christian

Being as you are just starting making knives I'd say just go to the local junk yard and find some springs or saw blades or files or ball bearings or wheel bearing races (not sure if that the right name) there is a lot of different types of high carbon steels you can get for scrap prices from local junk yards. and all you have to do is find out exactly what they are. For example ball bearings and wheel bearing races are 52100 steel a good stainless(?) steel very good for knives, however it can be a pain to work with some times. and if you happen to find something that is a little to high carbon steel you could also get it and try your hand at forge welding and forge weld it with a lower carbon steel to make a unique damascus of your own. and speaking of damascus you could always get crane cable and forge weld that together to make cable damascus which is a very good knife making steel. So for a starting bladesmith personally I wouldn't spend all the money for the specific high carbon stuff when you could just get stuff you can be 95% sure of what it is and that make knives that will preform just as well as the other steels.

i used to live in fl and i might know this gent lol what was his name?

hey looks like you have cable down pretty pat first time i tried i had ALOT of help and it still didnt turn out as nice as your second attemp and that was with a BIG swage block but ive got it down now and have several knives in the work that being made from cable (dont know when they will be done though) oh and depending on how thick that fisrt attemp is now it may still be salvagable,clean it up and weld that sucker inbetween 2 pieces of 1060 and walla all better lol :D

first off welcome to ifi, this is a great website you can learn ALOT here I have heard thats warps in blades could be caused by the smith hammering on one side more than the other.

well I went to flea market and was able to get a few things including a hammer, a great neck hammer, from italy Ive never heard of them before so I tried to do some research on the maker all I could find was great neck tools based out of great neck NY and they do not sell this type of hammer, atleast not anymore so does anyone know anything about great neck tools? and why does it have italy on it if the company manufacters thier product in NY?

haha guess that shows how much i know lol and how far above 1% is it steve? i have a few pieces of it so i would like to get my info correct on my material lol

thats awesome and ive heard of 1520, ive had a few freinds that have used it. and I beleive 1520 is similar to 52100, another stainless steel with 1% carbon. and i think i know what you mean... :huh:

these are great! what steels did you use? I really like the patterns, howd you make them?

wow that must have been a trick to do lol and why didnt you etch it? or did you etch it and you just cant see it in the photo?

not bad josh whats it made out of?

A freind once asked me "are you more likely to sell one $200 damascus knife or ten $20 knives?" the answer of course is the ten $20 knives, because they work and people can afford them. Id take functional and cheap over beautiful and expensive any day

Unfortunatly I have not been able to find any good thrift stores around me, I looked for one at alot of garadge sales but I couldnt find one, eventually I just got tired of it and went to walmart

Nice anvil! Maybe JUNB is just part of a person or manufacturers name, I mean Joshua Wilkinson could be one of the owners and another could be JUNB. Dudely?

well went to walmart today and I got a toaster oven FINALLY :D :D