WIP.... custom carbon Sabatier

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DevinT

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I bought some blanks from a guy at the Vegas knife show about 20 years ago. I can't remember now which company/family made them except that they are Sab's.

This one is carbon steel and has almost 10 inches of blade length. It has not been heat treated yet. I plan on doing my multi step HT on it.

I haven't decided on the handle material yet.

We'll take some pics of the process and post them.

With the recent posts on Sab's I thought that this would be fun.

Hoss

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Cool, I can't wait to see how it turns out.
 
This is really interesting. As a user who doesn't know much about the heat treat and tempering processes, how do you know how to approach this with a blade forged by someone else? It might be common knowledge (not to me) about the steel used in Sabs, but this seems like it could be difficult. Is this a trial and error process, or are you pretty confident about how to approach this? Or is the heat treat process generic enough that you can apply some general principles regardless of the steel composition and feel confident about the outcome?

Whatever your answers are, this seems like a really cool project. Curious to see the outcome.
 
most carbon steels fall into a pretty small window temp wise. Just to make sure I heat treated and tested one by measuring the hardness, and breaking it to look at the grain size. Good hardenability and very fine grain, lookin' good so far.

Hoss
 
Thanks for the response. As an outsider, the information is great to hear. To me this sounded like a puzzle.
 
a few shots of the heat treating.

Hoss

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Nice Hoss, It is funny but I was thinking of try my hand at a sab or two. looks like you beat me to the punch. I may still giv it a try though nice wip btw.
 
Please tell us anything that you learn from doing these. I'm not sure you can learn much from making knives these days, you old master, you; but there has to be some kind of revelatory quality to working on world class knives from another time and culture.
 
squaring, splitting, and flattening the stablized ebony. That's John doing the prep on the handle material.

Hoss

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Whoa.

Anybody need a car? My kidney? A pint of blood a week?
 
The handle is fit and glued up.

About these knives, the blanks I got were rough forged and trimmed. They had to be fully annealed, straightened, rough ground, hardended and tempered, straightened, finish ground, polished. The tangs needed a lot work also. These blades are heavy when they come and need a lot of grinding and straightening. It is easier to make a new knife from scratch.

The steel is a simple carbon steel with good hardenability and fine grain. The steel is clean and was nice to finish. Another couple of hours of work and this one will be done.

Thanks for your support.

Hoss
 

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