Search the Community

Knife number four - I found a shovel in the wood. Pretty rusted and dented but I took it home thinking it'll be bit of useful mild or wrought for something. I took a sliver off the bottom to see if it would harden, turns out tightening the vice on it was enough to break it after quenching. So I decided it'd be a good choice for a hori hori. I like rough finishes so I polished a bit but left a good deal of distress marks in. Hammered in a waist at the tang and worked around the edge so I'd have less to grind and kept the curve shallow as I wanted more knife than trowel, I didn't want a serrated portion. Grinding was interesting, I had a play with some offcuts and settled on bevelling the back and doing a flat grind on the front, it's given me a reasonably thick cutting edge. I'd thought I'd do something fun with the depth marker. Electro etch - table salt and 30mins at six volts, the curves on the stem marks 2cm intervals. I hadn't expected a strong grain ( or any grain) to the metal but I do like the end result. Gave it an oil quench and two two hour cycles in the oven at 205c. The handle's spalted blackthorn, I'd started shellacing but the paler area at the front just soaks it up so I let that dry and went for beeswax. I wish I'd gone for two pins now - that one being slightly out of line is bugging me but I'm generally thrilled with this.

Pair of ulu’ish knives diffrentialy tempered 1095 brass and cocobolo left them in the etch a little too long but they ended up really pretty anyway du

So i made myself a chefs knife out of o-6 tool steel being lazy i did not want to drag out the forge just to heat treat one knife so i grabbed my torch and went with a simple diffrential heattreat not expecting anything other than function.... this is what i got. Once i realized i had a hamon... my first all be it boring as no clay was involved i had to go all out on the fittings. I went with solid copper scales soldered to the tang then hammered and polished the blade was etched in my vinigar picle bath i use for removing scale 10 min then rubbed with silk then 10 min soak anout 6 cycles Tell me what ya think du

trial etch on the cable knife. I also used it to chop a 2x4, and got a slight delamination on the blade edge that you can JUST see with the single exception, I thought this turned out pretty good it was actually supposed to be a leaf bladed dagger, but the steel wanted to be a bowie, so that's where I went with this WIN_20170529_21_46_55_Pro.mp4

So when i first started doing my knives using damascus steel i etched them using boiling vinnegar. Then after that i was told it didnt need to be boiling and that it could just be room temp vinnegar. And then somone suggested i might see better results by using coffee. So i decided to give it a go and here are the results. Now im happy with the etch for the most part but this etch method has left the steel with these weird colours on it, kinda gold to almost a grey blue. Is this the normal effect of a coffee etch? Also this was after 1.5 hours of etching. Over all while the coffee definately works im not quite happy with it. Il be stripping this one off and trying to etch again later with something else. Trying to track down some FC. Any other tips or house hold etch solutions are welcome.

So I decided to give etching a try. The goal here was to etch a design into a plain piece of steel. The particular piece of steel was a belt-end for a costume my brother is working on. I am using Beeswax as a resist, melted onto the piece of steel; I then use a scribe to scratch in the design. For the acid I am using Muratic/Hydrochloric acid from Lowe's. (I think it says something around ~30% concentration) For the first test, I tried the acid diluted, about as much water added as acid. After an hour, nothing appeared to be happening, so I added some Hydrogen peroxide (the diluted stuff in the brown bottle). After about another hour, we removed it from the acid, rinsed it off, and removed the beeswax; the design was visible, but was so shallow it could easily be sanded off. For the second test, we tried to let the acid be more concentrated, and let it set overnight. In the morning, after several dreams in which strong acids and their corrosive effects figured strongly, I rushed outside to check the progress. I could not really tell much of a difference from the night before. Dissapointed, I let it set out for a couple hours. A few hours later I came back to do the third test. The lines were all rusted. Some of the wax had flaked off when I sprayed it with the hose to get the acid off, so I took it back to my toaster oven and let the wax re-melt and flow. Then I re-scratched the lines, being sure to actually scratch the steel itself, so I knew the lines were there. For this test, I only used enough water to cover the piece, then added more acid than there was water. I then added peroxide, since that seemed to help before. I had also read that adding table salt (NaCl) to such a mix could speed the process, so I added that until it stopped dissolving. After four hours in this bath, on a warm day in a black plastic container in full sunlight, this is what I got: After some cleanup with fine sandpaper: Now, I am not totally dissatisfied with the result, but I was really looking for a deeper effect, such as can be seen about 2/3 of the way through this video: http://www.wetanz.com/assets/videos/swords/LOTRSwordVideo.mov So I've been thinking about what I could do differently to get a deeper effect. Obviously I could try to leave it in longer next time, but one of the resources I read indicated that an etching should never be left in longer than four hours. I also considered that maybe for the particular steel I'm using, a different acid would work better, perhaps Nitric Acid as in the video above, or Ferric Chloride as gets used for etching circuit boards. So, does anyone have any thoughts on how to get a deeper etching?