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I Forge Iron

Material Choice and what I have access to...


Super Fab

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Hi all, brand new member, but I love alloys and fabrication. I am having a great time reading through the forum and am happy to have found it.

I am recently more and more interested in knife making. I have access to all sorts of machinery and materials (I have attached some below)... and I desperately need a hobby since my spouse has deemed the pubs out of reach until covid is sorted.

I would be drafting the templates and cutting the blanks with waterjet. I am wondering if anyone can point me towards a good starting alloy? My gut is leaning towards 440c, but ultimately I would like some advice. I hate wasting material. :)

Thank you.

 

 

Materials 1.png

Materials 2.png

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Certain alloys really profit from skilled heat treatment in specialized equipment.  Will you be forging these blades after cutting them out or will it all be stock removal?  Go through your list and discard all those without at least 60 points carbon.

My suggestion would be 1095 or if one of those alloys is close to 1084 or 5160.  These you should be able to heat treat with a torch and save your 3 for when you've gotten some of the skills down and try 440C.

Titanium doesn't make for good knives unless the need for corrosion resistance, (Diving knives), trumps edge holding.  (I have a hand forged Ti knife I use for my camping eating knife; beautiful blue colour, except for where I shaved off a curl from it using my hand forged belt knife with the Nicholson file providing the edge, San Mai...)

Note that knife forging is not generally considered a start up project, I generally liken it to someone asking "How do I win a car race and how do you start a car?"

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Thanks Thomas, all good points. I have some 1095 offcuts I can try. I will be cutting the profile and then removing material with a belt grinder. I will definitely try doing heat treat with a torch. Will save the 440c for a future project.

I hear what you are saying about this not being a start up... but you have to start somewhere. This is purely for pleasure and entertainment during my down time.

We only have 1/2 and 1 inch titanium right now, so will have to wait until we get some gauge offcuts.

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Sperfab, welcome aboard from 7500' in SE Wyoming, USA.  If you add your location to your profile you may find that there are nearby folk and we will be able to give you better answers to your queries.  A surprising number of answers depend on geography.  I suspect that you are in the UK, Australia, or NZ because of your reference to pubs.  BTW, it is often a lot more fun to be making something in your shop than to be hanging with a bunch of yobs in a pub, IMO.

I agree with Thomas.  Basic, high carbon steel (60-100 points of Carbon [0.6-1.00 % C]) is the best for blades, exotic alloys are for the experts and any advantage is not worth the extra work and hassle.  Use low carbon/mild steel for most other projects.

I think/know that blacksmithing is a very rewarding craft.  It can pay for itself and can even give a decent supplemental income which is something few hobbies can do.  I have found it very psychologically and emotionally rewarding for the last 44 years.  It has definitely helped me through some tough times.  I hope you find it as satisfying.  If it isn't fun, try something else.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

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Hi George, thank you for the welcome. I updated my profile and location. I'm over on the west coast of Canada, where we love our pubs just as much as any other region of the world! Definitely going to start with the 1095. Will cut some blanks tomorrow and come in on the weekend to have a go. My shop foreman says we have an old kiln, so fingers crossed.

Agree with you on the joy and benefits of working metal with your hands. My dream is to build my skills and knowledge and become some-what accomplished. Practice and patience makes perfect.

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Good Morning SF,

There are quite a spread of Blacksmith Souls in the Mainland/Fraser Valley. If you are interested, send me a PM and I will forward you some contacts. Making Shive's by using machinery isn't half as much fun as getting it hot and Forging. Completely different, but, almost kinda not quite the same, but similar.

Neil

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Joseph Moxon "Mechanick Exercises" pub 1703

CP 1&2 Ti is a joy to forge and a pain to grind.  Some of the other alloys have some toxicity in forging.  CP 1&2 are soft as butter at proper forging temp and forging to almost finished is strongly suggested.  Making an eating set and then anodizing for the wild Ti colours would be a fun project.

Stock Removal is the way most folks get into knifemaking; but after a while it just gets to be a grind and finding out that 15 minutes in the forge can save you an hour at the grinder lures many over to the dark side...bwa-hahahahahahahaha Especially when they realize how cheaply you can get set up to forge.

1095: I would quench in warm vegetable oil and temper IMMEDIATELY!

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Swedefiddle - If I can get things sorted out, then I will for sure reach out.

Iron Dragon - thank you for the welcome.

Thomas - I agree about the titanium. Some of the work we have done turns out truly beautiful and the guys love cutting it because of the light show.

End of the day today, we will be digging around the shop to try and find that old forge.

I cut some 440c last night as a test, I will play around this weekend with the etching and edges to see what I can figure out. I'm tempted to throw it in the 5-axis mill, but that's kind of cheating.

440c test.jpg

for the few people who sent pm's, here is the shop... currently running 2 water jets, 10 kw laser, some fab machinery, and lots of stock.

 

shop 1.jpg

shop 2.jpg

we specialize in high nickel, titanium, stainless and duplex alloys.

We cut a lot of squares, cirlces and rings.

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That's a good looking dagger. I have always liked the ring pommel.

Just a note, you might want to edit the post and remove the @name tags. You can just type in the names you are replying to. Somehow they mess with the software and are frowned upon.  Using the @ name on the forum

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absolutely... it is one of the greatest benefits to my work. I have only 1 rule for the machinists and labour... if they sell the offcuts/ scrap, the money goes back into purchases for the staff (coffee makers, beer for fridays, pizza, etc.) and if they are using it for their personal projects, the foreman or myself  have to approve the material use ahead of time.

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I know you are probably not thinking of swords; but if you ever do; remember that distal taper and fullers are very important and where folks using only stock removal usually fail and turn out blades that are way heavier than the originals.  I've know of one machinist from back in the old Sword Forum International days that managed to get proper distal tapers in his work. I sure wish I had bought a couple of them nowadays.

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I was wondering about that last night, I found some good articles. I feel like the process of material removal lends itself easily to having a linear taper, but I think for my next project I may cut 2-3 blanks and try a convex taper as well. Will take some time and patience.

Going to cut the attached project tomorrow after my kids lacrosse game.

 

chefs knife-blank 1.jpg

Also wanted to say that I noticed that in some forums, working with waterjet cut blanks, etc. is highly frowned upon, so I really appreciate everyones input and welcome to the community.

If the process I have access to isn't appropriate for this forum group, please let me know. Would hate to be wasting peoples time.

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My opinions:  There are always people who consider the use of any newer technologies as cheating---who then want to use modern alloys and the modern computerized heat treatment that they require.   In reality, as long as you don't misrepresent them as totally handmade a "hybrid made" blade can be just as good or even better than one using old tech.  (I tell my students that a handforged blade by a relatively unskilled maker is much more likely to have hidden issues than a stock removal blade by a relatively unskilled maker.  Forging does not make something innately better;  unless all the issues it can cause can be avoided.)

Often this gets into discussions of what "hand made" actually means and I fall on the "workmanship of risk vs workmanship of certainty" side of things.  I also would have no problem with using the term "custom" for items that you have designed and programmed their machining of---as long as it's not a massive production run; uniqueness does play a part.

Forging is much more fun and flexible as you can change the shape of the starting piece of metal without losing much of it in process---make it wider, tapered, even thicker so you can evaluate the possibility of using a piece for a blade by the mass more than a limiting dimension.

This being said; I really like trying out the old methods and some of the *really* old methods/materials of the iron age; I'm not so much into the lithics...I also don't claim that such blades are better than modern alloys and methods blades. (Though most suit my uses quite well.)

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SF:  As to someone poopooing a blank cut with a water jet or laser all I can say is "pshaw."  That sounds like an example of "more authentic than thou" in re-enacting e.g. "My tunic is hand sewn." "Well, mine, is hand sewn and hand woven." "Mine is hand sewn, hand woven and hand spun."  Mine is hand sewn, hand woven, hand spun, and spun on a drop spindle and woven on a vertical weighted loom."  "Well, I sheared the sheep by hand." "Yes, but was it a period authentic breed?" etc., bloody, etc..

How you cut your blade blank is pretty immaterial.  You can cut with anything from a laser to a file, hot or cold, to get to your starting point.  Even then, you can then do stock removal or forging to get the final blade shape.  Being a blacksmith, I prefer forging.  As Thomas says, there is more opportunity for a mistake with forging but I think it is more fun to make a blade that way.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

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I love Bob Ross. 

Ideally, I would like to get to a place where I am using older methods in the creation and forging of billets... and newer technologies in the forming and finishing of the blades. I did manage to find an old small kiln this weekend in the boonies of the shop, it measures 8x8x24 inches. I will have to refit the gas line though.

We are cutting some 3/16" 1095 this week for a pulp mill on the island, so will see what I can get from the off-cuts.

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For now you need to forget about getting what you THINK are the right tools and equipment and learn how forge proficiently and work up to welding billets. Stacking a number of dissimilar steels and get a good full depth weld is not a trivial matter. It takes knowledge and skill and skill only comes from practice.

You're worrying about too many tomorrows without having today in the bank. 

Don't worry, it's a common corner newcomers paint themselves into, we've all done it at some time or another.

Frosty The Lucky.

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