What constitutes a 'forged' knife to you?

madcap_magician said:
I wouldn't call them forged. To me, forging means the steel has been hot worked to some sort of shape. Obviously not all forging is the same, it's easier to forge from a straight flat bar of homogeneous steel rather than ball bearings or chains or wire or whatever, but it seems like you should at least hammer the rough shape of the knife and the primary bevels before you could call a knife 'forged.'
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Exactly what I was thinking. It's pretty hard to to misconstrue what a real forged knife is. It's in essence the opposite of stock removal by grinding. Throwing some hammer marks on it doesn't make it truly forged. It's the difference between what a blacksmith does versus what a manufacturer does. Some companies like Randall Made Knives start with a chunk of steel and it gets forged into a knife, like this:
http://www.randallknives.com/knife-construction/
 
There are some guy out in the PNW who sell forged knives. What they do is take water jet cut blanks and draw/thin the edge out a bit and then put hammer marks on them. Not quite as bad as what you are talking about, but not exactly what I do. What kills is how much they get for them.
 
madcap_magician said:
I wouldn't call them forged. To me, forging means the steel has been hot worked to some sort of shape. Obviously not all forging is the same, it's easier to forge from a straight flat bar of homogeneous steel rather than ball bearings or chains or wire or whatever, but it seems like you should at least hammer the rough shape of the knife and the primary bevels before you could call a knife 'forged.'
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I don't forge in the bevels on kitchen knives or certain damacus patterns like ladder. But I make my own damascus and those kitchen knives might have originally been a 7/8-1" round bar of W2. ;) I have also done a few stock removal knives, but that was because the steel or the size of the available stock did not lend itself to forging.
 
jdm61 said:
I don't forge in the bevels on kitchen knives or certain damacus patterns like ladder. But I make my own damascus and those kitchen knives might have originally been a 7/8-1" round bar of W2. ;) I have also done a few stock removal knives, but that was because the steel or the size of the available stock did not lend itself to forging.
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With kitchen knives and damascus it's different, since with kitchen knives the stock is usually so thin and with damascus you wouldn't usually want to mar the pattern. I don't really consider it an absolute rule, and I'm hardly an authority. But I think everyone agrees you have to do more than just put hammer marks on the blade flats to call it forged. Forging involves some level of hot-working metal to shape.
 
madcap_magician said:
With kitchen knives and damascus it's different, since with kitchen knives the stock is usually so thin and with damascus you wouldn't usually want to mar the pattern. I don't really consider it an absolute rule, and I'm hardly an authority. But I think everyone agrees you have to do more than just put hammer marks on the blade flats to call it forged. Forging involves some level of hot-working metal to shape.
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I figure if you change the profile with a hammer, power hammer, press or rolling mill, it is forging. Some people consider rounding or clipping off the end of a flat bar to avoid fish mouth and speed up the process cheating, but not me.
 
As a non-maker my perspective is that a forged knife has the majority of it's basic work done... by forging. That means I expect the knife to have started as a chunk of metal and has been heated and pounded until it looks knife shaped. Some stock removal/grinding is fine but the majority of the base work should be done with heat and pressure/hammer blows. Just my opinion as a buyer. A forge finish is just that, a finish, IMO.

I guess I miss out on this stuff by avoiding Instagram /s
 
Having started with stock removal as a maker and having started forging last year I say you have a hammered finish to the flats. I heard this comment before at Blade Show by a maker who was 100% up front with a customer saying I don't do anything other than do a texture job with the hammer. After hammering out round bar and bar stock into the shape and then grinding to clean it up, I understand and appreciate the work that goes into making a knife the traditional way with fire, heat, and human power. Still making stock removal knives along with forging when I can and enjoying the different ways of working steel.
 
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