Knife Making

Over Thanksgiving break, I got it in my mind to make knives. I thought it would be an awesome combination of metal working, and wood working. And ease me into the world of metal working. Plus, the end product would be something I could use, and give away as gifts. 

When I first started researching this hobby, I wanted to use the fanciest steels, and I thought I could do the heat treating with a oxy-propane torch and a bucket of water. Oh boy, was I wrong. But I'll get to that. 

Turns out, profiling the steel turned out to be fairly easy. I bought myself a Dewalt 11 amp, 4.5 inch angle grinder. And a bench grinder. With those I could draw my shape onto the steel with a sharpie,  cut out a rough profile using metal cutoff disks. And then using low grit flap disks to bring the profile of the blade to exactly what I had envisioned. 

The hard part, as you can imagine, was shaping the blade's bevel. I found it nearly impossible to create perfectly flat grinds. They always turned out to be slightly convex. Maybe this is something I need to over come with further practice. Or maybe I could up my file game. But I really don't like the kind of scratches files leave in the steel. They are really hard to buff out later. However I know this could be easily solved if I bought the proper tools, like a belt grinder. But until then, I will have to make do with my angle grinder and files. 

These are my first knife blanks. The top is made of 1080 steel, and the bottom is O1. I have yet to actually heat treat the O1 blade, as my furnace is a little unstable. But I can heat treat 1080 with only a little trouble

This is my first fully finished knife. It's a gut hook, specifically designed for fishing. I over tempered the steel, causing it to be softer than I had hoped. However, this means the blade will be very durable for hacking through the bones of fish with nothing more than a rock as a cutting board. 

I really wanted to add a kitchen knife to my repertoire. I even knew what profile. Behold my Santoku vegetable knife.

 It has a single flat grind as is typical for Japanese knives. I had heard about the superior cutting performance, so I had to see for myself. Notice the ugly grooves. The goal of these grooves is to help vegetables to not stick to the blade. They didn't turn out as I had hoped, and I later saw a design that simply drilled holes. The next vegetable knife I make will have drilled holes. But I will note that I love the cutting performance of the single bevel. My diced onions have never been finer. The single right hand bevel causes the blade, when used by a right handed cutter, to cut towards the left, which counteracts the natural tendency of a double beveled blade to move towards the right hand side when cutting thin vegetables. I've also realized why most kitchen knives are made with stainless steel.

The last knife I have made as of yet I did not really design for a purpose. I just really liked the sweeping curved lines. This time I tempered it correctly.

Each and every steel knife needs to be heat treated once the profile and bevel have been ground. The idea is that the steel will become very hard, so as to hold an edge better. To do this properly, one needs a forge that can reach around 1500 degrees, and hold a specific temperature for an arbitrary amount of time. I built one, it's a venturi propane forge. But I'll leave the details for another blog post.