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Old 04-01-2018, 08:48 AM
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Ray Rogers Ray Rogers is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Wauconda, WA
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There are other knife makers in the UK, hopefully some will read this and reach out to you.

Whenever we say "buy some steel" most everyone responds that they are on a budget and can't afford it. If you want to make a good knife you'll find a way to afford it, it's really not expensive. Any knife supply place will have small quantities of steel available. Any machine tool supplier or machine shop will have suitable steel and the shops might have scrap pieces you could have or at least they can tell you where to buy it. What you want is a simple carbon steel (meaning with as little alloy as possible) that has very near one percent carbon in it. Your designations for steel are different than ours but over here examples would be 1084, 1095, and O1. Check your phone books and Google search, you should be able to find a knife supply house, metal supplier, or at least a machine shop.

Another thing, motor oil is the worst possible choice for a quenching oil. Get some canola oil from the grocery store and use that instead. Peanut oil is good too but usually expensive.

When you have a piece of good steel it will be flat and straight and soft. That means you don't have to do the annealing step (that step with the sand over night. Sand, by the way, is not good for that. Use kitty litter, wood ash, or vermiculite instead).

Get some good sharp files and use those to shape the bevels on your knife instead of the sanders. A good file will cut that new soft steel very easily and you will get better bevels which will improve your cutting geometry. You want the edge to be about 1mm thick with a nice flat taper down from the spine of the blade. Do your heat treating (harden, quench, temper) and the clean it up and file it down some more making the edge even thinner. Then sand it until its pretty, put a handle on it, and only then sharpen it.

That should get you started ....


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