Well here's my first attempt at knife making, how do you think I went?

Z

ZXZERTYPA

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May 11, 2015
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So the other day I decided that I had collected knives for long enough, and that it was time to have a crack at making one :D. Made this out of a rusty old file I had lying around as many people suggested and i'm quite happy with the results. I have very limited experience in both wood and metal work (almost none) and that I had very limited access to power tools (i.e. I pretty much only had a drill :p) meaning that more or less everything had to be done with hand tools, many of which were improvised (yeah, I really need to invest in some high quality equipment, I pretty much just used what I already had lying around :o).


Please let me know how you think I did, feedback would be much appreciated as i'm planning to make many more knives in the near future and i'm sure there is much I need to learn :) thanks
 
Nice clean lines. Good job.
The only critique I have is that your plunge line isn't very crisp. But that's a minor thing and doesn't affect the knives performance.
 
Thanks for all the encouragement guys :) I learn't a lot from making this one and i'm sure my next one will be even better, I'll be sure to post pictures of how that turns out :D
 
As a starting point it is excellent.
One mistake most beginners make is that you need expensive tools to make good knives, you certainly do NOT.
More tools ONLY means quicker work, not better.
Well done.
 
Just finished making my second knife :D I feel that it went pretty well, although the file I made it from was already a bit dented up, hence the small amounts of damage to the file pattern around the ricasso, sadly this could not be corrected without removing the nice file texture entirely :( but I guess that's just something you have to live with when making knives out of makeshift materials :p. It's essentially a slimmed down, less beefy version of the first one I made. This ones destined to be my dads birthday present (I know its a bit early to be giving away what I make as i'm still a beginner and these first knives are rather experimental but I didn't want to wait til next year and my dad is not a knife snob :))



Here it is compared with the first one I made (I also cleaned up the plunge line of my first knife as well as I could as was suggested by Halbrust)



 
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Good start. You might want to post in shoptalk instead. You'll get more detailed feedback for beginning knives there.
Not let's see no.3! :thumbup:
 
I'm impressed to see that you understand what a sharpening notch/choil is for and how to design that, since I've seen many a knife, (some of which were made by very skilled cutlers) get it completely wrong- showing a misunderstanding of that particular feature.

Your work displays a solid understanding of what a knife should be able to do in the real world. Very practical.
:thumbup:
 
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