Railroad spike kukri , is it possible?

[jmccustomknives]

I'd be glad to hook you up with some 5160, but I'm nowhere near you. One tallent every blacksmith develops is the "magnetic" personality. Steel just comes to you. Just this week I had 25lbs of bandsaw blades, one coil spring and two wedged from a fork lift (idk, it's steel) show up. Tonight I had a 7' grader blade (1095?) show up. Then there's the art of the trade. Last week I got a box of Kaowool for a small file knife. I bet if you made some phone calls to scrap yards, auto shops one of them has a spring they will let go for a knife. :rolleyes:

[Shawn S]

Grader blade that I make at work is 1060.

[braselforge]

checkout braselforge on youtube i make a rr spike kukri im giving away for a contest that ends on the 12th

[Ratstomper]

Guiltyspark, I would use those RR spikes for practice knives. It can never hurt to practice beveling and shaping a blade before you use your good steel. I've got a RR spike belt knife I made that has performed very admirably when I put it through it's paces. Can it cut through Miyamoto Musashi's armor and still be good enough for a sushi chef to make sashimi after? Well, no, probably not.

"Quality" is subjective to purpose. No sense in using high-dollar super quality steel when something more cost effective will serve the purpose it's meant for. In this case, you can use cheaper RR spikes to practice your blademaking and if they're good you may even be able to sell them afterward (just don't make them out to be more than what they are). That sounds like a good enough purpose for them to me.

[2703adam]

I personally like the look of rr spikes made into different things. If you have 25 of them coming, and you mentioned you could forge weld, why not forge them out a little, hot split it, then forge weld a piece of high carbon steel into it san mai style and make a knife that way. This would give you a few things. One, you would get a cool looking rr spike knife, two, you would get a knife with a great cutting edge, and three they would be san mai! (which I love by the way)

-Adam

ps, the knife in my avatar is made that way.

[Dodge]

There are a lot of people here who will say to not even bother with rr spikes because of their "low" carbon content. While there are many steels that would be much better to use, in my experience rr spikes will hold an edge better than most store baught knives. As far a a kukri goes, well it all depends. There really is no standard size for them. If you wanted to make one out of a single spike you easily could. It would be a small one but it would still be doable. If you want to pattern weld two togeather, well if you have experience it in than go for it, if not it'll just break. Hope this helped.

Two pieces of the same metal welded into one will yield no pattern. Its just a forge weld. The pattern comes from two different metals welded together.

[ThomasPowers]

Which is why blades forged from cable show no pattern; right?

[tantofolder]

http://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/24636-rail-spike-kukri/

[CaveForge]

It would take more than one 6" RR spike to make a conventional size Ghurka Khukuri. You might be able to get away with a 6" blade Khukuri with a single spike, however it might be a little on the thin side if you are looking for authenticity. An automotive leaf spring would be a better choice in alloy. If you have the skill and the equipment to do it, i would heat up two spikes and twist them together in the Norse fasion then hammer.