Knife #5 WIP - Wish me luck (PHOTO HEAVY)

bladsmth said:
Now I have to figure out how to build a guard.......

As to the guard, you should have done that "figuring out" prior to HT. The holes you will need for it should have been drilled while soft. You will have to use carbide drills, now.

The guard would be a saddle guard, with a slot cut in it to allow it to be slipped up onto the blade from the bottom side. It is pinned/riveted into place with pin material of the same metal as the guard.Usually two rivets are used.
Click to expand...

Stacy,

Believe it or not, I did think about drilling these holes prior to HT but decided against it. I do quite a bit of finish grinding/polishing on the flats after HT and figured that by fitting the guard after all of this I will end up with a tighter fit. I have the appropriate carbide drills, but I seem to remember some folks mentioning awhile back that masonry bits could be used for drilling hardened steel... much cheaper than my solid carbide bits if I end up breaking one. ;)

Erin
 
So my next trick was figuring out how to turn the pieces shown below into a guard.
3712479468_c5e9ccb999_o.jpg

I cut two chunks of 3/8"x3/4" 416ss off the bar shown and trimmed a small piece of copper off the sheet shown. I wanted to create the guard block from the two pieces of SS with the copper as a spacer in the middle.

Now I have never attempted anything like this before. Seemed like the obvious way to join everything together would be to use solder. Well, I DID have some solder/flux laying around (I think it came with the small iron that I bought to burn my logo into my wooden dummies)... but I was out of oxygen for my MAPP torch. So I came up with the great idea to buy a heat gun... 'cuz HF sells them for cheap. They say that they'll get up to 1100F... that should be hot enough to do some soldering right?... WRONG. I sanded my guard material nice and flat, fluxed up the surfaces with the no-name flux, and cranked the heat gun on high. I figured that I could tin the surfaces of each piece to be joined, clamp the assembly together with some spring clamps, then heat the whole thing up for a nice solid solder joint. Well, the heat gun didn't do jack, unless it was pointed directly at the solder... and then I just ended up with drops of solder falling on the floor and burnt flux. No good.:grumpy:

So then I read Bruce Bump's hidden-tang WIP and thought, hey maybe I can use JB Weld to hold everything together rather than solder. It is a slightly different application than Bruce's, but it should work right?... WRONG. Yesterday I re-sanded my guard pieces, mixed up the JB Weld, and glued/clamped everything up. I let thing everything cure overnight and when I removed the clamps this morning it appeared that the JB Weld solution might just work... then I took the block to my grinder to square things up. Now I know that you don't want to overheat a JB Weld bond, so I made sure to dip the block very frequently as I trued it up. But just as everything was starting to look nice and square, one of the SS blocks popped loose. Crap.:grumpy:

So then I decided to bite the bullet and get some decent solder/flux, get some more oxygen for my torch and do things the way I should have in the first place. I was able to pick up some Stay-Brite solder and Stay-Clean flux today at one of the local welding supply shops. So I cleaned up my guard materials and tried my hand at soldering. And guess what... it worked. :D

Below is the block of guard material that I was able to solder together.
3719536860_8ed28025f3_o.jpg


The next photo shows the guard block after I drilled holes for the pins. It also shows the scribed lines for the slot that will need to be cut to fit around the ricasso area.
3718723089_7289e36696_o.jpg


Finally, I drilled a small hole near the end of the slot and then used my bandsaw to cut to the drilled hole. The photo below shows the block in its current condition. Tomorrow I will need to finish filing the slot to fit over the ricasso of the knife. I think I cut the slot a little narrow... I'm not sure whether I have a small enough file to fit in there... I'll have to dig through my toolboxes.
3718723287_a93a757595_o.jpg


Anyone have any tricks for fitting the guard to the knife?

To be continued...
 
Looking good Erin!

If you mirror polish the top/bottom surfaces of your guard stock, then you can make sure you're filing square to it by keeping the file in line with its reflection in the guard material.

There's some other things, but I can't think how to explain it without just getting wordy and making it more confusing.
 
lel said:
Erin, here is a good tutorial Fitting Guards by Rob Brown. He uses a milling machine, but also shows other tricks that will be useful even without it.

--
Sergiy
Click to expand...


Sergiy,

That was a great link, very informative. Now, however, I am greatly concerned that I did not grind a notch into the front of my ricasso area in which to seat the guard. Now that the blade is heat treated it may be tricky to file a nice/square notch. Does anyone have any ideas on how to accomplish this cleanly? Diamond files seem like they would take forever...

Erin
 
I think you'll find that once you get through the initial outer layer, Nicholson files will cut nicely. Use a file guide and go slow.
 
Erin Burke said:
Sergiy,

That was a great link, very informative. Now, however, I am greatly concerned that I did not grind a notch into the front of my ricasso area in which to seat the guard. Now that the blade is heat treated it may be tricky to file a nice/square notch. Does anyone have any ideas on how to accomplish this cleanly? Diamond files seem like they would take forever...

Erin
Click to expand...

Very, very carefully rough it with a 4.5" angle grinder then clean up with diamond files.

Also, you don't need to slot the guard in order to drill the holes in the blade.

Also, for the thin file, I have ground one side off of a file to make it thin enough to get into tight slots.
 
Last edited:
Um.... so all this talk about fancy drill bits, diamond files, etc.....

Did everyone (including you Erin!) forget that he clay hardened this blade and the ricasso isn't hard?????????????????
 
I didn't, Nick, that's why I said regular Nicholson's would work fine :P
 
NickWheeler said:
Um.... so all this talk about fancy drill bits, diamond files, etc.....

Did everyone (including you Erin!) forget that he clay hardened this blade and the ricasso isn't hard?????????????????
Click to expand...

Yes and no Mr. Poopy-Pants. :p

This was probably a horendous error on my part, but I only ran the clay part-way up the ricasso area. I did a full quench on the knife (cuz I don't like lighting my oil on fire), so the handle area and the bottom part of the ricasso DID harden.:eek: In fact, there is a little hamon across the part of the ricasso area that the guard will end up covering.:o It appears that the bottom two pins holes will be through the hardened area. Now I could soften things up a bit with my torch I suppose, but I don't want to blacken up my nicely-polished flats if I can help it.

We'll see what I can do once 5pm rolls around and the gaoler releases me from my cubicle servitude. :D

Erin
 
Erin Burke said:
Yes and no Mr. Poopy-Pants. :p

This was probably a horendous error on my part, but I only ran the clay part-way up the ricasso area. I did a full quench on the knife (cuz I don't like lighting my oil on fire), so the handle area and the bottom part of the ricasso DID harden.:eek: In fact, there is a little hamon across the part of the ricasso area that the guard will end up covering.:o It appears that the bottom two pins holes will be through the hardened area. Now I could soften things up a bit with my torch I suppose, but I don't want to blacken up my nicely-polished flats if I can help it.

We'll see what I can do once 5pm rolls around and the gaoler releases me from my cubicle servitude. :D

Erin
Click to expand...


I always draw back my tang to a deep purple with a torch, just sayin

I always figured 40 +/- RC was plenty for a tang and there wasn't any real good reason to leave it hardened.
 
+1 to Stephan's post.

I keep the blade over a bucket of water (point down) with my fingers right on the plunge cuts. Start heating near the end of the tang with your torch. When it's too hot to hold I lower it into the water a bit. This keeps from overheating the edge, and only leaves a small amount of oxides that will sand right off. :)
 
Another method for notching out the ricasso for accepting the guard. If you have an 6" or 8" bench grinder you can cut a perfect notch by using 1/16" bonded thick cut off wheel. I take two piece of 3" wide by 1/4" thick 90" angle aluminum plates and make a rest that has ben cut to accept the cut off wheel. Mount the two pieces together (looks like the letter "Z") with bolts where the center of the wheel meets the center of the rest. Now you may notch out the top of the aluminum rest (band saw or use the cutoff wheel in the bench) to accept the depth of the cut you desire for cutting the notch out of the blade or/and guard material. Line up the cuttoff wheel so it centers the notch on the aluminum rest. Bolt the rest to the bench and the bench grinder to bench as well. All that is left is to cut the length of notch you desire into the blade or guard material making multiple cuts until the width is up to the desired width. I have for many years (20 +) used this method to fit guards. I drill the pin hole in the blade prior to heat treatment and afterwards notch out the guards and knife once back from HT. Drill a pin hole through the side of the guard material, insert pin through guard material and blade side of the borders for cutting with the cutoff wheel. Vertically line up the guard to the blade. Use calipers to measure thickness at rear of ricasso and transfer to the guard. Use calipers to assure the correct depth and width. Cut out slot of blade with cutoff wheel and inure a proper fit. Polish cutoff burrs from blade and you are ready to glue, preen and/or silver solder. I hope this make sense as once witnessed or seen in photo's it is easy and quick.
 
Last edited:
NickWheeler said:
+1 to Stephan's post.

I keep the blade over a bucket of water (point down) with my fingers right on the plunge cuts. Start heating near the end of the tang with your torch. When it's too hot to hold I lower it into the water a bit. This keeps from overheating the edge, and only leaves a small amount of oxides that will sand right off. :)
Click to expand...

See, now that is a useful bit of info. :thumbup:

Thanks Nick
 
aktoklat said:
Another method for notching out the ricasso for accepting the guard.... I hope this make sense as once witnessed or seen in photo's it is easy and quick.
Click to expand...

I'm having a tough time visualizing this. You wouln't happen to have a photo?

Erin
 
Ok, I need to ask a stupid newbie question here. Back on the first page where the heat treat was done, you said you ran it thru 2 stress relief cycles, then applied clay then heatreat.
Are the stress relief cycles really neccessary for a stock removal blade ? I was under the impression that this was the samething as normallizing and really only needed for forged blades.

Thanks Rick
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top