Newbie intro and question

R

ryoon4690

Joined
Apr 25, 2010
Messages
8
Hello all. I've just started snooping around the forums and look forward to being a frequent poster. I've tried making knives before but from the steel at homedepot. I'm hoping someone could point me in the right direction for where to get proper steel for the job. I'm not looking for anything in particular. Just something good for a wood working knife. I'd rather not make purchases online. I live in the flint area. Thanks everyone.
 
ryoon4690 said:
...I'm hoping someone could point me in the right direction for where to get proper steel for the job...
Click to expand...
First, before anything, I believe you deserve a round of applause for making the choice to start off with the correct material:thumbup: with this approach you will be a "newbie" for a much shorter time than many others.

I know Mr. Cupples offers lots of good steel, and I certainly know what Mr. Bruno offers and I spend a certain amount of time on the phone talking with Aldo about the ins and outs of various steel alloys, he likes to know what his steel is and what it is going to do.

ryoon4690 said:
...I'm not looking for anything in particular. Just something good for a wood working knife...
Click to expand...

You’re on the right track but don't get turned around now... Look for something in particular. The single most important decision you can make in increasing your chances of success is proper steel selection for your application. I now believe that one the greatest stumbling blocks in methods for modern knifemakers is trying to use heat treatments to force a poorly chosen alloy to do a job it wasn't designed to do, if you would be willing to work with me in this thread I think it could be a great learning tool to take a methodical step by step approach to your steel selection.

The very first thing you do is determine exactly what the blade will have to do- slice, chop, cleave, shave, shear, pierce etc... and then determine where and how it will have to do it- the kitchen, the workshop, the woods, the ocean, etc... Next one of the most important but too often overlooked- what are your tools and skill level for working that steel?

After you determine these things you will then be able to choose almost the exact alloy you need according to how its chemistry matches your needs. Don't be intimidated by this this is not even as tough as high school level chemistry, I promise ;). In most of the steels we will ever work with there are less than a dozen elements we ever have to worry about other than the obvious iron (Fe) and these are the ones you will mostly see- C, Mn, Cr, V, W, Mo, Si, Ni.

Start with the most common and work toward the rarer stuff that is added for special effects. Carbon would be the first; it will determine your maximum hardness (thus overall strength) and abrasion resistance. C < .8% for choppers, C > .8% for slicers, C = > .8% for a bit of both in a general using knife. Your wood working knife will be one of these depending on the most common woods cut, if it is cut with hand pressure or if you will be using a mallet. The mallet on very dense wood may require around .8%, but a fine cutter that will be pushed by your finger will enjoy extra carbon. This comes with one caveat- the more free carbon content; the more skilled you will have to be for success.

Look for things like V and W to help out with this extra carbon, it can lock it up into extra hard carbides that will keep your blade cutting longer, but will make it so your steel will not tolerate a lot of monkeying around with temps and cooling rates. Cr will also add carbides but to a lesser extent and is more useful in increasing the depth of hardness. At your point in you knifemaking career keep heating to a minimum number of times (just hardening and tempering) when these elements are present.

Hardening the steel comes in two steps- heating (austenization) and quenching. These elements will effect either or both, and at times be at odds with the other. There are two reasons a blade doesn&#8217;t harden- it didn&#8217;t get enough heat (temp, or time at temp) or it didn&#8217;t get cooled fast enough. Mn, Cr, Mo and Si, make the cooling part much easier, total absence of any of them would require water or brine for maximum hardness, but adding greater amounts of any of them will allow the quench speed to be less extreme from various oils to eventually air when enough Cr is added. The catch it that the more effect the elements has on quench speed the more the opposite effect it has on soak time at temp. 1080 steel has none of these but a little bit of Mn so it must be quenched rather fast, but on the other hand it can be heated very quickly with a forge or a torch with little problem. O1 steel has plenty of Cr, W, V and Mn, it can harden in a slow oil but will take a longer time at a precise temperature to get things right. Think of these elements as hanging onto your carbon for you so the soft stuff can&#8217;t use it, it takes time to convince all of these elements to hold your carbon for you but once you do the soft stuff will not be able to run off with it when you quench. But without any of them present you don&#8217;t have to worry about convincing them so you just get it hot and do your best to outrun the soft stuff.

If you are just in your workshop Cr and Ni may not be useful in amounts greater than 2% but if you are going outdoors and particularly near the ocean you may want a lot of them for help in keeping the rust away.

At this point I would say your decision hinges on what tools and equipment you have at hand to get the most bang for your buck from your steel. Kiln/oven? Torch? Forge?
 
Just bookmarked this thread under my "Heat Treat Tutorials" section.

If your looking for info on the metallurgical aspects of how to select and prepare a "meal of steal" you've got the right chef on your side. Kevin was one of my instructors for the Intro to Bladesmithing class in NC last year. His advice has been invaluable to me in my burgeoning bladesmithing endeavors and there are few who approach heat treating with a more scientific zeal! Your first efforts will be less painful if you adhere to Kevin's tutelage.

Bob,

Hershey, PA:D
 
Wow guys. Thanks a lot for all the help. Its much more than I was expecting.
About the knife: In my mind the knife I want to make would be used for work on white woods for making bows so stuff like hickory, ash, maple, oak. I would like the knife to be able to cut down small trees, be able to remove a lot of material at times but also be able to take off smaller amounts much like a draw knife.
About my tools: When I tried making knives before I used an angle grinder and belt sander to do the grinding and in my feeble attempts to harden the steel I used a small fire in my back yard.
I looked at getting steel from Alro because they carried some steels that were mentioned on a page about knife steels but I'll check out the guys you mentioned too. Some of the tool steels Alro had that were mentioned were A-2 and D2 but they also had several others. What steels do you guys recommend for what I would be asking of the knife? If its too much to ask of one knife I don't mind making others and most likely will be. Thanks a lot everyone.
 
ryoon4690 said:
...About the knife: In my mind the knife I want to make would be used for work on white woods for making bows so stuff like hickory, ash, maple, oak. I would like the knife to be able to cut down small trees, be able to remove a lot of material at times but also be able to take off smaller amounts much like a draw knife...
Click to expand...

Yes, so this immediately changes the playing field, a draw knife is not a fine little detailing knife it is a hogger of wood, and to ask it to also make chopping cuts on smaller trees pushes it heavily more in the direction of a general purpose or chopper/cleaver.

If we still work with age old ideas of merely different levels of hardness to adjust for toughness (as too many modern smiths unfortunately do), we would use whatever steel and attempt to adjust this with heat treating. This would sacrifice strength much more than it would gain in toughness. Or we may fall into the trap of simply choosing a lower carbon steel in order to gain ductility regardless of the heat treatment. But the advent of alloying changed everything and we can now have our cake and eat it too.

You can start out with a lower carbon content if you are not concerned about abrasion resistance in all those cleaving type cuts- push cuts require less abrasion resistance than draw cuts initially. So if you look at the first element of carbon alone you would want something around .8% or less. 1075, 1080, 1084 would all be good choices. However if you really want a tough blade that has high strength as well look to the alloy steels. Alloys with Ni, Si and to some extent chrome, will have a higher toughness at equal hardness for that steels with merely the same carbon level, thus an "S" series, 5160, 15n20 or even L6 may work well.

I think for the work you are describing, which is not really intense whacking and banging, chrome may have the potential so 5160 may be a good one.


ryoon4690 said:
...About my tools: When I tried making knives before I used an angle grinder and belt sander to do the grinding and in my feeble attempts to harden the steel I used a small fire in my back yard...
Click to expand...

You can make knives with the simplest of tools, it has been done quite well for thousands of years, but in all those years they also had the simplest of steels. The ancient smiths could make a pretty cool blade with just a fire, and the steels they developed for their technology, but those same master craftsmen would have been screwed if you slipped them moderately alloyed modern steel. My Grandpa was one of the sharpest craftsmen I ever saw, he could calculate things we cannot understand in his head and just do it, but he couldn't set a digital watch or even start a VCR, they just were not part of his world. Modern alloys are not part of the ancient bladesmithing tradition, so we need to accept that before we can move our craft forward.

A fire with some air draft and a file to shape tings with is as basic as you can get but you can be quite successful in knife making if you make certain to keep your steel selection as simple as the tools available. Carbon can be dealt with but will require some experience and skills, so keeping the carbon at or around .8% in the beginning is a very good idea. In keeping it simple watch out for chrome, it is the basis for most richer alloys and will make greater and greater demands on you as you increase its presence try to keep it below .8%. Not only does chrome increase soak temperature and time demands it also starts doing annoying things with carbon after a certain level. Chromium carbides are big blocky affairs that result in stability at very fine levels (like along the edge). So for all of these reasons I would strongly advise you to steer clear of A-2 and D-2 for starting out with the tools you have, it would be a huge waste of your money.

From all of this you would probably be best served by 1070, 1075, 1080, 1084 or 5160, if you would like to give a shot at a very simple alloy steel.

With the same tools if you would like to make the finer cutters and slicers after you have learned the ins and outs of these steels you could try W1, W2 or 1095.

When you are really into the swing of things and have the skills or equipment to anneal richer steels well enough to easily cut with a file you could move onto things like L6, 52100, O1 etc… but you will need to be capable of precise temperature hold times to get your moneys worth from them.

And until you have the ovens and other equipment, I wouldn’t waste my time or money with the “A” series, D2 or any of the stainless stuff.
 
Thanks a lot Kevin. You are beyond helpful. I looked into getting O-1 from Alro but had no idea it was so expensive. I contacted Kelly Cupples and he sent me a price list. It looks much more reasonable for me although I'm a little worried about shipping cost. I'll probably start out with 1080 for my first bunch of knives.
 
You will be turned in the direction of O1 by many other makers, unfortunately even quite experienced ones. But this is rather tragic in its one dimensional reasoning. Most see O1 as a beginners steel simply based on how easily it will harden, but this is the same flawed logic that judges all quenchants based solely on speed; if speed was all that mattered the only quenchant we would need is something like brine. O1 is a fairly rich and complex alloy when compared with 1080, and it will require more accurate temperatures and hold times to bring out its best qualities. Along with these issues you also have to have a pretty good grasp of spheroidizing and subcritical annealing techniques to soften it up for hand working if you have heated it at all. I did indeed make some reaching assumptions when I approached this from the angle that you would be forging and heat treating yourself, but then I often make that error here due to the fact that the title of the forum is &#8220;BladeSmith Question and Answer&#8221;, as in the Anglo Saxon root word implying one who hammers his blades. You could, of course, shape your blades from any material and then send them to a heat treater in which case you would have access to the more complex equipment and the point still applies. At any rate, you have seen the cost of O1 compared to other steels, if one does not have the skills or equipment bring O1 above the performance level of 1084 then there is no justification for the added costs over a good bar of 1084. A well known maker not too long ago reviewed a pretty good steel and pronounced it no better than 10XX blades he had made, but he should be ashamed of himself since he used the exact same oversimplified heat treatment for both and one would think that an experienced maker would know better, but apparently not. IT is worth noting because many a good steel has gotten a bad wrap by people who never gave it a chance their lacking heat treating practices- there are no bad steels, only poor choices in selecting and working them.

P.S. There is no need to thank me, you started right out looking for a good known steel that you needed help in selecting, you had the attitude that necessitates a knowledge of your materials that this craft needs more of to pull it out of its slumber. Under such circumstances I will always be happy to help in any way I can, your approach deserves it, our craft deserves it, and besides that you are from Michigan as well, and us poor slobs from MI could use all the help we could get these days;).
 
I appreciate it Kevin. Making knives has quickly become an obsession before I've even hit the grind. Hopefully it will become a lifelong passion like making traditional archery equipment already has for me. If you're interested we may have to get together some time so you can show me the tricks of the trade. Anyways I'll take your advice and hopefully my first real knife will come out better than my first bow. Take care. :)
 
I apologize for cutting in to the conversation here, but... wow! I was turned toward O1 when I first started for the exact same reason, and I have successfully heat treated it using a small oxy-propane torch and bricks from a fireplace. Recently I have been considering using a different steel to gain increased edge retention, but perhaps it has been my method (my knives still hold an edge as good as some professionally made knives I have).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top