Amateur Knife Making

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Mokwepa,

That's quite a setup there! Hardcore! Are you forging on an actual rail siding? My first anvil was a ground rail segment, but dammit, it wasn't still attached to the sleepers, LOL!

When I forge a single edge blade, first I curve the blank towards what will be the edge. How much to curve is a bit of an art, and I seldom get it right, but it helps.

If I need to straighten the blade during forgeing (because I misjudged or forgot to pre-bend), then I'll typically place the blade edge up on the anvil and gently strike the highest point with the hammer. This will waver the edge, but that can easily be re-straightened. It is much harder to do this than to pre-bend correctly....

Lookin' forward to seeing your new kit!

J
 
Thanks 7x57. Ill get a pic of my new forge up in about an hour.

Thanks for the tips on forging. Ill definatly try the pre bend on the next knife.

It is just a piece of rail. Got my brother to cut me a shorter piece of track.

Let me go take a pic of the forge
 
You need to take a grinder to the face of your hammer and put a very slight crown on it. Shorten the handle a bit as well (a little at at time since having a little too much is much better than a little too little) and you'll find the work to go easier.

As far as the blade curving, flip it over more often.

Also, get a short wooden club that you keep in a bucket of water. Heat the whole thing to red and flatten it with the club. That keeps you from moving metal around, but allows you to flatten the blade as it is held along the section of rail.

The other thing to do is to NOT form the tang that early. You don't have anything to hang onto the way you've done it. Since you cut the tang instead of forged it you can wait to the end to do that anyway.
 
Makes sense.

What do you mean by crowning my hammer, is this rounding the corners of the face?

Ill definatly shorten the handle. it is quite heavy to use.

Ill get the pic of the new forge up in the morning (forgot my camera in the office).
 
Use a grinder to make the face of the hammer a bit of a dome, so there are no hard corners to print in the blade. My primary forging hammer is a 38oz ballpein, and the "flat face" has been ground so that its center is probably about 1/8" higher than the edge. This also helps the hammer move metal faster when drawing out, as the curve tends to push the metal to the sides like a blunt wedge, instead of just mashing it.

HSO, he doesn't mean the way the blade curves away from the anvil while forgeing, but the way it will curve to the spine as the edge is drawn out. That is solved by curving the blank towards the edge before drawing out....

Mokwepa, if you can, try to mount your new "anvil" on a sturdy stand. The top of the anvil shold be at the height of the base of your fingers as your arm hangs by your side. That will help your hammer face hit parallel to the anvil face, also helping to avoid hammer printing the blades....

J
 
Can1.jpg

Here is the new forge. 2" air inlet, should be enough. Still need to get a good air source (hair dryer for now).

The top of the anvil shold be at the height of the base of your fingers as your arm hangs by your side. That will help your hammer face hit parallel to the anvil face, also helping to avoid hammer printing the blades....
Click to expand...
 
Looks workable! A step or 5 above the last system, I'd say...

FWIW, you can generally remove the fan unit from a hairdrier and run its motor on 12VDC.....

J
 
Doc, I learn at least as much as I teach, just by having to think about this stuff enough to put it into coherent words. I could post to threads like this for hours....

I found myself at the forge last night for the first time in a few weeks.

I've been on a flint'n'steel firemaking streak now since last fall when I first saw it done (yes, grew up in a cave...). I've forged a few steels and burnt a few tins for tinderboxes.

At work I had one of those Altoids Tiny Tins, about the size of a Zippo. You know where that lead me. To a 2 finger strike-a-light, and the rest of the kit to fit the tiny tin.

Put the kid to bed at 7:45, had fire in the forge by 8 (struck with flint'n'steel, of course). Burnt up the little tin in a charcoal brazier beside the forge. Finally tempered the finished striker at in the fading light just after 9, as the skys began to open up with yet more rain. I'm sick of rain!

Down in the man-cave, I brushed off the scale and tested the striker. A bit harder to use than a full sized one, but plenty workable.

I used a hammer to knock some flakes off a flint I'd picked a couple weeks back, and got one I was satisfied with. I packed about 3' of jute twine around the bottom of the little tin. In the centre, about 10 folded squares of charcloth, then the strike-a-light, and the flint on top.

All told, 2.25 x 1.25 x 0.625" for a flint'n'steel kit. I'm happy!

Sure was a nice way to spend the evening....

J
 
The best way to crown a forging hammer is on a slack belt grinder. Quick and easy.

Next would be with a palm sander with a soft pad under the paper. Just angle it so the center is high and work around the center.

Lastly would be the "shoe shine" method using a belt from a large belt sander like a shoe shine stand would buff your shoes. Lots of work, but it produces a great surface without risk of removing too much metal.

7X57chilmau is correct in that you need that chunk of rail on a solid base. If the base absorbs the energy of the hammer blow you don't get a lot done very quickly. The height should be as described, hammer flat on the anvil with the handle horizontal in your hand. That gives good flat hammer blows.

You don't need much more than 6 inches of rail to work on anyway since you can't work much more than 4 inches of bar at a time. Just make sure it is on a solid base that will support it and not rob any of the energy from the hammer.

Do not hit cold metal with the hammer. Hot only.
 
Here's the anvil I started forging on.

DSCF0001-1.jpg

It's a 12" section of 75# rail, thus about 25#.

I used a 4.5" angle grinder and alot of determination to grind a horn on one end, which is useful for bending operations. Unfortunately, I chose to do this in the basement :uhoh:, and the wife became somewhat miffed at me when black rings of iron dust began to surround every magnet on the refrigerator. :what::fire: The angle grinder is now confined to outside use...

:banghead:

Whatever the anvil is mounted to should have a few specific properties. It should above all be stable. It should have the anvil staked to it, so they will move as one. The stand should be resiliant, returning energy back to the hammer. My old anvil was mounted on a wooden stump, but the new one is larger than the easily available stumps in my area (coastal area, stunted growth), so I built a new one out of 2x12 pt lumber. It's basically a truncated paramyd, with the top sized to seat the anvil's foot. The new anvil's about 250#, but I still stake it to the base.

J
 
That is a cool looking piece of track. Going to have to modify mine now....dam you :)

Wow, my new forge works great, even with the hairdryer. Made some progress on the knife however, how often do you change your original design once you see the knife taking shape? I am supposed to be making a smalish carry knife, but after beating yesterday, she looks beatiful big, with very clean lines.

Can you ark weld two pieces of leaf spring together the heat red hot and forge the welded are......ive got a plan just dont know if it can be done, i think it should, what do you guys think?
 
The silicon content of spring steel makes it all but impossible to weld, from what I've read. I've been tempted to try what you're talking about, with my gassless mig setup, but haven't yet.

I CAN tell ya that it's been an abject failure each time I've attempted to forge weld spring steel either to itself or to mild steel. Just won't "stick", even when clearly at welding heat with adequate flux.

Sometimes when I fire the forge, I know exactly what I want to make. Sometimes the steel tells me what it wants to be. It usually turns out better when I follow my plan, tho...

Smaller knives are, to me, a bit more of a challenge. The heats don't last as long and a mis-struck hammerblow leaves a proportionally larger ding. You'll want to carry your EDC knife, well, every day, so a little more practice before you turn it out wouldn't be a bad thing.

Since your RR track doesn't afford you the use of a hardy, you can use a cold chisel (sharpen it up a bit better than usual) to hot cut steel, if you'd like to truncate a blade. Do this on a scrap bit of steel, not on your anvil (no need to dent up the anvil face...).

J
 
Here is the new knife. I did ark weld the handle and got a good weld, im not sure what is going to happen when i heat and beat the weld though.......guess ill find out soon though. The black line is where im going to trim the blade to my desired shape.

What do you think?

Dylan1.jpg

This is the new setup, far away from any sensitive people :), theres going to be lots of Ding were i live. I know the track is too low but it will have to do for now.

Dylan1010.jpg
 
Every Day Carry.

Lemme know how that weld turns out!

Looks like an interesting knife, but she's a biggy! Lookin' forward to seeing it done!

J
 
Can you ark weld two pieces of leaf spring together the heat red hot and forge the welded are......ive got a plan just dont know if it can be done, i think it should, what do you guys think?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you want to do.

Weld two short pieces together to make a longer piece? No, won't work. It will always fail. Even if you're just trying to get a tang longer. You'll always have a weak area.

Weld two pieces on top of each other and then forge out to the larger piece? Yes, that can be done. You have to flux the work heavily and you'll need to get your forge up to high enough temps for the two pieces to weld. Then you have to beat them out and fold them and flux them to death and put them back in the heat. Then repeat. A few more times. Just like making damascus. If you don't do this the inhomogeneities will wreck your finished knife.

As to the steel telling you what it wants to do? All the time. I had one knife when I was learning to forge that had it's own ideas about what it wanted to look like. I only thought I knew what I wanted it to look like. The problem was it kept changing it's mind. At one point it looked like it was going to be a clip, then a drop point, then it was a chisel tip for a minute. Eventually I decided that one of the two of us had to make up their mind and I completed it as a drop point. (in all truth the steel only seems to have a mind of it's own, it's really only the lack of experience or planning on the part of the smith that makes it seem that way {although sometimes it is fun just to see what the steel wants to do on any given day;)})
 
This is interesting because it shows what challenges some of us all over the Earth have with making efficient tools and how we evolve from that point on.

I was into Japanese sword making techniques and metal folding to work out impurities and I have tons of broken shank huge air tool chisels that we use on these 30 lb. air tool guns to remove concrete from the inside of mixer drums on trucks, these bits are incredibly tough, same material as the smaller air tool chisels you would use in a zip gun, they however do not like to be bent, lots of small sparkles when ground.

I am going to try an idea of wrapping combination's of chain like bicycle, chainsaw or just plain industrial link chain that I have ample supplies of and then hammer wielding this into bars. Wrapping the harder brittle core with a more flexible steel has been done a long time, it using common discarded materials that still allow a superior end product is what counts. Though for centuries the Japanese made swords out of well used old iron skillets that had ingrained carbon in them, nowadays people are talking about the revival of Damascus and using metal combinations that were unheard of years ago.

However I live in Alaska and heavy tools like a really big professional anvil are hard to come by so what I do have is some old bucket loader counterweights that are basically slabs of cast iron, an old large backhoe bucket and lots of heavy structural girders thats been cut up. So I plan to make my own anvil, I can get railroad track as well up here but we do have lots of cast off worn out bucket parts and grader blades because we do a lot of year round road maintenance up here.

I just bought a Seki City Damascus folder that needs to be finished and I am going to use some African gabon ebony on it, would be neat if you could have a supply of wood like that in your area, people would pay plenty for that stuff. Two small pieces of that wood cost me $10 plus shipping.
 
HSO

Have a look at the knife above my last post. I welded the bottom of the handle to the bottom of the blade. All i want to do is blend the weld in with the steel to make it look one piece. I doubt that ill get a reply before i try it, im leaving work in 10min. Ill show you the outcome tomorrow, wish me luck.

It is a big knife but man i love big blades. My EDC at the moment is a Cold steel Rajah 2, quite a monster of a folder.
 
Silverado6x6,

Cast iron generally makes a poor anvil. It is not resililiant, so it absorbs the hammer blows instead of returning energy to you. It'll work, but you'll work harder.

Railroad track has the opposite problem. Because the web is so thin, it adds alot of spring to the track. Again, you work harder.

The railroad track is better suited to light-duty anvil work, though.

Have a look over on Anvilfire. Lots of people there working cable and roller chain damascuses. Some of it works out VERY well, too!

Consistant forge welding is still beyond me.

Mokwepa, since your weld has held through being made and cooled, I'd guess your chances are pretty good. I've made the odd throwing star, welded from 2 pieces of mild steel. The weld forged out very well. Granted, you've got the additional difficulty of differnt alloys, but I'm somewhat optimistic for ya!

J
 
All i want to do is blend the weld in with the steel to make it look one piece.
Click to expand...

Because of the differing compositions it won't blend visually. When you clean it up you'll see a difference between the two and it will become more apparent after soaking in vinegar, polishing or as rust forms. On the other hand, if you don't clean it up it may not show.
 
I really know almost nothing about knifemaking and I am just starting to get involved but from what I understand the wood has to be dried extremely well, the pieces I bought were dried for three years the seller says. This is the seller:http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&item=400053683583

And the knife:http://cgi.ebay.com/Damascus-Seki-C...id=p4634.c0.m14&_trkparms=|301:1|293:1|294:30

I am really interested in making my own style of Damascus and I saw this, I made a low bid and was quite surprised that I won it.

65cc_1.jpg
!BTnnq)gCGk~$(KGrHgoH-EMEjlLlwLjKBKJZRect9g~~_1.jpg
 
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