This past week has been a BUSY week. I still had a few days of vacation from 2008 and I told my boss I was going to enjoy them. I had to do some stuff on my VW California and then worked a bit on my knives.
Starting from 5mm leaf spring with angle grinder, files, sandpaper and lot's of elbow grease I came up with three blades (a whole day or so working on them). This is my grinding/filing jig:
And these are the blades. BTW, I am not making another wide bevel blade in my life with handtools... I takes ages filing!!! There is a point where you are trying to sand such a big area that the file doesn't bite at all.
These are going to be my first not skeletonized handles. I always did that on my other blades but without a powerfull drill it takes a lot of time to do and it doesn't actually make much of a difference. I was a tad worried about the epoxy not having enough grip so I drilled a bunch of holes in the tangs. They ended up like this.
As you can see in this picture, the two small ones are ground thin (edges are like 1mm thick or so), while the big one ended up almost twice as thick (2mm).
I didn't meant to do so but wanting to keep the saber grind as even as possible on both sides... I screwed up a bit. I guess I will have to work a sweat putting an edge on that one. Probably a wide convex edge. That might help making cutting tool instead of a splitting one.
And here you have a few pictures of the heat treat of one of the small ones. Coal forge and lukewarm burnt engine oil for quenching.
I actually had to repeat the HT on one of the blades TWICE because it didn't pass the file test on the whole edge. Somehow some of it didn't get hard (not hot enough I guess). I finally got it right the third time. Now it's all good.
The small ones will probably be gifted as soon as I finish them (one as a birthday present and the other one as a pseudo-payment for seizing his welding machine for like three months straight...
).
I will keep you posted. Right now they are waiting to get tempered in the kitchen oven (2 cicles of 2h at 250ºC). Thanks for watching.
Mikel
Starting from 5mm leaf spring with angle grinder, files, sandpaper and lot's of elbow grease I came up with three blades (a whole day or so working on them). This is my grinding/filing jig:
And these are the blades. BTW, I am not making another wide bevel blade in my life with handtools... I takes ages filing!!! There is a point where you are trying to sand such a big area that the file doesn't bite at all.
These are going to be my first not skeletonized handles. I always did that on my other blades but without a powerfull drill it takes a lot of time to do and it doesn't actually make much of a difference. I was a tad worried about the epoxy not having enough grip so I drilled a bunch of holes in the tangs. They ended up like this.
As you can see in this picture, the two small ones are ground thin (edges are like 1mm thick or so), while the big one ended up almost twice as thick (2mm).
I didn't meant to do so but wanting to keep the saber grind as even as possible on both sides... I screwed up a bit. I guess I will have to work a sweat putting an edge on that one. Probably a wide convex edge. That might help making cutting tool instead of a splitting one.
And here you have a few pictures of the heat treat of one of the small ones. Coal forge and lukewarm burnt engine oil for quenching.
I actually had to repeat the HT on one of the blades TWICE because it didn't pass the file test on the whole edge. Somehow some of it didn't get hard (not hot enough I guess). I finally got it right the third time. Now it's all good.
The small ones will probably be gifted as soon as I finish them (one as a birthday present and the other one as a pseudo-payment for seizing his welding machine for like three months straight...
).I will keep you posted. Right now they are waiting to get tempered in the kitchen oven (2 cicles of 2h at 250ºC). Thanks for watching.
Mikel
