December 30, 20187 yr A friend of mine bought me a beautiful billet for Christmas. It is a ton of metal! This thing is 3/16 thick, 2.25” wide and 10” long. Honestly, if this was 1095 I would think I had conservatively 3 knives worth of steel here, but this thing already has the pattern perfectly made out on it. If I Forge this into a couple knives will I ruin the raindrop effect? Or could I potentially make it into an interesting smashed down personalized raindrop billet? Ooorrrr would anyone advise I just draw a full tang 10” knife on it and hit the grinder?
December 31, 20187 yr Perhaps you can find a smith who has a rolling mill who'd be willing to reshape the bar?
December 31, 20187 yr Forging will alter the pattern. There's not much getting around that. Perhaps you could cut it lengthwise to get two blanks and forge in the bevels. With raindrop pattern if you do a lot of stock removal you will probably grind through all of the pattern where you did the deepest grinding anyway. If you forge in the bevels you can keep some of the pattern, but it will elongate in whatever directions the steel "stretches" compared to its current state.
January 1, 20197 yr Try forging 1 blade from a subsection and see if you get an acceptable blade from it. 3/16 isn't thick enough for a lot of forging anyway.
January 1, 20197 yr 20 hours ago, Buzzkill said: Forging will alter the pattern. There's not much getting around that. Finding a smith with either a power hammer with big flat dies or a hydraulic press will only make the drops larger, but should keep the round shape.
January 1, 20197 yr of course stock removal will remove part of the pattern, since its a surface effect much like ladder pattern
January 31, 20197 yr Raindrop is such a beautiful pattern, I've looked at your pics here several times. Maybe make 1 large drop point Chefs knife out of it, using just convex bevel grinding to preserve the pattern. Maybe only a 40 or 50% grind. Maybe use some nice well defined straight grained hardwood on the handle, like old yellow pine with close dark growth rings. Zebra wood is also like that. Just a couple of thoughts.
January 31, 20197 yr On 12/30/2018 at 12:53 PM, Hunter Copelin said: A friend of mine bought me a beautiful billet for Christmas. It is a ton of metal! This thing is 3/16 thick, 2.25” wide and 10” long. And it weighs a TON! What did postage set you back on that? It's going to need at least 10 handles to be usable at all, you won't need to push down to cut though. Frosty The Lucky.
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