I've been putting some work into my "Grinding Tips" page...

I spent a lot of time reading your webpage and all of the tutorials. As a newbie to grinding blades it has helped incredibly. Thank you for taking the time to help complete strangers out!
 
Great Salem! I love your stuff and it is sweet that you take the time and effort to share the way you do.
 
Wow.
Thank you so much, this is right at the top of the loooooong list of Things I've Most Wished to Learn About Knifemaking.

Next Question, Salem, if you please: What about using this technique when hollow grinding, any suggestions?

As in so many things, there's some benefit in inventing it, but it's a lot more efficient to learn a technique that works and then, having mastered that, REINVENT it to suit the job!
Andy G.
 
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Thanks for putting this together.

Salem Straub said:
If I had bandwidth, I'd just post videos. One day...
Click to expand...

If you have some videos done up, why not contact your local library and see if you can upload them to youtube from there? They probably have high speed internet. Edit them at home, put them on a flash drive then off to the library, or maybe a friends..
 
Geez, it's been a while since I looked at this thread- thanks to all of you for your feedback. A couple answers to some of the above:

It's not the angle of the grind that changes so much as the depth of the grind. You'll notice in the last pic there of the ground blank, that up near the terminus of the plunge the edge side of the blade is tapering in thickness toward the heel of the dropped edge, at which point it's more or less reached the desired thickness for the edge. It may be necessary to fudge the angle a little steeper toward the plunge to create the desired effect, but I try to minimize that as much as possible so as to end up with a flat plane across the entire grind. It helps that I grind with a good amount of distal taper, too.

I've not tried this as much with hollow grinding, but it's pretty similar. I know I've seen my sensei Ken grind some nice mild plunges on his 14" wheel this way. I'd recommend a large contact wheel for sure. I'll definitely add more about this as I gain experience, I've not been hollow grinding as much the last year.

You are all very welcome, thanks for reading. Thanks for stickyizing this too, Stacy. Maybe I'll get the time to make and post some video after my powerhammer rebuild is done.
 
Salem Straub said:
It's not the angle of the grind that changes so much as the depth of the grind. You'll notice in the last pic there of the ground blank, that up near the terminus of the plunge the edge side of the blade is tapering in thickness toward the heel of the dropped edge, at which point it's more or less reached the desired thickness for the edge.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply Salem. So do you first make contact with the belt at the very start of the plunge, on untouched metal, then push the blade further into the belt as you slide the blade to the side, toward the tip?
 
Steven, mostly I rough the grind in well inside of where I envision the finished grind line/plunge to be. I run my starter 45 deg. bevel up to about 1/8" from where I want the plunge to end, then rough bevel the blade as evenly as possible, staying "inside the line" all the while. It can help if you actually draw your intended line on- then, with the roughing step, "color inside the line" and with the finishing steps color up to the line. In this case, your color being a smoothly transitioned, flat as possible bevel.

Through the roughing and finishing steps, I almost always grind plunge-to-tip. So, pulling the blade out from the platen edge.

Phil, I've been working on the hammer when I can, got it wired up and switched, and I've been building new toggle links as the old ones were a bit scary. The new ones will be threaded for adjustment on both sides. I'm pretty much ready for the babbitt pour, just gotta line up a couple friends for help that day...
 
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