Ring Guard Bowie Progression

[Kyle Royer]

I will look forward to this one. Did you get those scales from Roland Quimby at Blade this year?I have a set that looks just like those that a customer of mine purchased from him that will be on an extra large friction folder I am in the process of making.

Yes I sure did.

Thanks for all the complements everyone.

 

[Kyle Royer]

very nice pics, I'm kinda new here and I was wondering how you posted them I tried but couldn't figure it out

I first re-size the picture in Adobe Photoshop Editor to be 800 pixels wide and then load them onto Flickr were it gives you a URL address. Take the URL from Flickr and click the insert image icon here on the forum and put your URL address in there. Make sure that you take off the http: that the insert image icon gives you, if your pictures are from Flickr because Flickr will automatically give you the http:.

I hope this helps. It might sound complicated but it isn't that hard.

 

[xaman]

Thanks for showing us your work Kyle, this one will be fun to watch come together. I love the design you guys settled on.

 

[Kyle Royer]

Here I have cut the end of the billet with a band-saw and I will now forge it up and around so the damascus pattern will follow the blade edge.

Now I've forged the tip and tang of the blade. This is as much forging as I want to do on this knife, any more and it could start to distort the damascus pattern. Notice the blade is 3/4" thick, the reason for this is so I can grind 1/4" off each side to get to the inside of the billet were all the cool "W"s are seen instead of the outside that would look like a bunch of straight lines.

Here I have ground 1/4" of one side of the billet.

Here I've ground 1/4" off the other side and have surface ground the blade and dipped it in a little acid to see the pattern. (You can not see the pattern very well in the picture but let me say that it looks great!) I will have a good picture of the damascus pattern tomorrow after I grind the bevels in the blade.

Now I have put the blade into my Paragon heat treating oven to normalize the steel by heating it to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit and letting it cool at a rate of 150 degrees an hour.

While the blade is normalizing I will grind the scale off the 1080 for the damascus fittings.

That's all for today. Thanks for looking.

 

[C.Edmondson]

Kyle thanks very much for taking out your time to post such intresting threads. I have learned alot about knife making by watching you and reading the threads, Thanks again,Charlie

 

[peterinct]

Another fantastic WIP thread so far and i'm sure the BEST is yet to come.

Thanks for taking the time to show your work Kyle.

Looking forward to see the completed knife.

Peter

 

[bobbywett]

Thanks Kyle for allowing us to follow you through another forging/fabrication tutorial. I just found this thread this morning and will be following it closely. :thumbup:

Bob,

Hershey, PA

 

[Nebulae]

thanks thats the conclusion I came to but I didnt want to post it to the internet first.

 

[RogerP]

This is such a treat.

Roger

 

[jjtjr]

Kyle,

This is a great thread. It's going to be an outstanding knife.

Jim Treacy

 

[r connally]

Love the idea of the takedown and interchangable guards! This one is going to be really neat.

 

[Shawn fu]

This is great,thanks for taking the time to post:thumbup:

 

[geerts]

All I can say is:" I've still got a long way to go."

G

 

[Kyle Royer]

Thanks for all the kind words everyone!

Lets start on what I did yesterday.

I have taken the blade out of the heat treating oven after the normalization proses and gone over it with the surface grinder to clean the scale off.

Here I have started grinding in the edge bevels.

Now I've ground in the edge bevels and am stamping my mark in the ricasso, K.ROYER

Here I am stamping my J.S. stamp in the other side of the ricasso.

This will look more refined after I hand sand.

I have heated the blade to 1500 degrees Farenheit and am quenching the blade in oil, for the next three pictures.

In this picture it looks like I'm breathing the smoke off the oil but my head if off to the side and I have a vent fan pulling the smoke away from me.

 

[Kyle Royer]

Here I'm inspecting the blade after heat treating to see if it warped. It did warp a little, about 1/16" which will be easily fixed when grinding.

Here I have used a new file to see if the blade is hard and it is very hard.

Here is a picture of the blade after heat treating. the damascus pattern came out great! I will now put it in my heat treating oven at 410 degrees Fahrenheit for two cycles of two hours each.

That is all until Monday. I am going to work on a side project today and Sunday. Thanks for looking.

 

[NickWheeler]

Looking great Kyle!

I'm telling your mom that you're a smoke breather!!!



It looks like you're using your forge for austenitizing rather than your Paragon. If that's the case, why not use the digitally controlled furnace?

Very impressive work Kyle. Your drive to continually produce such high end pieces and so "fast" is most impressive. I put fast in quotes because I know none of these knives are quick to build, you just stay on them for long hours so that you're getting a lot of them done in fairly short order.

Keep it up Kyle! :thumbup: :thumbup:

 

[Kyle Royer]

Looking great Kyle!

I'm telling your mom that you're a smoke breather!!!



It looks like you're using your forge for austenitizing rather than your Paragon. If that's the case, why not use the digitally controlled furnace?
Very impressive work Kyle. Your drive to continually produce such high end pieces and so "fast" is most impressive. I put fast in quotes because I know none of these knives are quick to build, you just stay on them for long hours so that you're getting a lot of them done in fairly short order.

Keep it up Kyle! :thumbup: :thumbup:

Actually I was using my Paragon on this blade. I stopped using the forge about four months ago and would not go back. Except for on my clay hardened blades. I have all the control and an exact temperature reading with the Paragon.

Thanks,

Kyle

 

[Dawkind]

Another amazing WIP.....thanks for all of your time and trouble to do this for us.

 

[blad5]

First off, I want to echo all of the compliments posted here. After seeing and reading this thread, one gets a much greater appreciation of what goes into the making of a damascus blade and why, at first blush, the asking price for such a knife appears high.

I do have a question. For me going back to some of the earlier pictures that you posted, it was not intuitive why you twisted half the bar with a right twist and the other half with a left twist and then alternated the four resulting pieces. I assume that both actions, the twisting and the alternating, were necessary to form the W pattern you wanted. But how did you know that? Is there literature that can tell a maker if you want to obtain a certain pattern in the steel, the maker need to do thus or do you have to learn from experience?

Paul

 

[Don Hanson III]

Nick, the forge in the photo is black, cold, not running

Cool thread Kyle!