March 16, 200818 yr ive been playing with patternwelding for a few months now, very on and off. the only knife I ever got round to finishing was a 1" blade for a giveaway competition..... untill now .... I promised a knife to my best mate about a year ago, and eventually have been guilted into finishing it! its a low layer damascus (poss 60 layers ish), with a final weld down the length of the blade. water hardened & tempered. The handle is a hardwood called irroko (irroco?) stained dark, finished with wax - brass pin & guard, nitrile rubber in the spacer stack so its nice & grippy, blades 5" - just needs a final stone dress to sharpen it. Overall im quite happy with it, so.. (drumroll.......) my first proper knife:) in the hand (excuse the fingernails, I made meat from one of my fingers so couldnt clean em...... my excuse and im sticking to it!
March 16, 200818 yr Beautiful, John! What metals did you use for the damascus? What etchant did you use?
March 16, 200818 yr Good Work On The Knife. When You Say You Made Meat From One Of Your Fingers;where You Feed'n Your Dog?:p
March 16, 200818 yr Author thanks dodge! I really cant remember what the metal is, possibly a bandsaw blade and some slices from a machine guard about 1mm thick (im working mostly with scrap whilst learning !) it wouldnt harden properly in oil so ended up dunking it in very cold water, so guess its a bit carbon lacking. it did harden though! its quite a deep etch in ferric chloride, (5:1 solution) - it had about 3 dips of 15 mins, then when it was all finihsed a 2 min dip and rubbed lightly with wet'n'dry paper to take the black of the high layers so the contrast showed a bit better. hope to be able to show somthing good soon, my welding has moved on leaps n bounds since this one was forged december last year, the novelty with this one is I actually finished it :)
March 21, 200818 yr That's a good looker for sure. I wonder what kind of edge it'll hold. What do you mean by, one final weld down the length of the blade? Don't mind finger nails, its a badge of an honest knife maker! I especially like photos of hand held knives for two reasons. It shows an excellent sense of scale and "hold-abililty". What I really like, though, is that I feel like I'm meeting the maker more when I see his or her hands. -Phil
March 21, 200818 yr Tres Bon Norman Very nice John, very nice indeed. Glad to see a bit of quality coming over the pennines in the opposite direction for a change. ;)
March 22, 200818 yr Author cheers guys!!! you can see the weld down the middle of the blade, where the pattern does not match up, it runs from the point (tip) of the knife to the guard. Forged a wicked 'w's blank today (in a mr fisk style) so the next one should be intersting!!
March 23, 200818 yr Author this is the 'w' blank I was happy with. took a lot of work to get it to this point. I was hand forging the bevels on and a lil crack appeared on the cutting edge (in line with the pattern). less than a 1/4" but enough to make me think the billets not 100%, so back to staring again. theres 3 types of scrap in here, 'landrover' leaf spring, mild and bi-metal bandsaw blade. After it went tink forging I gave it an 'angle grinder' grind, and an etch to see what could have been! Ill get it next time !!!!!!
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