Steel Dust

ddavelarsen

ddavelarsen

Joined
Dec 7, 2000
Messages
5,179
I swept up 16 ozs of steel dust this weekend! I don't know about you, but for me that's some serious grinding. :D Ground two knives and profiled and tapered the tangs on three.

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The top two are ready for heat treat, though I won't be doing that dagger-looking thing until early summer. That's my 100th knife and it's been "spoken for" for about 18 years... I'm going to try to have it finished for my buddy's birthday in July (his girlfriend is giving the knife, not me - he'd just have to pay for it if it were between him and me :)). My 101st knife, the third one in the pic, is slated to be my personal carry knife. I've never made myself a knife for camping/hiking and I thought it was time. Naturally, with all those pins I had to get a couple out of alignment, so I wouldn't be able to sell it even if I were of a mind to. I actually thought about starting it over, but it'll be good enough for me to carry. I'm not entirely convinced the blade is in its final profile yet either. Anyway, I'll give it a workout.

Since I started back on the steel dust thing, I've really been trying to do a few things better - besides just improving fit and finish, I've been working on getting the edge geometry improved and more deeply tapering the tangs. The tangs on these babies are really tight - about 3/64 unfinished. They'll be a little wider when I get them done, but not much. I really dig that - really thinly tapered tangs. It's just a thing I have.

Since we're on the subject, I'm curious. When you taper a tang, do you go all the way to the plunge, or do you stop at the back of the bolsters? That's what I do but I know others taper through the ricasso. Just curious, and interested in your reasoning.

These and the few I've finished the last month or so and one other that's already been heat treated, are probably all I'm going to have to take to the Wolverine show. So that's eight knives. Dang, that's not much! Sometimes I wish I weren't so slow or was willing/able to put more hours in the shop, but I've been pushing the shop time about as far as I can. I guess it is what it is, eh? It'll be interesting to see how many knives I can make in a year when I work at it. I've always been pretty cavalier about that, just working when I feel like it. This is kind of a different ball game. As long as I'm doing stuff on spec though, and trying to learn how to do everything better, it doesn't seem so much like work.

Thanks for listening, have a great week!
 
Thanks for sharing. Those look great! I collected up my filings from my exchange knife and it was about 1.5-2 oz, I want a grinder now!
 
Lookin good, bud! I admire that dagger... I haven't even attempted a dagger yet, because it's challenging enough for me to get one set of bevels even. :eek:

Are you like me and sometimes wonder if there's some use for steel dust? I'm a cheap sum-biscuit that way... hate to throw something out if it might be recyceable or made into something else... :D
 
Dang Dave! Love that dagger, nice grinds and the tang work looks perfect, NICE!

Love your tantos... whether STeven will call them that or not ;) :D
 
Thanks for the kind words, gents! I call em tantos too Nick, regardless what someone else might think. ;) They're fun to make too. Notice I got the pins put right on these? :D Dang James, I thought I was the only one who tried to think of something to use that stuff for! Guess not; I'm betting there is a good use for it and someone here knows it. I guess I've never tried setting fire to it, but I know steel wool burns well - maybe it'd make good tinder. And I wasn't exaggerating it's 16 ozs; I weighed it on my postal scale. :D

It's a trip that you guys like the dagger most - that's the one I'm not going to finish soon. It's a pretty big knife too (for me). I haven't measured it, but overall it'll end up being something like 15". This guy has been drawing his ideal knife for me for almost 20 years, and I've kept all the sketches. This is a distillation of them all. ;) I'll show you when I'm done if I don't hose it too bad, but that'll be a couple months yet.
 
I like the dagger most, too. The others are good as well, but that double hollow grind with a good straight grind line is a show of grinding skill!
 
I have a friend who is a drummer. He's been studying drums from India. He told me that they use iron filings and paste in the center of the drum heads to give them different pitches.

He took an ounce or so of the filings I had and mixed them with some wheat flour and elmer's glue. Then he made a thick circle of that mixture in the center of a raw-hide deerskin drum head he had on his bass kick drum. It has an interesting sound.

I'm thinking that 16oz. would make a lot of drums!

Probably not of use to most of us, but at least it's one thing you can do with them. =)

I've always wondered if you kept your filings separate, if you could smelt them back into usable 1080 or O1?

Walter
 
Hey Walter, that's cool, drums are fun. I've been around a lot of drumming sessions at SF conventions, but I won't go any further into that. :D If you've been there you know what I mean. I've always wanted to make a drum of some kind but having gotten much older, I seem to have lost my rhythm. Really, and it's too bad.

vorpalknives said:
I like the dagger most, too. The others are good as well, but that double hollow grind with a good straight grind line is a show of grinding skill!
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I don't know about skill, I'd say it's more like holding my tongue just right (and trying not to clench my teeth! :eek:). I can say that was one of the hardest grinds I've ever attempted because of the recurve. I left enough at the centerline for cleaning up and polishing after HT. I still hope I don't box it all up when I go to finish it!
 
those look great. when i was in full production mode making my 2nd Amendment knives full time i made so much dust. in about 1.5 months i filled about 2/3ds of a 5 gal bucket with grinding dust. it was my slack bucket that had water in in. i finely had to empty it because when i went to cool a knife down i could not fully submerge a knife in the water there was so much grindings in the bucket :D. That's one more thing that pushed me to get back into forging was having to throw away so much wasted steel.
 
JT I know what you mean about wasting steel. Between the ground-off part and the little wedges left from cutting them out, I bet close to 1/4 of the steel is lost. I don't think smelting it back into a useable form would work but I have wondered whether it could be forged into something. May try that some day. I've been watching your mini forge project with interest. If I bought a welder and learned how to use it, a small press might be something I could use around here without alienating the neighbors. ;)
 
Take it for what it's worth coming from someone with much less experience than you, but on the five tapered tangs that I've done, I ended the tapper at the proximal edge of the bolsters. But like you I've wondered if it would be easier to take the taper up past the bolsters. The knives look great. I too, like the dagger especially.
 
Dave, Looks like your 3 day weekend worked out pretty good. I look forward to see these finished. Whats the steel on these?
 
Ray, these are all O1 - that's pretty much all I use since I can get the same steel repeatedly from the same supplier. And it's precision ground on size, so no cold rolled surface to remove. Call me lazy. :)
 
robloveday said:
Take it for what it's worth coming from someone with much less experience than you, but on the five tapered tangs that I've done, I ended the tapper at the proximal edge of the bolsters. But like you I've wondered if it would be easier to take the taper up past the bolsters...
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Yeah, fit up is often the reason given for taking it to the plunge, but there's also the larger area to take to its final finish, which is kind of a tradeoff. For what it's worth, I think anyone who tapers tangs in not an inexperienced maker. Hardly anyone really does that, seems to me. So my hat is off to you. :thumbup: In my book, tapering the tang is a "makerly" kind of deal; call me a child of the 70s. ;)
 
Child of the 70's. Precision ground, then you grind a taper tang? How much precision ground ends up being left flat? I'll have to tell you about precision forging in Novi. :D
 
Re: reusing steel dust. The issue I have with grinding dust is that it's not just steel, it has grit from the belts in it too. At least I would think it does. I don't know if you could separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak... Filings would be pretty clean, and I've heard of guys saving swarf from the drill press for use in canister damascus.

I don't know if steel dust will actually burn, but I do know if you grind wood and don't clean up under/behind the grinder before grinding steel, that will definitely burn :o :eek: Yup, I learned that the hard way. :foot:
 
mete said:
Grinding dust = steel + abrasives
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well well, MR smarty pants, if the dust was not covered all weekend then there is airborne dust in there too. so his 16oz measurement is way off.

last time I spent a day out in the shop grinding. I went to do clean up and the blaze belts had removed the metal to fast that the dust hit the ground and welded to itself. so all I had to do was pick up and throw away the steel mat that had accumulated.
 
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