is rebar suitable for blades?

[colt.45]

we are having a houls built right now and i picked up a bunch of scraps. that made me happy. i was just wondering if i could make a half decent blade out of one. i have really gotten into blade making, but i have only used store bought steel and scrap leave springs. i use a piece of railroad track as my anvil.

at least it would be good practice.

 

[zahc]

I really doubt it. Think how cheap it has to be. I seriously doubt that all the roads, buildings and concrete structures of the world are filled with steel suitable for knife blades.

 

[Freddymac]

no

Re-bar is typically made from lo-grade recycled steel, I don’t think that it would make a good blade, but I’m no expert on blade making… or…any thing else…

 

[mete]

I've never been able to find chemical analysis for rebar, they make it to mechanical properties to chemistry. BTW they even make stainless steel rebar. Stick to leaf springs !

 

[mogunner]

Is rebar suitable for blades

If you want some really decent steel to make knives from, get ahold of an old leaf spring from a Car or Truck. A little hard to work with, but well worth the effort.

 

[RyanM]

Make sure it's an older model car or truck if you get leaf springs. Cars nowadays use very cheap alloys in their springs, which isn't suitable for blades. Mercedes springs are supposed to be the best. Seriously.

 

[hso]

There isn't enough carbon in rebar (~.18) for a knife steel (.8 - 2). It won't harden.

Older leaf springs do well.

 

[Don Gwinn]

There are ways to check these things. You can find spark charts on the internet that show the different spark patterns created when you grind different steels. Try www.anvilfire.com for a good start; there's lots of good stuff to read even if you don't need the spark charts.

If all else fails, heat a piece to red and quench it in oil. If it comes out hard and brittle, you can harden it and should be able to temper it, too. Might take some experimentation to make it work for blade material, but you know it's carbon.

 

[DWARREN123]

No! Try anealing a file, once made less hard and workable they make excellent blades.

 

[colt.45]

i have been using leaf springs. i got them at the junk yard for $5.00. two from an old chevy, ~3' long. so far ive only made a simple chisel and i have cut the basic shape of a soon-to-be, pretty big brush cutting knife, but im not sure what it will hammer into.

 

[joab]

I read an article on making damascus blades from steel wire.
how would rebar compare to that

 

[Kamicosmos]

Try anealing a file, once made less hard and workable they make excellent blades

Yup. My dad works at a wire rope factory, and the guys there are all pretty good at taking old worn out files and making them into knife blades. Not the prettiest things, but they use them to cut rope and boxes and things, so they're servicable. I'm sure they could be polished up to look pretty nice.

 

[hso]

joab,

Rebar is low carbon and shouldn't harden.

All the found materials bladesmiths I know have passed on rebar.

 

[AJAX22]

Rebar is junk, its soft, won't take an edge, and contains alot of impurities, leaf springs work good, so do old files, old double buck saw blades work really well if you can find them.

the best is old tool steel if you can come by it.

 

[James T Thomas]

mystery

Reinforcing bar is not junk steel, as some suspect. It comes in "grades" that are specified by the engineer to match the strength specification of the concrete into which it is placed, and to achieve the tensile strength of the stress calculations that the engineer uses or is required by the purchaser.

It supplies the tensile or stretching strength, if you will, for the concrete which is so strong in compression; squezzed, but is perhaps only one tenth that strength when "pulled."

However, as to the sulfur content, and other potentially harfull chemicals, there are accompanying analysis certificates with each large batch.

What you have in your hands is an unknown material. Unless you can obtain the certs for it.

 

[Freddymac]

Yup try files

That's how the Buck Knife Co started. He would take old files, make them into knives, and sell them.

 

[CWL]

Don't forget old railroad tracks. They've taken more pounding than anything most smithies can do. The Japanese used to prefer this material for sword-making before WWII.

 

[hso]

The Japanese used to prefer this material for sword-making before WWII.

The Japanese sword makers preferred to make tamahagane (carbon steel) and resorted to scavenging Manchurian railway tracks during the exigencies of WWII for mass production of blades for the military.

I've participated in the process of making tamahagane and it's amazing.

 

[Don Gwinn]

No!

Why "no," Warren? One cannot discover whether a piece of steel is high-carbon and can be hardened into a serviceable blade by simply hardening some of it? Or one should not? For what reason?
Or was it the spark charts to which you objected?


Files can be good, but you still want to know what you're using. Files used to be made more or less the way a knife or any other tool would be, meaning that high-carbon steel was used and the file was hardened and tempered for its application. Nowadays many files are simply surface-hardened steel that is no good for knives. Again, you want to know what you have. The older the file in your hand is, the better the odds that it's high-carbon steel and will make a knife.

 

[joab]

All the found materials bladesmiths I know have passed on rebar.

OK so I guess I'll just get rid of the rebar I have then. Maybe I'll just get rid of it by burying it under the concrete slab I'm pouring next month

But I do have a bunch of old tractor lawn mower blades

 

[DWARREN123]

If rebar was good for making knives they would sell it as such, they don't.

 

[TMM]

i have a knife or two made form rebar just for fun. one it ok, other is bad. it's fine for practice or a junk knife, but otherways it's a waste of time. lawn mower blades are great, so are leaf springs, ball bearings, train track steel, and train track spikes marked "HC" (high carbon) on the top.

~tmm

 

[hso]

Lawn mower blades good for big choppers.

 

[Zero_DgZ]

Rebar is low, low carbon. Same stuff as the cheapo bar stock you get at Home Depot for the toolbelt brigade to fashion up custom angle brackets. .10 to .15 carbon content, when I asked the manufacturer for the stuff that we stock at the hardware store.

Now, the new steel railroad spikes are a decent source of steel. However, I've heard that there was a change in their formulation (thankfully in our favor) and in my area the 'new' ones with the decent composition have a funky grey paint or powdercoat sort of finish on them that the older ones didn't have. Hearsay indicates that they're about .40 to .50 percent carbon content and experimentation confirms that they harden tolerably well and make real nice throwing axe heads!

 

[pete f]

Not all rebar is junk steel, There are codes stamped on the sides of the rebar that tell you a lot about who made it and what it is made of and size and strength. Rebar is sized by the eighth inch, therefore a #4 rebar is 4/8ths of an inch or a 1/2 inch. I have a couple of pieces of big stuff, one is a # 32 rebar the other is a # 28, the latter is made of 1095 according to the manufacturers hang tag that is still attached. Both pieces came to my possession after working at a concrete testing facility while in college. The 4 inch diameter #32 is from a nuclear reactor containment test, (no radiation, we just built a mock up of the wall sections then slammed big things into them to see if the wall would give. The smaller is from a cantilevered bridge span meant to carry a mainline freight route which failed in testing. (we built a section then used hydrualic rams to similate the loading and unloading of a overwieght train. After a hypothetical life of 4 years, the mid span braces failed and the whole thing snapped. Really big noise. ) regular rebar that you get for home foundations and the like is usually low carbon mild steel. However, at some high rise projects, you can find some pretty good steel used in the columns and the grid beams, usually this has to be a better grade of stuff.

http://www.crsi.org/rebar/id.html one site that has a lot of info, and can answer more than i can