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The Newbies Arena Are you new to knife making? Here is all the help you will need.

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  #16  
Old 10-01-2012, 09:00 AM
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Crex Crex is offline
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Sounds like a great place to search out an old backcountry smith and learn how it's done basic primitive. What a chance for further education!


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  #17  
Old 10-01-2012, 12:40 PM
Imakethings Imakethings is offline
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A bit late, but I'm going to throw in my 2 cents. Now I'm going to admit up front that this is NOT going to make an awesome knife, but it will make a good one.

Use a leaf spring off a car or truck.
If you go slow with the grinding, with frequent cooling you can retain the temper and heat treatment on the steel.
You're not going to end up with a perfect knife, but you will get one that is effective.

The second option is to use an old file and do the same deal, but you will have to adjust the temper a bit. You can do that by heat treating in an oven 475-550 degrees for about 45 min. Then doing your grinding and shaping, once again, go slow and keep it cool.
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  #18  
Old 10-01-2012, 12:52 PM
Doug Lester Doug Lester is offline
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My concern with getting the steel that hot is that you will over temper the steel for use as a knife. If I were tempering a blade made from a file that had been normalized to reduce the hardness, then quenched , I would not temper that hot. Have you had the opportunity to do this and then measure the hardness?

Doug


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  #19  
Old 10-02-2012, 07:09 PM
Imakethings Imakethings is offline
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To be quite honest, no I've not measured the hardness. This is commonly what I do to recycle any of my dead files and they end up making pretty decent knives.

The thing is you're not totally annealing it, you're just softening it up a bit.
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  #20  
Old 10-02-2012, 07:32 PM
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Ray Rogers Ray Rogers is offline
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Ya, Doug, looks like he's not normalizing and all that - just taking a hard file and going straight into tempering.

Even so, Things, what Doug means is that tempering temperature is too high for a file made from decent steel and maybe not high enough to make any difference to a leaf spring. Sure, it probably does make a serviceable knife but tempering in the 400 - 425F range and increasing the time to 1 hour would likely make a much better knife. As it is, you're making the steel much softer than it needs to be. For the leaf spring, I wouldn't temper it at all since it's already softer than a knife should be.

It doesn't make much difference to the grinding if you leave the steel a little harder as long as you're using high quality belts. I do all my grinding on steel much harder than what you're dealing with. Anyway, if you want to work without heat treating the steel then if you want the best possible knife you should get better results by lowering that tempering temperature ...


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  #21  
Old 10-02-2012, 11:04 PM
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Woodchuck Forge Woodchuck Forge is offline
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Rocketman where are you from. If you are close to Pacific you are close to me and a few other smiths. I would be happy to assist if possible. Let me know, I even have a bit of steel that might work well for you.

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  #22  
Old 10-03-2012, 02:13 AM
Imakethings Imakethings is offline
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Ray Rodgers, I'll try changing up what I'm doing for tempering on the next one and see how it wears.
Thanks for the advice.
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