progress report on first knife

well, i finished the 0-1 steel down to a 120 grit, still had an edge of .050. I had a group of students going to our metal shops for heat treating of wrenches they had made, so i got my assistant to take my knife and heat treat it with the wrenches.

After heating, quenching and a temper cycle the hardness was 68, so they did two more cycles on it. It's now 58.

I've now started final polishing with sandpaper, it's going to take forever to get it down to a final edge, but it's coming along, slowly but surely.....

Show us some pictures, John! Like to see how it's progressing.

Hey that's great John! I agree with Don. Show us some pics. Let's see how that puppy's coming along.

If you don't mind my asking, what was the 0-1 quenched in to get an RC of 68 even after the first minimum stress relieve temper (guessing about that)?

To get the edge down pretty fast and really nice and clean, you can start out with a coarse diamond hone (I like EZ Lap's continuous diamond hones in the 1X4 size). Then I recommend you switch to a 220 grit norton waterstone (grainger.com has them for 19.95) to clean up the scratches. For the second half you rub the blade on the stone, not the stone on the blade. It's very fast and leave nice sharp lines for the transition to paper.

If you're finishing completely by hand, that'll cut your time in half compared to just using sandpaper alone.

oven was at 1600 F, 15 min duration, quenched in 'quenching oil' don't know what temp. It was tempered for 30 minutes at 500 F. First rockwell test was with a brail bit and was RC68. Tempered it twice more for one hour each at 500 F.....