Main Discussion Area > HowTo's and Build-a-longs
Big camp knife (FINISHED)
Zion:
Ok I found an old camera which I used to take some more progress pictures, today I just drilled some holes for the handle and did some finish sanding, I think tonight when it's dark I'll triple normalize the blade and then quench.
I mark out where the pins will go.
Sorry for the bad pic, but I then center punch the marks.
I put my drill press to it's slowest setting, I think it's around 600-800 rpm.
I'm going to drill 1/4" holes so I put a sharp bit into the chuck.
Here are the three main holes for the pins drilled, I then drilled 2 more for the hollow lanyard holes.
This is what it looks like when all the holes are drilled.
I will now start removing some of the file marks that are still in the blade, you can kinda see some of them here.
For this I will use a small cheap belt grinder I have, but you could just use normal sandpaper.
Bad lighting but this is the result.
I then start hand sanding the blade to further refine the finish.
A wire brush also helps in removing small tool marks. I put one made for a hand drill in my drill press and move the belts to the highest rpm.
I then rubbed some white polishing compound on the blade and rub it with scotch bright. This polishes it up a bit.
The blade has a nice satin finish on it now. I like doing most of the finish work before heat treat as it's much easier to sand annealed metal than when it's hardened, but I'll end up sanding it more after heat treat when I have to get all the scale off anyway.
Next up: triple normalizing, and then quenching! Seeya all then.
lebhuntfish:
Looking great! Thanks again for the build along!
Patrick
Zion:
Thanks, no problem man! Good luck on your knife, they're fun to make that's for sure.
lebhuntfish:
Thanks, it's my first adventure! Patrick
Zion:
Ok sweet, we get to put some fire to this thing! I started the day by normalizing the blade, which just means I heated it up to a nice cherry red and let it air cool. I then repeated this process three times, and during the first two I did some final straightening and punched in my maker's mark. The forging process puts a lot of stress into the steel, so this is why you want to normalize it at least once. I'll let the pics do the talking, this'll be a long post so grab a beverage lol.
This is my forging setup. None of this stuff is purchased except for the hair dryer.
The hair dryer is put into a handline elbow, which is then jerry rigged to a pipe going straight up into the bottom of my forge, which is a wheel rim filled with rocks to get rid of all the gaps.
This is my anvil, which is just some kind of large towing hook I nailed into a large stump. I ground down the top a bit to give a flatter surface.
This is a 45# plate nailed to a railroad tie, I use it to straighten blades and also use the wood to do more delicate straightening.
I like to use hardwoods like apple which I got from an orchard, it burns hot and makes good charcoal once I find the time.
I turn the air supply on and start the fire with some gasoline.
After a few minutes of the knife in the forge you can already see the temper colors starting, once all those rainbow lookin things are gone you know the steel's starting to turn red.
This is the maker's mark I sketched out, I got sick of my old one.
When heating up metal during the day it's almost impossible to see what color the steel is, so take it into someplace dark so you can get a better idea. I want the whole blade to be this color, then I'll let it air cool for the first cycle.
But first I want to work on the mark.
I use a chisel and hammer to begin marking the hot steel.
It's lookin good so far. Just be careful not to let the chisel 'run' along the blade so you don't get marks where ya don't want.
Working on that one area led to some warping on the knife, as was expected. So I kept straightening it out and letting it air cool 3x. The third time I slowed down the cooling process by laying it on the coals of the fire.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version