Hi everyone
I've been lurking around the forums and doing my best to learn the art of blacksmithing and blademaking for some time now. This forum has been of immense help, and thought I'd finally make myself a profile and an online log of the things i make. I am thoroughly enjoying this hobby and my goal is to keep improving and am hoping for critiques of the blades i manage to whack together.
I started making knives at the end of 2018 as a means to improve my collection of wood carving tools. I since found that it is knives that I really enjoy making, and the carving has taking a back seat to the knifemaking. Full time job and little kids means there's not that much time for making anything at all thoug, but I squeeze some smithing in where I can. I started doing stock removal of O1 (like I suspect so many do), then a makeshift charcoal forge out of bricks, a makeshift hole-in-the-ground charcoal forge and a coffe can forge, and have just recently aquired a two burner devil forge, which means i can squeeze in half an hour-hour of forging before I head to work in the morning. It's been great! My first "anvil" was a steel rifle target. It was terrible. My current "anvil" is a sledge hammer head lodged in a tree stump. It's not so terrible. Like all my tools though, i am hoping to gradually improve it. The grinding I do with an angle grinder and files for the time being. I just splurged on a 350mm vallorbe double cut bastard file, and that has been a huge improvement over my old hand me downs (they're still nice though).
I live in tropical North Queensland, so the weather is often not that optimal forging, but what can you do?
Thanks for taking a look! Hoping to start putting up some photos of my old things soon!