Lathe bit blades

U

UltimateDadBod

Joined
Jun 2, 2024
Messages
1
I’be read s fair bit about using truck springs, railroad spikes, and old files as the stock from which a blade is ultimately produced, but has anyone here ever worked with large (like, 1”+ x 6”) lathe bits? If so, how do the resulting blades perform? If not, does anyone feel comfortable speculating? Thank you in advance.
 
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My wood lathe tools are made out of M2 high speed steel. Designed to hold a decent edge cutting wood on a lathe, probably would work good for a knife. Also wood lathe tools are usually a good size hunk of steel. Would be somewhat easy to find old used ones cheap at yardsales/antique malls etc
 
Is the material uniform?
Same?
Sometimes other, harder material is brazed on.

You don't want that or bimetal.

If it's a solid piece of high speed steel, like M2 was suggested, then it would be Great
 
You can buy M2 steel in any size no reason to mess with cutoff blades for the lathe .
Good carbon tool steel , is there any magic ? not really .
 
Lathe bits come in all sorts of interesting materials, like T-15, Rex 45, Stellite 98M2, Stellite Star-J, Tantung G, etc. Many of the exotic steels used to make tool bits have been successfully used to make knives (by Spyderco for example), but AFAIK nobody has used any of the more exotic Stellites to make a knife. Stellite 6B/6K have been used for knives occasionally, but Stellite 6 is fairly pedestrian compared to stuff like Star-J and Tantung G. Those grades have high strength, extreme corrosion resistance, extremely high carbide volume (around 50%) and correspondingly high wear resistance, but they have low toughness and zero flex. I don't know if they would be able to support typical knife edge geometries. Grinding them to shape would also be quite difficult.
 
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