My "organic" knife

Gitichigumi-gane? Lord!!! And all this time, I thought Wisconsin was the state best known for cheese.:rolleyes: Nice work, Dr, Evil.:thumbup::D
 
Very interesting Kevin. Can you show us a close up of the blade?
Mace
 
The knife is cool as a polar bear's backside... but now I have "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" stuck in my head ;)
 
Beautiful work, Kevin. I especially like how you smelted the ore yourself. :thumbup:
 
Impressive! That's sole authorship taken to the max.

Over the years I have stuck with steels that I am familiar with mainly to simplify the H/T. I can only imagine what is required with using one that you make from scratch. I realize that this may be a very open-ended question (and could be a thread all it's own) but is there any simple formula that you use when starting with a steel that doesn't have known H/T specs?
 
Now that is a sole authorship knife if there ever was one. Most excellent example of work by a true master of Knife Making
 
thats nice work right there Kevin BTW if you like i could ship you some cpm10v millings so you can spice up your next batch :)
 
J. Doyle said:
...That natural hamon is really cool too. Is there a short form (or long form, if you wish and have the time) answer of why that happened that way?...
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Short form is good since it is really quite simple. The steel is nothing like modern alloys and has none of the chemistry to help in hardening so it makes 1095 look like it air hardening. Even a fast oil like #50 can’t cool it fast enough to get much deeper than 1/8” with martensite. So you can see the edge and 1/8” of the choil area as well as the spine managed to harden but the body of the blade is pearlite. Despite folding in the neighborhood of 10 times the carbon is still not totally evenly distributed throughout so you ten do get really cool activities like undulating habuchi, nioi and nie without clay but if one applied ashi the hamon would be very easy to manipulate. This it the part that so many guys who want to quench in water, and tell other people to, seem to forget when using modern steels. Tamahagane and bloomery steel is a totally different beast from any of the modern steels we are familiar with. 1095 has a round 0.5 seconds to avoid pearlite in the quench; the time on this stuff is much less. So before you decide water is the way to go because you saw a guy doing ancient style swords that way, you need to ask what steel he was using.
 
butcher_block said:
thats nice work right there Kevin BTW if you like i could ship you some cpm10v millings so you can spice up your next batch :)
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No thank you! Been there, done that! I used a bunch of the scale from around the base of my hammer to do a smelt and it wasn't cool. Good bloomery steel welds wonderfully, you don't even need flux, because it doesn't have all the modern alloying to form oxides and get in the way. When you reintroduce those alloys it becomes a real pain in the butt again:mad:.
 
Gary Mulkey said:
Impressive! That's sole authorship taken to the max.

Over the years I have stuck with steels that I am familiar with mainly to simplify the H/T. I can only imagine what is required with using one that you make from scratch. I realize that this may be a very open-ended question (and could be a thread all it's own) but is there any simple formula that you use when starting with a steel that doesn't have known H/T specs?
Click to expand...

With this steel it is only a matter of getting an idea of carbon content and adjusting your temperatures accordingly. When one adds alloying it complicates matters exponentially. About the only way to approach an unknown alloy is to first test to see if it has enough carbon to be useful and then start playing with variations of the old heat it until the magnet lets go and quench it.

I could do a few dozen test samples, soak at different temperatures and then do a full metallographic work up to generate a primitive I-T curve for the steel. Then you may be able to zero in a precise heat treatment, but the cost in man hours would make the steel more pricey to work with than if it were gold...

...It is just so much cheaper and easier to give Aldo a call;)
 
This is by far the coolest knife I have come across on my many hours of surfing. I can appreciate the elements that go into this. I have family that live on Keweenaw Bay. I have been looking at getting into knife making, this has sealed the deal for me.
 
Kevin R. Cashen said:
With this steel it is only a matter of getting an idea of carbon content and adjusting your temperatures accordingly. When one adds alloying it complicates matters exponentially. About the only way to approach an unknown alloy is to first test to see if it has enough carbon to be useful and then start playing with variations of the old heat it until the magnet lets go and quench it.
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Thanks, Kevin. Thats got to be very satisfying. Thanks for sharing.
 
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