felix24

lovely work sir. congrats on your first "real customer" ;)

great work both of you. what a fantasic start. not at all that's one of the reasons I like to do most of my work with hand tools.

I think it's fantastic I've long admired the Dwarven Miner's Knife from MDW myself. Great stuff!

that's really interesting stuff, and an acomplishment to be very proud of. congrats and thanks for sharing B)

that's superb. i love the file work. congrats :)

welcome! those are some nice lookin' knives. looking forward to seeing some more of your work :)

looks fantastic. weel done :)

yeah. to normalise, heat them up to non magnetic, remove them from the fire and let them air cool. if you leave the blades in the fire as it slowly goes out, they will cool very slowly over a span of hours. they will then be annealed. in this state, the steel is very soft and can be worked with hand tools such as files, hack saw etc. the hardness of the steel depends on the speed at which it cools. i.e: annealed => cools very slowly and ends up soft. Normalised => cools faster and ends up tough, but not fully hard (you can use a grinder on it, but not hand tools most of the time). Hardened(quenched) => cools very fast and ends up very hard. In the hardened state the blade is essentially useless because it's too brittle for nearly every task. That's where tempering comes in. When you temper the blade, you are bothe relieving stress in the blade that was caused from hardening, and slightly softening the steel so that it becomes tougher and less brittle, but still hard enough to hold an edge. You can temper it to different degrees, which are shown on the blade as temper colours as the blade heats up. From coolest to hottest you roughly get the following colours: straw, gold, brown, purple, dark blue, light blue, grey. Straw being the hardest and grey being the softest. At dark or light blue the steel becomes springy. best of luck with it!

Welcome to the forum my man , I would suggest you normalise the blades before quenching them in oil next time. Normalising releases stresses from the steel, which may cause the blades to crack or warp when quenching, and evens out the structure of the steel (don't quote me on that ), making a better quality blade. This is done by heating them to non-magnetic and letting them cool naturally to room temperature. Do this three times. After you've quenched the blades, you can test if they are hard by trying to scratch them with a file. If they are hard, the file will just slide over the surface. in this state, the blades are very brittle and will crack or shatter easily. I think grinding them while hard may be a bit stressful and cause them to crack. I'd say just carfully sand all the scale off them until you can see the shiny metal, don't worry if there is some pitting on the blades, and them temper them in your oven or with a blowtorch. After they are tempered you can sand off the pits and have your nice shiny blade back the way it was . Hope this helps and enjoy the knifemaking .

nice work my man. that's some cool pattern welding .

great stuff! looks like a trusty companion for a hike or camping excursion.

To make the guard/bolster, the first, and trickiest (in my opinion), thing you need to do is make the tang slot. This is the slot that the tang slides through when assembling the knife. To make the slot using your drill-press, drill a series of holes, in a straight line, through your guard/bolster material (eg, brass, stainless steel, copper etc) using a drill-bit that is the same (or as close as you can get) thickness as your tang. The length of this series of holes should be slightly less than the width of your tang. Then get some needle files and file away the spaces between the holes to join them up, thus creating the slot. Then it's just a matter of slowly filing the slot until it fits snugly around the tang. If you want you can have the tang finish inside of the wooden handle. If you do this, then I would suggest you add a pin to prevent the blade from popping out of the handle. If you want the tang to go all the way through the handle, then there are two ways that I know of to add a pommel. The first is to leave a small bit of the tang sticking out past the pommel, and then to peen it with the ball-peen of your hammer until it mushrooms out over the pommel. This will hold all your handle components firmly in place. The second is to file the end of the tang round, and then thread it. Next tap the corresponding hole in the pommel and screw it on to the tang. This will also hold everything in place for you. My explaining skills leave a lot to be desired ...so I hope this is some help to you All the best with it!

that's a really nice piece od work. is the purpose of the tapered tang to give more weight to the blade, i.e have the balance point more towards the tip? or is it cause it looks cool? thanks for sharing B)

that's some classy work!! congrats :)

that's some really great work .