We kicked it around the chat room last night and this is what we came up with:
This is a full scale pattern, you should be able to simply print it out and glue it to your steel. If you don't have a printer just let me know and I'll mail it to you by snail mail.
The steel must be 1084, preferably from Aldo. the blade will be 1/8" thick, 5" long, with a full flat grind, and a 4" full tang handle. Finish the blade to 220 grit, no more, and put the best edge you can on it. Handle material can be anything cheap, Dymondwood is ideal but anything will work.
These blades will be broken after testing so no point in doing anything fancy. Try to make sure the flat ricasso area is the same hardness as the blade because that's where I will do the hardness test.
If you need steel, let me know. Several people have extra, we can work something out.
Here's what will happen:
You make the knife. Do your best effort at heat treatment. Do more than one knife if you wish to try variations on the HT but make sure you mark them as to what you did so you will know what worked best. If you want advice on how to HT, ask. Otherwise, do the HT any way you wish. The idea here is to test
your process to make sure you can get an effective HT.
Mail the knife to me. My address is:
Ray Rogers
PO Box 126
Wauconda, WA 98859
I will collect all the knives, do a hardness test on them, maybe re-grind the blade if I think the edge geometry needs improvement, etch the maker's name on it, and then I'll mail the whole bundle to Eli at my expense.
Eli will re-sharpen if he thinks the blade needs it or if I re-ground it, then he'll do a brass rod test, some simple cutting tests, and then break the blade to examine the grain.
At that point, we'll let you know by email how it came out and suggest what you need to do to improve your HT if necessary. You can have your blade back if you want to include return postage AND PACKAGING (in other words, a box within a box) when you send it to me.
Anybody can participate but understand that this is not a contest. The aim is to help the new people come up to speed on their HT. So, get started and try to have your blade in the mail and on it's way to me by July 15. That's a little more than two weeks to make a rough finished knife. If you already have the steel, as most seemed to, then that should be enough time but if you think you need more just say so...