What an awesome take on a "blacksmith" knife. By that i mean a knife entirely made with only metal and entire by the blacksmith. Very sleek looking. I am glad to say i will be making some of these. Thanks for the inspiration.
As ignorant as this probably sounds, im wondering how well taking a piece of 1/2 rebar, flattening it out into a rough shape of a knife then using hardfacing welding rod on the edge side 3 passes stacking the bead would work. ( sorry i know that sounds crazy)
Nothing ever wrong with wondering about different ways of doing things! That being said I have almost 0% experience in welding (other than forge welding) so I have really no idea what type of metal hardfacing welding rod are or if it would make a good knife edge or not… But here is my .02 on the matter, the steel is probably the cheapest part of making a knife, for this particular knife in the video I used 1084 steel, a very good simple steel that is probably the easiest of all steels to nail the heat treating process, the size that I started with was 1/4”x1”, a 48” length of it I believe is something like $40 and I only used 7” or so for this knife. So I wonder how much money you would really be saving and get an inferior or unknown steel at the end of the day. But! Welding rod could still make a good knife because if you think about, pretty much all cultures have used stone for knives, then copper, then bronze, then iron, then finally steel. All were good knives for their time and maybe we are just spoiled with modern steel, so if it’s something you want to try then I say go for it! Just me sure to let me know how it goes!
With twists on high carbon steel you can’t really use water to slow down a section twisting faster than the rest of the material like can with mild steel but what you can do is let it start to cool down naturally and then selectively heat up the area where you need it to twist faster with an Oxy Acetylene Torch until the handle is twisted equally enough so the entire handle matches
Glad you noticed my struggle with that! Lol unfortunately I don’t own a torch yet, and this coal forge is new to me and I’m still trying to get the hang of using it. I’ll be making a couple more of these twisted handle knives soon and hopefully I’ll get them more even! Thanks for commenting!
@@valiantforge I didn’t own an Oxy Acetylene Torch for years and I finally bit the bullet and bought a cheap kit to start with decent size tanks not those baby tanks, I eventually replaced the cheap gauges with better quality ones and added different torch tips and a rosebud but other than the better gauges/ regulators and the stuff I added everything else is still the cheap Harbor Freight torch kit and I honestly don’t know how I got by without it
Definitely a useful tool! I’ve been super busy getting my new forge built and set up in my shop, once I get done a torch set is one of the next upgrades I want to get, I’ll have to take a look at harbor freight!
@@valiantforge yeah I usually avoid the cheap tools from Harbor Freight but that torch kit has served me well, the only thing I needed to replace was the regulators because they didn’t seem like good quality so I watched the welding supply stores and they had a sale on Harris Gauges/ Regulators and they will last a long time and can even be rebuilt if needed. As far as the torch body goes you just need to know what style yours is because there’s like 2 main styles nowadays a Harris style torch body and a Victor style torch body as the parts are not interchangeable
