splash out on a grinder. I could have built one, but decided on buying a gold plater.
Managing the "business" is the big part for me. There used to be a guy in our heighbourhood, who wandered around giving gum to the local kids. nice guy. I don't ,however, want to be the knifemaking equivalent of that guy. I'm spending a few K, and I'm not all that interested in giving stuff away to my friends, though I probably will, then what? I'm not in this as a business, so what does one do with the product? That's why I like smithing, becuase it's no more expensive, takes longer, there is more to explore. With stock reduction I hade 2 saleable knives int he first few hours I spent grinding. There is just too much production too quickly to ignore. So anythign that soaks up a little time without being boring is a good idea in my view, and you can make quite a lot of different stuff on a forge.
For me the tiping point into smithing was the desire to heat treat my own steel. i like high carbon steel, and work with it every day as a carpenter. Stainless is nasty stuff from my perspective, so home heat treating was a real option for me. That led to the gas forge, that leads to the blacksmithing. If my feelings on the mater had been from the stainless side, then outsourced heat treating might have been the answer, and I wouldn't have strayed down this path.
