- Joined
- Jun 10, 2011
- Messages
- 50
Week 01:
A few days ago I was chatting with my wife about how I never seem to have enough free time to spend working on my new custom knives. I've got 100 ideas bouncing around my head but never any time to try them out. So she suggested that I take one day a week to guilt-free design and practice making my knives! Awesome! Now we have Knifemaking Tuesdays.
This tuesday's project was to figure out how to fully machine a knife blade so that it doesn't have to spend any time on a belt grinder. I made 4 different designs and after a lot of practice I finally figured out how to render a blade profile in in my CAD software, now that I have that skill I can design pretty much any shape! Once I had the code written I spent a few hours with my cnc mill cutting out the first batch, surprisingly everything went very smoothly. I got to try different parameters for each one to see what I could get away with, the one pictured lower left turned out soooo wonderful. I've got all 4 blades broken apart now, tabs sanded off, and they're currently in my tumbler where I'll leave them all night and probably most of tomorrow to get cleaned up and deburred.
Video coming by morning, it's uploading now.
These are tiny little guys, just proof of concept so that I could practice. I had a few pieces of 1/8" thick 1.5"x5" 1018 low carbon steel kicking around, so I wanted to pack as many tests into one piece as I could. And yes, that's lightning strike carbon fiber in the background!
Thanks for looking!
John Grimsmo
A few days ago I was chatting with my wife about how I never seem to have enough free time to spend working on my new custom knives. I've got 100 ideas bouncing around my head but never any time to try them out. So she suggested that I take one day a week to guilt-free design and practice making my knives! Awesome! Now we have Knifemaking Tuesdays.
This tuesday's project was to figure out how to fully machine a knife blade so that it doesn't have to spend any time on a belt grinder. I made 4 different designs and after a lot of practice I finally figured out how to render a blade profile in in my CAD software, now that I have that skill I can design pretty much any shape! Once I had the code written I spent a few hours with my cnc mill cutting out the first batch, surprisingly everything went very smoothly. I got to try different parameters for each one to see what I could get away with, the one pictured lower left turned out soooo wonderful. I've got all 4 blades broken apart now, tabs sanded off, and they're currently in my tumbler where I'll leave them all night and probably most of tomorrow to get cleaned up and deburred.
Video coming by morning, it's uploading now.
These are tiny little guys, just proof of concept so that I could practice. I had a few pieces of 1/8" thick 1.5"x5" 1018 low carbon steel kicking around, so I wanted to pack as many tests into one piece as I could. And yes, that's lightning strike carbon fiber in the background!
Thanks for looking!
John Grimsmo
, turned IT guy now. 
. It's never too late to learn new skills.
