What do you do with botched knives?

[Brian.Evans]

I use them as throwing knives. They fly pretty well across the shop, fueled by curses.

My problem, is that I make mostly small knives, so when I screw up, FLING!! You can't make a 1" paring knife from a 3 1/2" bowie. Lol

 

[jdm61]

For me, the decision to NOT try and "fix" any more knives was a huge turning point. It made me slow down. I still have a few of those early "shop knives" lying around as a reminder of how NOT to do things. They never get used in the shop because well, they suck!!!! The ones that I actually use are later ones that did not suck so badly. They are perfectly functional, but had some minor to moderate cosmetic or design issue, typically because it was the first time that I had tried something new. My current personal knives are a CPM3V hunter that was my first completed full tang knife (a little scalar gapitis up at the finger guard) and a little 115W8 bushy that my first attempt at a machine finish. (not totally pleased with the machine finish)

 

[coldsteelburns]

The one thing that I started doing a few years ago, was to make sure and NOT drill any holes until after I grind the bevels. Once the holes are there, especially if you drill a bunch of "weight reduction/ epoxy rivet" holes, and then you happen to really screw up on your bevel grinding, it really limits any profile changes you can make to the blank.

Another reason I "still" do this is because I also forge blades (also Im still not the best grinder ) , and sometimes if the blade/tang is large enough and I happen to royally srew up the grinds, I can just cut off the screwed up blade portion, leaving the tang material to forge out to a different blade. I also used to use the tangs of botched blades to practice forge welding san mai blades or even make small billets of damascus with the tang portions. It's good stuff when you're just learning to forge and are experimenting etc.. Plus, if you're forging some san mai, and ya have 3 "tangs" stacked up for a billet, you usually have enough thickness in there to draw it out to make a good sized knife.

Since for the most part of my knifemaking "venture" I've really only made revlatively smaller knives, and use(d) thinner stock, when I screw up a grind, and go to fix it, and happen to screw it up even more, there's really not enough material in the blade to reprofile it into anything worthwhile. I probably wouldnt have any screw ups these days if I used a grinding jig, but I won't allow myself to use one (unless it's a sandi grind, which I never do) because grinding is a skill that I really want to master someday, and one day be able to pick up any size barstock (or forged blade) and consistantly grind any blade shape or style that I want to.. although that won't be for quite a while lol

~Paul

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