hi

I am new to knife makeing and i have a ton of questions.
For now all i need to know whitch is better to make a blade out
of titanium or steel. i have heard of titanium blades but ,havent
seen any here (maybe its just that i am new). does titanium even make good blades?



sorry about misspelled words

thanks for your help

CAW

STEEL. Ti takes alot of special treatment to make work. If your gonna send your blades out for heat treat 440c or ats-34 will work well. If you are gonna' try your own heat treat O-1 or 1095 will probably work better. Go to the newbies area and use the search button up top, you can probabaly get all your questions answered. Good luck and welcome to CKD.

STEEL

steel... oh, welcome to the forums. :D

Steel , steel, steel.

As someone new to knife making i would recommend you start with steel, titanium i hear is expensive, you would not be wanting to make alot of throw away blades from Titanium i would recommend you master steel first. Plus titanium does not hold an edge like some of the tool steels.

Good luck with your endeavor to make knives.

Philip Lee
Fiji Islands

The only knives I've seen made entirely out of titanium were for very specific purposes (non-corrosive, non-magnetic for, say, underwater mine removal). Neil Blackwood recently did an integral design called The Fiend that he did some in titanium. You'd have to check with him as to why he did that, but I suspect it gave him a lot of freedom to anodize the knife.

For a non-steel blade, you'd find a lot more knives made with Stellite/Talonite than with titanium.

Titanium is used a lot more in liners or handles. Tom Mayo, a knife maker in Hawaii, has popularized his TnT design (for Talonite and titanium). The Talonite blade cuts reasonably well and has reasonable edge retention, while the titanium handles are quite light.

http://www.mayoknives.com/images/forsale/tnt_MedDropPointTNT.jpg

Here's an example of a titanium dive knife:
Ocean Master Titanium Knife (http://www.divebooty.com/equipment_details.asp?pid=141)

Boker has a line of titanium kitchen knives:
Boker Titanium Knives (https://www.bokerusa.com/artikel.asp?ProductType=titanum)

There are also ceramic blades, which may surpass steel in the next ten years or so but which currently suffers from a variety of negatives that keep it in a niche market, and a new class of materials called amorphous metals, most notably promoted and sold by Liquid Metal Technologies. Their first material, LM-1, had a number of interesting characteristics including the ability to be cast with very fine details (~ 1 micron feature size) that may be of interest to production knife makers who could afford the very steep setup costs.

These are certainly the exception, and I'd guess 95+% of all production and custom knives by unit volume or dollar volume are steel.

This is probably more information than you were looking for, so I'll have to ask you to excuse my geeking out on the subject.

Great response Gabe.

I get asked almost every week to provide titanium for knife blades. My response is “Titanium does not make a good blade”. But there is much more to this issue.

First, there are several titanium alloys. The most common alloys are different grades of CP (commercially pure) and 6AL4V (6-4). This alloy is comprised of 90% titanium, 6% aluminum and 4% vanadium. 6-4 is the most commonly used titanium in aerospace. The strongest alloy is 6-6-2 which is 86% titanium, 6% aluminum, 6% vanadium and 2% tin. A spring alloy is 15-3-3-3 which is 15% vanadium, 3% chromium, 3% tin and 3% aluminum. There are many other alloys and new alloys are being developed all the time. Mission knives uses a different alloy in their knives. They do not identify the alloys so I will not either. When most people talk about titanium they are referring to 6-4.

Titanium has interesting properties. The first of which is corrosion resistance. Titanium loves oxygen and quickly develops an oxide coating over the surface of the titanium. The oxide protects the titanium. When scratched of scuffed the oxide quickly covers the scratch or scuff until you cannot tell where the minor damage occurred.

Titanium is a reactive metal which means it can be colored. The coloring occurs by growing oxides on the surface of the titanium. The oxide is clear. Different thicknesses of the oxide allow different wavelengths of light to pass which result in different colors. The oxides can be grown by anodizing or by applying heat. Anodizing is very controlled and results in repeatable colors. It is harder to control the colors from heat but the oxides are much more durable. I’ve been carrying a folder made by Jim Smyth for ten months. Jim is an excellent maker and person. I highly recommend his work. Jim bead blasted the bolsters on my knife then heat colored then. I’m using the knife to test the durability of heat coloring. After 10 months the wood scales show some dings and dents but the bolsters look new.

Titanium is hard to refine and machine. Titanium galls very badly when machined. When cutting with a bandsaw the blade speed is critical or the teeth will be rounded or broken off. Or use old blades and run them as fast as possible and friction cut. When forging the temperature is critical. If you forge too cold titanium will not move. Too hot and it turns to liquid, squirting everywhere and catching everything it touches on fire.

Titanium can be sharpened to a razor edge. Every time we get a new shipment of titanium my daughters and my hands have cuts all over them. But it does not hold the edge as long as good steel will. For this reason I don’t recommend titanium for knife blades. If someone needs a corrosion resistant, non-magnetic blade with great spring properties they can justify using titanium for the blade.