Seems to me he's talking about the state of the material *now* when he says it's annealed. I know the specs for 4140, for example, strongly recommend doing any electric welding in the annealed state. If it is 4140, by the way, not an ideal knife material. Or, if he is talking about annealing after welding, no, annealing or normalizing won't hurt the weld.
If it was me, I'd do just what the others suggested and weld on a piece to handle the stuff until I could forge it out into a bar.
Steve
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Steve Alford
Sojourner Forge
home.hiwaay.net/~alfords
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