The overall process of knife-making seems to be pretty standard. Weld, shape, grind, quench, grind, polish, do the handle.
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The overall process of knife-making seems to be pretty standard. Weld, shape, grind, quench, grind, polish, do the handle.
A friend of mine told me that she had a friend who said he’d kill for a chance to make a damascus knife. I was in an expansive mood, and said, “well, he could come up for a couple days and I’ll walk him through it.” That’s how that happened. Fortunately, Maat is a cool guy, young and energetic, and he made it up here right before the ice set in on my driveway.
This weekend I’ve got a guest coming to the forge; we’re going to try to make him a seax. It’s going to be a lot of fun watching someone else work while I take pictures and drone advice at him.
This is an idea I stole from michaelcthulu on youtube. He’s the guy who makes gigantic swords from anime shows [youtube] and he’s quite a character.
Sometimes, you start working on a project, and it just gets away from you. When that happens, it goes on the Shelf of Shame and Glory, or you otherwise get it out of your sight.
I’ve spent a bit of time in search for steel wire rope to weld into sharp, pointy things. It’s been a fun quest. I assumed for a long time that the stuff would be all over the place, up here, because of strip-mining and logging.
I’ve been slowly noodling my way through a project, in which I am trying to make some large ornaments, using the water-jet CNC machine at the fabricators’ in Clearfield. It came to me when I was watching Michaelcthulhu make giant swords, and thought, “No, but a giant sword-guard would be kind of neat!”
There are a variety of patterns in damascus steel-making, each of which represents a different way of laying up the bars, and manipulating them afterward. Each step brings with it a unique opportunity to fail: if you work too slowly, things may oxidize and not weld cleanly anymore. If you work too fast, you may wind up with inclusions or a mis-aligned weld. Two bars the have been forge-welded together are now one bar; you can’t re-position things.
When I was making Jazzlet’s breadknife, [stderr] I originally spec’d it as quite a bit larger. This is how it came out.
Jazzlet’s knife is done.