So....am going to make a knoife, dubz chooses what kind. Limiting

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>>1232089
mohel knife

Karambit.

>>1232122
And we have a winner...fixed or hinged?

>>1232125
fixed

>>1232126
it'll be at least a few days

>>1232134
K.... KEEP ME POSTED

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still some room for small items if anyone else wants to try for dubz

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Like pic related. Multiple concentric rings, almost seperated but held together by a little bit on the top and bottom. Twist each ring a bit relative to the others, and you have a little ornament. Drill a little hole in the outermost ring and thread some copper wire through it and you can hang it onto shit. (copper looks nice with polished steel) Round out all edges and you could make a necklace. Be careful with the twisting though, metal fatigue kills thin pieces like this really quickly.

>>1232197
You can also somehow stick a glass crystal or something like that in the middle, or have the middle be a solid circle attached like the outer rings, and have some kind of cutout in the middle.

>>1232200
what a waste of dubz

>>1232172
Better chuck a skinner in that top section, looks like it'd fit

Done my dash with 15N20, made a kitchen set and had enough of it for a while myself

>>1232289
you didn't get dubz though

Aren't saw blades kinda shitty for knives? Seems like it would be way too flexible.

>>1232361
care to donate some non-shifty metal?
just working with what I have

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>>1232361
15N20 makes a very nice blade, basically the same as 1074-75 spring steel but likes a little bit of a soak at temperature before hardening and a double tempering cycle. Otherwise it has a better final finish, is about as tough as 1075 (which is fucking tough) can take a very fine edge.

It was used a lot in the older saw blades, newer ones can be a HSS like M2 or even something crazy like D2 on occasion, but that's the gamble of not knowing what the fuck it is.

>>1232495
good the the blade i'm using looks like it was from the 60's or 70's

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hand drill broke so waiting to use a drill press for the handle holes next.

>>1232515
Yeah, you'll want to anneal that as it'll be harder and tougher than r9k sped's trying to get a date.
1-2 thermocycles as well probably wouldn't hurt either

>>1232518
the cutoff wheel did ok...centerpunch jumped around some though.
dunno if I wan't to put the time of making a fire hot enough to temper it though

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before heat treating.

knife cracked during tempering...im out

>>1232779
The hell did you do to it? Drop it? Try differential heat treating?

>>1232780
did not drop it
heated to non-magnetic...quenched
400 for an hour...let cool
400 for an hour...god damned crack

>>1232822
Where was the crack? There's usually a reason for it, aside from not thermocycling the steel like I recommended.

>>1232845
middle of the the blade edge

>>1233033
Few reasons-
>Stressed metal, saws are put under quite a lot of pressure/heat. So they can get micro-fractures running through parts of them
>Edge got too hot during the hardening process, the ferrite grains got too big and crumbly- easy to tell, they look like salt grain sized chunks in the break
>Ground the edge too thin during forming, you generally want to leave around 1mm (3/64th) to be safe along that edge or it overheats too quickly

Thermocycling is important on recycled steels (and hot rolled stuff) as its spent years being hammered, heated, beat up and god knows what else, it won't fix the fractures in the steel but it will reset the grain structures in the metal after a couple of cycles so that it normalises.

>>1233172
Oh and don't stress yourself over it, its just part of the learning process

>>1232822
Aside from what these other blokes have mentioned. What did you quench in? Water would certainly be asking for a crack in the first place. Oil would be my go to, but normalizing prior to the heat treat would have been ideal.

>>1233172
i think i might have ground the edge too thin
>>1233173
very true
>>1233328
i did quench it in water...though i aslo normalized the water first,
ill make sure to use oil on the next one

>>1233501
You can quench in water if the metal is very thick (6mm-1/4") or do an interrupted quench of water (or brine) + then oil for some types of steels
Nearly all the common tool and spring steels though are an oil quench, even if its just vegetable or canola oil- both work just fine for 1075, 15N20, 1085, 1095 etc. Heat up the oil to about 80-90C as it will lessen the shock of the hardening.

Stuff like W1/W2 is technically a water or brine quench, but only on an industrial scale of using a thick block of the stuff, otherwise when we're doing a knife which is typically anywhere between 2-5mm thick it will crack about half of the time. Which is quite costly on a time and materials scale to say the least.

Working with 15N20 on the thinner side of things, it'll fight you all the way.
>If its too cold into the quench, it'll bend
>If it isn't normalised, it'll bend
>Even if you did the right temperature and normalised it a couple of times... it'll probably still fucking bend because the gods hate you!

I have a couple of big aluminium strips, clamp the blade between them after quenching and it'll generally straighten itself out in the tempering just fine.

>>1233747
thanks for the advise...very helpful
are you a professional maker of knives

>>1233769
Chronic, long term hobbyist might be a better description.
I do the odd knife mostly for chefs, butchers and family, given enough time I'll do some kind of art-fag knife here and there.

>>1232172
...rolling for a fork

>>1232089
>>1232172
>not forging it from a steel bar
git gud

>>1234979
>not having a large enough forge or steel stock
as good as it gets atm

>>1235120
dont mind this guy. Someone just watched a few eps of forged in fire and wants to arm chair it.

>>1232172
Opinel style tanto

>>1235132
Reroll

>>1235133
could you be more specific...pic maybe

Make a puukko, very simplistic and useful knife and scandi grinds are very easy to grind and sharpen, in my opinion even superior to other styles. Otherwise make a kiridashi

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>>1235359
This is my own selfmade kiridashi

>>1235360

looks great anon.

>>1235362
Thanks, and its really simple to make

As we are here already, which belt grinder you use?

butter knife

>>1236000
Since OP cracked a blade on the tempering, i would guess he just uses files and has no proper workshop

>>1236000
a delta one by somethin or other
>>1236100
i think it cracked due to me making it too sharp before heat treating

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My work I did yesterday, first time trying to "forge". Still need to polish the bevel

>>1236366
Dubs says you grind the knife to nothing and then consume the steel shavings.

>>1236366
bretty gud jab anon

>>1233775
Got any pictures you can share with us?

>>1236366
dubs says you take up self harming and hooker strangling

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as finished as its gonna get with a cracked blade

>>1236450
Dude you have to sand the blade way more

>>1236450
>>12364566
But still a decent first knife, good job

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>>1236405
Last thing I seriously messed around with was prototyping a Honesuki type knife as an experiment- its basically used to bone out chicken, fish and various other critters
I did some full tang 'kiridashi shaped objects' some time ago out of O1 tool steel, but they where a little too stiff for boning and the handles where not exactly great for kitchen work. So I dragged out some fairly thin 15N20 about 1.8mm thick, did a steep chisel edge for the bevel and some adjustments to the tang so it wasn't as heavy, which is important for working knives. Temper to about 58-59HRC which gives it a bit of bendy but enough hardness it doesn't need to be sharpened very often

Handle is Wenge with Myrtle over the top, I had this idea in my head that I'd make the bolster out of 304SS to keyhole around the front of the knife, which was actually a lot more fucking around than I really thought was necessary
So we wont be doing that ever again!
Anyway there was also this other great idea of making some mokume-gane over the top so it would be this transitional blend from the blade to the SS to the timber. Got some thin nickel silver, some thin bronze plate, sandwiched that shit up in a stainless steel clamp, torched it up to welding temp, mashed it with a hammer, did that a few times and managed to fuck most of them up to the point of having a lot of un-salvageable, expensive copper alloy shit everywhere. But some of them finally stuck and gave me enough to use, then silver-soldered that shit on top of the stainless bolster. Which I thought would be a cool idea, but we're at the point of making dissimilar metals talk to each other which is like trying mate a donkey with a turkey and its not going to happen.
Its not going to happen well, but it did happen

And
>Blade is great
>Feels good
>Don't like the looks

It looked better in my feeble brain at the start of the experiment, just didn't turn out how I wanted and sometimes that happens
But, you should experiment

>>1236582
Still love the idea of the mokumegane. Wish i would have the proper metals for one. I heard you can make some out of nickels

>>1236466
did you not read..."as finished as it's gonna get"
>>1236467
actually second knife...first one was made of shitty hobby bar steel

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>>1235322
an opinel, with a tanto blade.

>>1236624
Its something I'll come back and try another time when I've got the kiln to soak it for long enough and sit between that really fine line of forge welding temperature and melting. Plus there's a few areas of the handle design I'll work in a bit better, figure something out for the front so that it's a better fit and probably silver-solder the blade to the bolster so nothing will get stuck in there. Had a bit more practice at that lately and getting better at it.

Basically got some thick plates of stainless steel and SS bolts to compress the layers and the trick seems to be-
>keep it clean
>keep the surfaces dead flat
>flux the sides with high temp braze flux
>soak it for a while until the metal looks 'sweaty'

Tricky bit is not melting it into a pile of goop and making a tremendous mess, so it was a real learning experience if nothing else. Coins work, but I had trouble keeping all the surfaces hot enough to forge weld together, so I ended up getting a whole heap of 0.8mm thick blanks and using them instead. Something to revisit another day I guess

>>1232495

a lot of older circular blades are made of L6 steel, too, I've made a couple knives out of those. Likes to warp a little during quenching but hardens easily and seems almost indestructible in any thickness. Barely tempered mine and they're durable even at (estimated) RC >60.

>>1236721
ill give it a go...dunno bout that opinel locking mechanism though

>>1236685
You can always finish it better. At least better than that, there ar still scratchmarks not finer than 60 grit.

>>1236842
The locking mechanism is just the bolster being able to rotate to lock the blade open or close. Otherwise you can go without a lock and make more of a classic friction folder

>>1236840
L6 is one of those low alloy tool steels that has super high toughness and wear resistance, fairly much the same as 15N20 but has the addition of chromium and a bit more manganese to beef it up.
Quite a very expensive steel so you're lucky to come across it in the wild.

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could still use some more sanding...coming along nicely though.
sorry to dubz, its not a karambit or tanto

>>1232172
A hippekniep/sodbuster

>>1237410
i don't see myself making any folding knives anytime soon

>>1232089
two things: circular blade steel may not be hardenable. That's an absolute deal breaker for any bladed tool that isn't intended to spend all its time hanging on a wall.

Second thing: Don't overbuild it. Overbuilt knives seem to be the trend in DIY knives, but they rarely make great cutting tools

>>1232495
That's an ambitious design. Fit and finish could be improved, but it looks like you've got the skill base to dial that in.

Nice knives bro!

>>1232172
Didn't notice this wasn't carbide tipped. Ya, the whole thing is usable blade steel. It will have been heat treated previously so you may need to anneal it to drill it and make working it easier.

I'm assuming you don't have a HT oven so grab yourself a torch and heat it to cherry red where you want to drill/file/grind, let it cool at room temp until you can touch it without burning yourself. Repeat it for good measure.

>>1232518
When metal spends time significantly above critical the crystal structure size of the steel grows and swells. The resulting large grain makes the steel brittle.

Thermal cycling is only necessary when you've had grain growth. You only really do this with forging or if you over heated your steel. Professionally heat treated steel (like in a saw blade) won't have swollen grain.

>>1232822
The crack formed during the quench, it just didn't go full monty until you saw it.

Cracks happen along deep scratches and if your quench is too stressful (like water)

>>1233172
Taking above critical causes the crystal lattice to restructure upon cooling. Each time you repeat this the grain gets smaller. But like I said, if the grain wasn't swollen to begin with, this won't do anything. No amount of soaking and normalizing cycles will cure micro fractures in recycled steel.

>>1233501
Water quench is very hard on blades. And ya, grinding too thin means the edge will definitely overheat.

Also, preheating the water doesn't help. That only works for oil because heating the oil reduces viscosity and makes the quench "faster".

For anything as thin as knives the only time to use water is when something is really low carbon, like a rail road spike. (even the ones marked "HC" are still low carbon by blade standards and won't exceed 40RHC when quenched)

>>1238669
elaborate on overbuilt
>>1238679
i just use a magnet to check it

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>>1238673
They where a wedding gift from my parents to some friends of theirs, almost bit off more than I could chew in a ridiculously short time frame. Pic wasn't at their final finish, still had some more polishing and shit to do but at the time I needed to snap a picture, finish them off, cleaned up and get them out the door so it was literally the only chance I had.
Construction was basically having a frame made out of 304SS with brass spacers around the extended bolsters, then mechanically pinned and silver-soldered together. After that handles gets carved, hollowed out to fit the frame, slide the blade tang in and pin it to the bolsters. Makes it immensely strong, lot lighter than it looks, but so over-engineered its kind of a 'fuck my life' nightmare really. They where part of 4 knives but didn't get to take a pic of the honesuki/paring knife and a little peeling knife.

Oh and just to top it all off, when I was sharpening the chefs knife, figured "yeah that's pretty good" and did the old hair-shave down the arm- well, we got past shaving sharp and well into 'scalpel sharp' territory, so ended up bleeding everywhere as I nearly accidentally filleted myself. Took a break from that and sharpened up the bread knife and managed to mutilate an index finger as apparently that can get razor sharp too. 15N20 gets really, screaming nasty sharp if you put the right edge geometry into it, maybe not the durability of a chop down a tree edge geometry in this application, but its a blade material people often overlook as just a bit to squeeze into some forge welded patterns. It stands on its own very well.

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>>1239199

Here's some general advice about overbuilding. I see a lot of custom knives with blade shape that severely limits the usability of the blade. A moderately small, thin, short (from spine to edge) knife will be more functional than some god awful monstrosity like the Tracker (Pic related). Also, don't go crazy with handle shape. Deep finger grooves make it hard to choke up on the blade and will surprise you with how uncomfortable they'll feel after a a while.

Magnets are good too.

>>1239300
>chop down a tree

That sounds like a lot of work.

Oh man, don't even get me started on batoning firewood. That's another problem with the custom knife market. Every bushcraft knife is measured by its ability to do chopping tasks rather than cutting tasks.

I don't see the fancy axe guys (yes that's a thing) judging their axes on how thin they can slice tomatoes.

>>1239316
Yeah people forget that the early pioneers and colonists in most countries went running around in the bush with a hatchet or 3/4-axe and a couple of english/french/german butchers knives that where about 3mm-1/8" across the spine. Partially because that's all they had and mostly because they knew the tools for the job- axes chop down trees, knives cut things.

Have been binge watching a few youtube channels about knife making because sometimes you can pick up something new. Awful lot of people out there using stuff like 1/4" or 6mm bar stock to make a 'bush knife' (or worse- use that type of thickness on smaller knives!) and they really must be absurdly heavy, even though most of them don't use any kind of bolsters. This is also an issue when it comes to edge geometry, either they just half arse it by making a simple flat grind, vaguely axe shaped geometry, or a couple will do a bit of a low hollow grind on the bottom half of the blade.
This is not a good thing!
Yes it has the mechanical strength of a crowbar, but it also cuts like complete garbage, balance is awful, swinging it will give the user tennis elbow and it weighs a fucking ridiculous amount.
>Somewhere an abrasives salesman is out there rubbing his hands together going 'yesss, yes good good' as people burn off a 72" belt trying to hog out a fuckhuge lump of bar stock.

2-3mm for stock removal is quite good for nearly all the utility, bush, kitchen and even some of the larger blades. I will rarely use 4mm for something like a dagger where it needs some lateral stability across the blade, but for the most part anything thicker than 5mm is really just for forge work so you can hammer in bevels and some of the larger, exotic stuff. Otherwise you're just beating yourself up with a lot more work and higher material costs

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>>1239330
Also found this, I'm fucking crying by the halfway mark

>>1239332
Ahhh, love it! "The wood is obviously bad"

I just about died.

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>>1239316
>started on batoning firewood.
that's because people are stupid.

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>>1232122

well mods...seems its just you and me atm