Grinding and grinding and more grinding… As my buddy Mike says “blacksmiths turn the universe to dust, one piece at a time.” That’s neglecting hand sanding.

I was rummaging through my photo reel, trying to find a picture of what the blade looked like when I pulled it out of the annealing bin. Usually, it looks very non-promising: a blob covered with carbide and scale and white pearlite melted to the surface. Usually, I clamp it in the bench vise in the grinding area (which is not a very good vise) and knock the scale off with an angle grinder and a hard wheel.

Example of what a blade looks like out of the annealing bin: (obviously a different knife)

Those things used to depress me, until I realized that the layer of scale and gunk is very very thin and I won’t really have much grinding to do to get it down to bare metal. After a few years of doing this, I have gotten so smooth and fast with an angle grinder that I can skim the blade so accurately that once I take it over to the belt sander, it’s just a little work on the platen to get the flats flat. Once you’ve done that, it looks like a blade again, and you can assess the thickness, look for cracks, and make sure that the tang drew out right and has no obvious weak spots or places that will become stress points. As you start grinding it, the blade will work harden and you can crack it by dropping it on a hard floor, which is why it’s so tempting to interpose a foot.

I went through a bit of a pointless exercise thinking whether to do some kind of fancy file-work on the back to make it more visually interesting. There was opposed angle piercings:

And saw teeth:

And, hey, Rambo-style round sawteeth:

Well, yeah. Those had to go in before the steel is quenched, because filing the shapes would be a nightmare with a diamond rasp, but while it’s still soft, a chainsaw rat-tail file makes short work of it.

The astute among you, and Reginald Selkirk, Digit Manifest Agent of Destiny, will probably notice that the teeth are not perfectly laid out. That’s correct – when I started cutting down with the file it hit some sort of hard zone and kicked slightly off course. I’m going to say that was to make it more “rough and tough” looking, but I am too proud to lie to cover up my mistakes. I also painted the flats with blue dychem (layout fluid) so I could see where my grind-lines were going to go, and ground a whole lot of the blade to powder to get it looking roughly about right.

You probably can see there’s a bit of a dip in the ridge-line where I probably dwelt on the belt for a half a second too long. That’s not a problem, though obviously I should avoid making it worse – it will be corrected in fine grinding and then flattening and polishing. It just means that I have an extra half hour or so of working on that flat with diamond plates. It is how these things go. I went with a bit of a thickening at the tip, so it’d hold up to delivering a slash or a stab that reaches bone. At this stage, there’s plenty of metal on the thing to still grind off, and the proto-edge (not visible from this angle) is about 1/8″ or 2-3mm thick. That’s a 6″ vise so you can estimate the blade at around 11″ or so. The tang is relatively massive – 1/4″ thick (5-6mm) and wide and long. I left a lot of metal on the transition-zone between the tang and the blade because there’s no point refining that area until you’ve gotten it all quenched nicely.

By the way, that’s an 80-grit finish. 80 grit belts just rip steel to dust and throw little pieces of grit everywhere. Bladesmiths who are working with monosteels and don’t have to worry about warpage will usually grind the blade thinner and to a finer finish, because it’s a lot easier than grinding hardened steel. If you’re working with layers and twists and stuff like that, you’re courting disaster if you thin things out. My attitude is “it’s another 20 minutes of grinding and that’s what I signed up for.”

I usually don’t do much photography of quenches, either. Because I am going to shove that into a cannister of Parks #50 which will burst into flame and I’ll be flapping my gloves to keep them from catching alight. So, what I did was I put some clay on the blade, to keep the center of it softer than the back and edge. But I wasn’t trying to get a temper-line or anything like that, I just wanted a bit of transition between hard and less hard. So, this is a picture of one of the times I pulled it out to have a look at it:

All that sizzling and burning and drama and it’s time to let it cool, wipe it down, take it back to the house and put it in the oven at 400F for a couple hours to temper and slow cool, then it’s a couple days of grinding and shaping and shaping and plating and polishing. I guess that’s next. Oh, yeah, and around now I start thinking about a handle and fittings because it looks like there are going to be some since we got this far.

Naturally, “fittings” on a knife like this means some big hunks of silver and some 4,500 year-old bog oak. There is no other realistic option. But we’ll get to that.