Looking to make my first knife, need your help and recommendations

J

jm1

Joined
Apr 15, 2010
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15
I'm looking to make my first knife, should I get knife blanks or a piece of metal and cut the knife out myself? Also what type of materials? Like a grinder/sand paper and what else?
 
Depends on what you want to do. Either route will work, some people like the idea of starting out with a blank and going from there. Others like the idea of starting from scratch basically.

As far as what you "need" the material can be extraordinarily minimal to quite involved and expensive. As far as what you can get by with on bare essentials. Basically a hacksaw for cutting the shape (angle grinder with a cutting wheel is faster). A few files and a lot of sandpaper can make a functional knife. Having some kind of drill press is something else that would be great to have, but you can likely make a hand drill work. If you wanted to again go super minimal you can do something like a paracord wrap on a handle and not have to worry about holes or how straight they are.

That's about it to get going, everything else like bandsaws, belt grinders, etc just help speed up various steps. If you want to try doing the heat treating yourself you'll need some kind of forge, kiln, or HT oven. But you can always send the knife out to have the HT done.

You're best bet is to fill out your profile and chances are you might find a maker near you who would be glad to help you out in person.
 
Check out a video on youtube called Greenpete's knife making. He uses simple tools that anyone could get and will give you a good idea of the whole knife making process. Some will disagree but I think you will learn a lot from doing your own heat treating and probably will be a little more proud of it. You'll make mistakes but let's be honest your first few knives won't make the cover of Blade magazine anyway so have some fun with it. I honestly wouldn't use used motor oil like he uses in the video though. Get you a gallon of peanut oil to start off with. Also 1080 is probably the easiest to heat treat for the beginner instead of a file like is used in the video but for a first knife a used file would be fine. Keep in mind though if you don't have a used big file a four foot bar of 1080 from Kelly Couples will be cheaper than buying a new file. Good luck and post a pic when your done.
 
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