So I'm planning on getting into knife making...

[KennyB]

So I've been "planning" on getting into knife making for a long time. You know, "waiting" until I have a forge and a drill press and all that. That's kind of a big wait, and I decided I wanted to try to get my feet wet before then so I'm going to buy a bench vise and some hand tools and some steel stock and start cutting out a knife.

I haven't really made a lot of design choices or anything yet because I'm trying to familiarize myself with what the overall process will be, but I want to make a 4" fully-fixed one piece fixed blade. I figure making it one piece will allow me to cheat in not needing to make scales, and still get some experience in the meantime--plus I like one-piece knives.

So anyway, here's what I'm thinking I'll do...

1. Find some steel stock to use. I'll probably want it about .250" x 1.25" since from what I've seen that's a pretty common size available.
2. Cut out a "blank" of my knife design using a hacksaw and handfiles. I'll probably do a lot of pieces in wood until I get a "template" to follow.
3. Cut out the bevel leaving some room for the edge bevel itself--heard this was important, makes sense. I'm just going to have a swedge on the spine and then a flat grind to the edge, so I think a rather coarse file will work well for that.
4. Smooth out the corners on the handle. I'll probably just file in some chamfers at 45 degrees, and then round them over with sandpaper.
5. Smooth the whole thing down with some sandpaper. I saw a thread suggest stopping at 400, but is this just before HT, or in general? I want a pretty high polish.
6. Heat treat (No plans for this yet)
7. File in jimping and grip on the handle and then do any more polishing if I have to wait until this point.
8. Finally profile and sharpen an edge onto the end of my primary bevel.

I've made a lot of various tools going to school for machine technology, so I'm not really worried about most of the metal work and look forward to figuring that out, but what I"m wondering about is the choice of steel and the heat treat process.

From what I've seen there are ways to build your own furnace, but in another thread ( sorry I can't remember which ) a user seemed like they were suggesting using a conventional oven to HT 1095. Is that even possible? In any case, my steel for this knife will mostly be motivated by how capable I will be of heat treating it. I believe someone in the same thread suggested 5160, and that seems like it would do just fine for what I'd want to use the knife for--right now I'm mostly just focused on getting my foot in the door with some experience.

Only problem is I probably won't be able to have access to a furnace of any sort, even a home-made one. I've heard many people talk about sending knives to various makers for heat-treating though, so is this an option until I can get into the position of being able to HT myself?

Anyway, I think I've got the general process thought out pretty well, is there anything I'm missing? I'll have a whole bunch to think about with attaching scales later on down the road, but for now I'm just going to focus on one-piece fixed blades.

 

[Remyrw]

I'll just pass along the advice I got.
Try 1080 or 1084 if you want to do your own ht in a non temp controlled forge. A regular oven can be used for tempering but not the actual hardening. The reason for the 1080/84 is because it requires no soak time to mention when in knife thicknesses, so you get it to temp and then quench. I am doing it using a propane torch meant for weed burning and some kiln bricks setup to make a little forge chamber.

If you are going to stick with sending it out, figure almost $40 by the time you get it back. Most of which is shipping. The actual HT varies, but if you were doing a bunch it gets a lot cheaper per blade, shipping each way is where you get killed on doing singles. That's why I setup my mini forge. If you decide on stainless there's lots of options though, 440c, ats34 and 154cpm are good "basic" stainless options that won't cost an arm and a leg and are regularly available in shorter pieces for a single knife. Check Knifekits.com and Texasknife.com for single pieces. If you plan to do more than one you definitely want to check out admiralsteel.com as well.

For forming the actual blade, 1/4 is VERY thick, I'd start a lot thinner if you aren't using a grinder (or even if you are). You are thinking about a 4" blade, so there's no real need for the super thick steel and it just means a lot more work filing. Maybe try 5/32 or even 1/8. If you don't plan to use it for heavy chopping 1/8 is pretty good, you'd be amazed how much stronger these are than most mass produce blades. The only real problem will be the handle, if you aren't putting scales on it that's kinda thin, but you can always do a cord wrap. That fits in your KISS design concept and doesn't require any extra tools or real time.

 

[KennyB]

I'll just pass along the advice I got.
Try 1080 or 1084 if you want to do your own ht in a non temp controlled forge. A regular oven can be used for tempering but not the actual hardening. The reason for the 1080/84 is because it requires no soak time to mention when in knife thicknesses, so you get it to temp and then quench. I am doing it using a propane torch meant for weed burning and some kiln bricks setup to make a little forge chamber.

If you are going to stick with sending it out, figure almost $40 by the time you get it back. Most of which is shipping. The actual HT varies, but if you were doing a bunch it gets a lot cheaper per blade, shipping each way is where you get killed on doing singles. That's why I setup my mini forge. If you decide on stainless there's lots of options though, 440c, ats34 and 154cpm are good "basic" stainless options that won't cost an arm and a leg and are regularly available in shorter pieces for a single knife. Check Knifekits.com and Texasknife.com for single pieces. If you plan to do more than one you definitely want to check out admiralsteel.com as well.

For forming the actual blade, 1/4 is VERY thick, I'd start a lot thinner if you aren't using a grinder (or even if you are). You are thinking about a 4" blade, so there's no real need for the super thick steel and it just means a lot more work filing. Maybe try 5/32 or even 1/8. If you don't plan to use it for heavy chopping 1/8 is pretty good, you'd be amazed how much stronger these are than most mass produce blades. The only real problem will be the handle, if you aren't putting scales on it that's kinda thin, but you can always do a cord wrap. That fits in your KISS design concept and doesn't require any extra tools or real time.

Yeah, good call on the cord wrap, that will save time on the handles file-work too.

I suppose I'll start reading up on heat treating 1084 then. I've seen people make home-made forges before so I'm sure I can get some brick and an oxygen source to pump in.

 

[Remyrw]

find some high temp fire brick (2200+) and a good propane burner, like a weed torch or even a good plumbers torch. In theory the little ones work but go for one of the more powerful ones rather than a little bottle mounted one. No need for a blower or extra O2, in fact you're better off with LESS O2 since it causes oxidation. I'll have pics of my setup posted later.

 

[KennyB]

find some high temp fire brick (2200+) and a good propane burner, like a weed torch or even a good plumbers torch. In theory the little ones work but go for one of the more powerful ones rather than a little bottle mounted one. No need for a blower or extra O2, in fact you're better off with LESS O2 since it causes oxidation. I'll have pics of my setup posted later.

Ahh, okay, that seems cool...

I decided to check out what my Machinery's Handbook said about the heat treatment temps for carbon steels, and it was mentioning a tool called a "pyrometer". Is this important, or is doing it by one of those "color" charts to indicate the temperature accurate enough?

 

[Remyrw]

Depends on the steel, which is why the 1080 or 1084 was important. With that you can just take it up just past where it goes non magnetic and then quench, you don't need to know what temp your forge is at. You can TRY to go by color of the steel, but I did some testing this morning and found that it's deceptive. Very easy to go too far for the 1080 on a thin blade. I heat treated my first actual blade for this thing two days ago and probably went over on heat by a bit.

The real key is making sure it's even. You don't want to overheat the tip or edge and have the rest not even close, very easy to do in a simple forge. I wound up moving my burner's opening into the forge much further toward the front so that the tip was well past it, otherwise the extra heat right there tended to overheat the tip of my test pieces while the rest was still coming up to temp.

Read up on the stickies here, do some browsing through the posts... TONS of good info here for the finding. I'm not much further along than you, so I'm mostly passing along the advice others here have given me and the little bit I've learned while doing it.

 

[KennyB]

Depends on the steel, which is why the 1080 or 1084 was important. With that you can just take it up just past where it goes non magnetic and then quench, you don't need to know what temp your forge is at. You can TRY to go by color of the steel, but I did some testing this morning and found that it's deceptive. Very easy to go too far for the 1080 on a thin blade. I heat treated my first actual blade for this thing two days ago and probably went over on heat by a bit.

The real key is making sure it's even. You don't want to overheat the tip or edge and have the rest not even close, very easy to do in a simple forge. I wound up moving my burner's opening into the forge much further toward the front so that the tip was well past it, otherwise the extra heat right there tended to overheat the tip of my test pieces while the rest was still coming up to temp.

Read up on the stickies here, do some browsing through the posts... TONS of good info here for the finding. I'm not much further along than you, so I'm mostly passing along the advice others here have given me and the little bit I've learned while doing it.

Oh, so there's no extra annealing process, just a quench? That's useful then, I thought about doing it that way before, but I didn't know if that was the proper process.

Only thing I might have trouble with past that is figuring out how to test the magnetism of a thousand degree piece of steel. Maybe one of those, magnet-on-a-stick things.

 

[Patrice Lemée]

So I've been "planning" on getting into knife making for a long time...

Don't do it. For the love of God stop NOW!

I got the same advice when I started but thought that I could control it and quit on my own if need be. WRONG! I it too late for me now. Monkey's on my back for good. Maybe there is still time for you.

 

[BladefulArt]

Pretty much all has been said, but a simple forge you can make for Hting purposes is the one brick design by Wayne Goddard. As for the design...a sheepsfoot styled blade would be very simple and the easiest to put the edge/grind on since the cutting edge doesn't have any curvature.

 

[Remyrw]

Pretty much all has been said, but a simple forge you can make for Hting purposes is the one brick design by Wayne Goddard. As for the design...a sheepsfoot styled blade would be very simple and the easiest to put the edge/grind on since the cutting edge doesn't have any curvature.

+1billion on the sheep's foot. That's what I did as my first "from scratch" knife that I was going to ht myself for just that reason. I'd tried a few others and while I'm not bad at grinding the bevels and such, this was easier and faster to get done to test the actual steel and ht process, which was my first goal. I didn't want to spend three days trying to get something more complex all nice and perfect just to screw it up in five minutes.

Lemme snap some pics and I'll post what I've got

 

[p moore]

Don't do it. For the love of God stop NOW!

I got the same advice when I started but thought that I could control it and quit on my own if need be. WRONG! I it too late for me now. Monkey's on my back for good. Maybe there is still time for you.

X2
Your kids, wife, and wallet will thank you for this. Sleepless nights, everything you see is a knife design, or a tool to make knives with. It's just not pretty.

Paul

 

[12345678910]

Oh, so there's no extra annealing process, just a quench? That's useful then, I thought about doing it that way before, but I didn't know if that was the proper process.

Only thing I might have trouble with past that is figuring out how to test the magnetism of a thousand degree piece of steel. Maybe one of those, magnet-on-a-stick things.

I think you may be mixed up with some terms.

Heat treatment is a two step process, get it really hot and quench it, then just get it a little hot to reduce the hardness and brittleness(tempering)

This video is pretty clear on heat treating.
A good HT basics video
http://www.archive.org/download/gov.ntis.ava08799vnb1/ava08799vnb1_512kb.mp4

Especially if you are doing it by hand, 1/4 inch stock is pretty thick, I wanted that too because it's what I saw some other knives made from, but it's very thick... try 1/8" to 3/32" to 3/16"

Look at the stickies at the top, many are expired, but many are not.

This is a nice list of books and videos
http://www.knifedogs.com/showthread.php?t=5285

This thread on BF has links to some of those books linked as online, or pdf e books
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=603203



Green Pete's video on how to make a Mora style bushcraft knife - simple jig stock removal with hand tools and a neo tribal / unplugged type heat treat. "Green Pete" posted it for for free distribution.
It is available here for those who can use torrent files. + plus more too.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4995247/Greenpete_s__Knifemaking_Basics_-_Make_a_Mora_Bushcraft_Knife

You can find it on utube also

Comments on books
The $50 knife shop is popular and starts a lot of people off but:
I find it confused me for a long time.
The goop quench is BS, there are commercially made quench oils available, (maybe even mentioned in the new edition)
Found steels are interesting,but require the skills of an experienced smith to be able to work and heat treat properly., you can buy proper steel cheaply(mentioned in the new edition)
Cable damascus is interesting, but not a beginners project either.

It leads you to believe that forging is necessary, but you can just file and grind everything away to create a knife (stock removal)

I like:
David Boye-Step by Step Knifemaking
Tim McCreight-Custom Knifemaking: 10 Projects from a Master Craftsman

Jim Hrisoulas- has 3 books on forging, all 3 are good &available on Amazon

There are many videos available now, some are better than others, but all better than nothing.
If you cannot use torrent files many videos are available for rent here.
http://smartflix.com/store/category/9/Knifemaking

You do not have to buy equipment to start with.
You can send out for heat treating, 10 or 15 $ per blade
Where you send it will depend on the material you chose, stainless vs non stainless.

Peters heat treat
Bos heat treat
texas knifemakers supply
and others


The basic process is here in the most simple terms
http://www.scribd.com/Jones-Scott-Jonesy-Absolute-Cheapskate-Way-to-Start-Making-Knives/d/3622507

 

[Remyrw]

Ok, here's the forge setup, not snugged up like when I'm actually using it, and I still have to cut the extra off on some blocks, just not a priority since I'm still tuning the design.

And the basic view of the sheep's foot I did. I am mostly just testing it and going to keep it as a shop knife, so the finish has been redone a few times in the past few days after getting torn up in testing. hehe. Maybe at some point I'll take the cord off and sand/buff it all pretty again. Some obvious flaws and goofs, but a very educational project. The larger knife is a blade I bought and handled in G10 with corby bolts. I discovered a few things, G10 will "burn" around the bolt if you aren't careful and Loctite 330 is a GREAT adhesive, but you don't want to use much and give it plenty of space to ooze out into if you want no gap. I spent too much time trying to get it clamped and tight as well. I probably would have been better off with just the corbies from an appearance stand point, but I like some glue in there and like the sheep's foot it was mostly a learning project, not something to sell. I needed to test the glue and get some practice with the G10. I've probably refinished the surface on that thing a dozen different ways now. The white compound suggested by Tracy at USA Knifemaker does a nice job on it.

 

[KennyB]

Nope, it's already too late to stop for me... And I haven't even got started!

Also, I was thinking of either a sheepsfoot or a wharncliffe. I figured on a wharnecliffe since I didn't think it would be hard to curve the spine out in that fashion. I'm pretty good at machining radii.

Excelling links, Numbers (12345678910). I had annealing confused with tempering. I decided to crack open my Machinery's Handbook to read up more on heat treating, so I've got a better grasp on the basics of it now. Plus it has a nice little chart with "common heat treatments for carbon steels".

Right now the basic mysteries to me are left in tempering. I haven't watched all of those videos yet though so hopefully doing so will answer my questions, but I'm a bit confused about whether you're supposed to temper in a bath or just in air, and for how long.

 

[tryppyr]

If you think it's too late to stop, maybe I can at least slow you down.

Before you start making knives you need to solve one other problem first... what is your makers mark going to look like and how will you put it on your knives?

I made the mistake of not spending the time to develop one, so now all my knives are anonymous contributions to the future. Not that the future cares. But since I have no kids, it would be nice if there was SOMETHING enduring to remind the world I was here. Alas, it is not to be, since I now have my feet firmly planted on the moving sidewalk, and any attempt to step off long enough to design a makers mark would surely result in my instantaneous destruction, or at least a twisted ankle.

- Greg

 

[Remyrw]

On most of the steels we use you could do either way, as long as you get it to the chosen temp and leave it there for the chosen time. A bath might let you reduce oxidation though.

In my experience, tempering is kind of personal, everyone seems to do it differently based on their preferences for the end result. I'm too new to really have any first hand experience (one complete blade doesn't exactly give me much to work with there) but I think I spent more time looking through tempering data than anything else when figuring out my HT process. For this little guy, due to the design, thickness, steel choice and desired hardness I went with one hour at 400. It wound up getting another half hour when I tried to straighten it some by reheating, but that wasn't effective without a bending jig so all it did was increase the temper time. It worked out well, it's strong and fairly stiff, but not brittle. I couldn't quite bring myself to test it to destruction, maybe the next one.

 

[KennyB]

On most of the steels we use you could do either way, as long as you get it to the chosen temp and leave it there for the chosen time. A bath might let you reduce oxidation though.

In my experience, tempering is kind of personal, everyone seems to do it differently based on their preferences for the end result. I'm too new to really have any first hand experience (one complete blade doesn't exactly give me much to work with there) but I think I spent more time looking through tempering data than anything else when figuring out my HT process. For this little guy, due to the design, thickness, steel choice and desired hardness I went with one hour at 400. It wound up getting another half hour when I tried to straighten it some by reheating, but that wasn't effective without a bending jig so all it did was increase the temper time. It worked out well, it's strong and fairly stiff, but not brittle. I couldn't quite bring myself to test it to destruction, maybe the next one.

I was planning on working with some unrefined steel blanks to work out the heat-treating process I'll use--just some little blanks with edges on them. That way I won't mess up the knife that I spent the time filing out, and can go ahead and test them destructively. I'll probably try to go something that turns out harder than tough.

Greg, that's an interesting concern that I never even thought of. I haven't really thought about the criterion behind a maker's mark either.

 

[lonepine]

Quote from Remyrw: "For forming the actual blade, 1/4 is VERY thick, I'd start a lot thinner..."


I want to echo Remyrw's suggestion. There are many reasons for starting with thinner stock.

If you're doing stock removal you will end up with a blade a LOT sooner. There is a lot more steel to take off a 1/4" blank than an 1/8" blank, even if you are using a grinder, and especially if you're using files. Remember, you learn from your mistakes, so make your mistakes quicker and learn quicker!

It's easier to heat a smaller chunk of steel when heat treating it.

It will cost less, and even though you will think your first knife is wonderful (it will be the BEST knife you've ever made!), a year from now it will probably be the worst knife you've ever made. I have a saying "It's easier to build on small successes than grand failures."

Making your first blade is sorta like starting a small home fix-it project. You THINK you know what you need and what you will do, but three trips to the hardware store later to get the the correct gizmo, the tools you need, the part(s) that goes next to the gizmo that you didn't know you needed, some stuff in tubes or tubs of which you'll only use a teensy bit, and on and on.

My advise is to keep it fun. Laugh at your mistakes and celebrate what you've learned. No one has a gun to your head making you do this. It's not going to bring world peace and cure cancer. There's a lot to learn so you may as well have fun in the process.

LonePine
AKA Paul Meske, Wisconsin