in deep now

[walker72]

i just bought out a retiring knife maker from my area. and i am having a blast. every thing a man needs to make knives. i've got 4 blades back from h/t and am going to start putting them together tonite. this will be my frist knives.

i hope you all dont mind me picking your brains. there is alot of good info and talented people here. thanks in an advance.

walker

[combs6136]

Now lets see some pictures;;;;;;; Welcome to the forum..........carl

[Ray Rogers]

And now for the bad news: no one has "every thing a man needs to make knives". For instance, you wouldn't be sending out your blades for heat treating if you had your own furnace. Yup, you'll be buying tools for a long, long time yet. If you're like the rest of us though, you'll enjoy that part of knife making too!

Welcome to our addiction....

[Doug Lester]

Ya, Ray, and don't forget the tank of liquid nitogen for cryo treating and then there's that hydrolic press for making damascus and the power hammer to draw it out with. I bet he doesn't even have half the tools he's going to "need".

Doug Lester

[walker72]

almost everything and more than i had (lol).

i have a question i sent three blades to tks and one to piedmont metal (i think) my friend
put it with his batch of knives the ones from tks were black the one from the other didnt have no where near the scale build up? it wasnt black at all. what are they doing different?

thanks for the correction ray.

walker

[chiger]

Hey walker. Welcome to the brotherhood of the twisted. Yep, your in for it now!

As to your question, if the atmospheric controlled furnace is set right and functioning properly and they are all from the same steel...there shouldn't be a big difference. The procedures for heat treating most steels is pretty well established.

I don't know the folks you used, but it is possible that one is using a modern atmospheric control oven and the other is doing it old school. Maybe that would account for the difference?

Maybe one does a clay coat and the other doesn't. depends on the kind of steel of course.

Who cost more, how are delivery times and can you live with that much scale in the allowances for finish grinding would probably be my only other concerns. All other things (hardness, blade trueness, ect...) being equal.

Maybe mete or one of the metallurgists on the Network here can give you a scientific reason, but those are some of the things I've seen.

chiger,

[Ray Rogers]

Walker,

I agree with Chiger that it was probably that they used a different process and there are far more ways to heat treat a particular steel than one would think at first glance. Some steels like ATS-34 for instance, can be either air quenched or oil quenched. You can imagine that would make a difference in surface scale. Some guys might use inconel foil wrap while another uses a neutral gas like argon. The results can be acceptable with any of those methods but they are not exactly equal. This is probably the primary reason why makers who focus on blade performance are likely to do their own heat treating. It's the only way to know precisely what you have and the only way to squeeze out that last bit of performance from any given steel...

[6T7L71CPE]

Welcome walker! So you bought out the shop, did he show you some good knife making stuff too? I've had three 440C blades done at TKS, they were dark grey but not what I'd call scale.

[walker72]

robert the three from TKS came back grey not a big deal the other had a dull apperance. he has shown me alot and only lives 30 mins from me.


got one glued up hope i did right ive got epoxy every where.

thanks for explaining about the color difference. all the blades are d2.

walker

[ranger1]

Epoxy everywhere?" sounds about right." Thats the way it usually goes for me.