First knife I have made in well over a year, Its a late christmas present for my girlfriends father. I have gone 'back to basics' and concentrated on blade geometry, and trying to get a reasonable level of fit and finish.

 

The blade is 'stock removed' ( which leaves me a little cold  :mellow: ) from a piece of 2 mm thick bandsaw blade, its a full flat grind with distal taper. I left about 0.005" at the cutting edge, before honing on a convex secondary bevel. Just falls through food :)

 

To ensure the grind was really flat after 'freehanding' it on the grinder, I did the finish ' hand rub ' with wet and dry paper using a hardened and ground backing block. This ensures no 'cheating' and ripples or rounded out bits on the knife. diddnt go to crazy with the finish, went from 400g jflex on the grinder, and then 80, 240 and 400 hand rubbed.

 

I will try and do more kitchen knifes this year, they are deceptively tricky :D

 

 

 

 

 

 

very nice. i would like to have one of those.

I agree it does look very nice. What is the handle made from?

My wants one ;)

 

Sam

Nice work, fit and finish are spot on!

Thanks for the nice words!

 

The handle is Mauser Birch and ebony. The ebony polishes up almost like bakelite !

That's a fantastic looking knife! What did you do for heat treating?

When I want a finish like that I do the exact same thing as you did but I finish it off with scotch brite. I found it gives a more even scratch pattern.

The blade is from a piece of sawmill bandsaw blade (its not 15n20, ive welded some of this particular blade up in the past and it etchs dark, possibly manganese content ?)

 

I cobbed out the profile, normalised once from a bit shy of 800c , then heated to 780 c / 790 c (cant hold exact temps with current set up) , held it for 5 mins, and quenched into hydraulic oil heated to 80c.

 

Tempered it twice, 210c for a couple of hours, then a smidge cooler for a couple of hours. Pulled the temper to purple with a gas torch on the tang and transition point. Nothing to scientific, but a basic formula I use for unknown steel that seems to give good results. - it certainly cuts.

 

If id forged I would have run a couple more normalisations at reducing temperatures to put the grain structure back where I want it.

 

Did all the bevel grinding post heat treat.

Thanks for the info, did you grind post HT to prevent warpage?

couple (ok, 3..)  reasons I heat treated before grinding,

 

- I tried the other way round, and grinding soft thin steel to a near zero edge is very tricky, pressure against the platten bends it!

 

- Grind before heat treat resulted in banana blades,

 

- Grinding before heat treat left a blade that was so thin you could see the 'colour' fall away from it on the way from forge to quench, (even with the quench 2' away from the forge) , I use a thermocouple to get the blank to just the right temp, so no margin for cooling between forge and quench. Im sure the edge would be below austentising temp when it hits the oil. (im sure funky temperature gradients in the blade when it hits the oil contributes to the banana effect!)

looking nice John.

 I especially like the way the handle facets meet in such a loverly gothic arch kind of way.

I got a sawmill blade, maybe 36" or so, and did the can it harden test. I hardened it two times and slapped it against my vise. It broke like glass. It sounded a lot like glass snapping off. 

besides it looking nice, I like the angels of the handle they work well with the knife shape

I have a lead on a saw mill blade, but am not quite able to produce anything of that caliber just yet. I really like it. I enjoy cooking and a good knife in hand makes it so much more pleasurable.