craig

I've never made a knife from one, I do have a bucket tooth though from a payloader that I haven't done anything with yet...so I would be interested to see how it goes with your tooth. Maybe just clean it up so you can check if it has any small cracks from rapid cooling from getting wet. If it still looks OK I would continue. But as for hardening and tempering, it may be somewhat tricky if you haven't done some testing with a sample first. If you decide to finish forging the knife, try to get your hands on another of the same tooth so you can experiment with it without wrecking your blade.

Yeah, I think that should be plenty sturdy enough too...but if you're still worried, just try it out !! Donnie, do you mean "wasn't" satisfied with ? ;)

What is a railroad knuckle pin ?

That looks pretty good, what size stock is it made from ?? I just recently made one for the mother in law very similar to that...they wanted it 4 feet long for the fire pit...and since my forge welding skills are very minimal and I didn't have time to mess around with trying, I flattened the poker end of 3/8 stock since I was cutting with hacksaw so it would lose less metal when I cut down the center. I'm not sure if that really saves all that much metal...but if you're splitting with chisel or hardy then you lose next to nothing. As long and you're not using that hook to drag trees around the yard it should work for what it was made for. Thanks for sharing !!

Useful working knives are the best kind !! And it looks great too, awesome work !!

Well, I suppose it could be...I didn't weigh it. You can sort of see in the picture it says 85 lbs. on the side (per yard I'm guessing) so I did some quick math to get an approximate weight per inch and in the end came out with 66 lbs. So it must be a lighter grade rail.

Approx 65 Lbs. of railroad track 29" in length

I think chop saw or any kind of grinder has a lot of xxxx in it...not sure if you want to (or even can) melt that stuff and mix it in with your scale. I've never tried it, I think it was Thomas Powers who has posted on here that he's done the bloomery furnace thing.

That looks good, I like the wrap !!

I work in a large bakery, and live out of town...I take all the broken pallet scraps to make charcoal out of it, and have a small but steady supply of clean canola oil (about 10 L/week from the bottoms of barrels) which I have recently started using as a large portion of fuel for the heat to make the charcoal...being on the farm also makes broken machinery a handy source of junk too, with which I have just finished putting together an "OK" forge.

Ahh...I used a shop vac last year, nice and noisy eh ? ;-) Now I have found a burner for a large gas oven...took everything off except for the blower...much quieter.

What do you use to cut out the blanks ? Angle grinder ? Hacksaw ?

Nice !! I really like the burned/scaled look where it is not ground. I have always been a fan of the rough forged look.

Those look great !!

Get a tetanus shot BEFORE digging around too much...but since most won't...get one as soon as you cut yourself:)

Cool idea ! It's probably handy that you can apply as much pressure as needed while still being quickly and easily released.

Thanks for the welcome guys, I had an uncle who worked there for most of his life, retired a few years ago, but has recently passed on...and another guy who grinds pipe for 12 hours a day, but that's about it. I hear you guys get good deals on steel ;)

Hey everyone, Fairly new here, but have already found a lot of good reading. I just wanted to say that so far, this looks like a great site with lot's of friendly people !! Keep up the excellent work !! Craig.