File work on spine

Hi

Is it possible to do file work on the spine of a stainless-steel blade if it is already heat-treated and tempered?

Right now, I order premade blades because I do not have the equiptment to make my own. I would like to do some file work and engraving though....is this possible?

Yes, with diamond coated needle files and a buffer.

It depends on how hard you are willing to work to make it happen. As the blade comes from the manufacturer (Store) it is probably to hard to file. You can heat up the spine and aneal that part of the blade (and tang) to get it soft enough to file (keep the cutting edge in water so it will not get hot). You may have trouble doing this and you can ruin the heat treatment that was done on the blade leaving it useless until re-heat treated. You must be careful. This is not a real good option.

OR

You could just heat the entire thing up and anneal it. File work it and send it in to someone to get it heat treated again. Another option but not as good as making your own blades.

The BEST thing you could do is get some files and a vise and make your own blades. It is harder to do this way and takes longer but you will be a LOT more satisfied with the result when you look at it and are amazed that YOU made it. There are a lot of people that make very high quality knives, even folders, without any fancy tools. They just file everything to shape and polish by hand. You may want to consider giving this a shot, I bet you would prefer doing it this way.

Let us know what you do.