I've got some mails regarding my latest post here and I thought my answer to especially one mail could be quite interesting and I'll even expand on that a little because I didn't mention some stuff in the answer to the guy writing me the mail but he'll see
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So the mail was along the lines that one can now better see how my forging is efficient compared to stock removal.
I just need to explain that this is true under the specs I set out to have on my knives. For example it probably won't make much sense if my knives were only 3mm thick at the thickest part (nothing wrong with that).
I want that heavy taper though so I'd need use 6mm blanks in stock removal technique and grind the whole blank down and a lot of material and belts along the way. Just to visualize that for you - I'd have to use about 3 times the steel with the stock removal process compared to what I'm using now and about 2/3rds of that would end up beeing steel wool. Carbon steel is nothing that drives the costs higher by an significant amount but stock removal would come with a lot of time spent on the grinder and also using up lots of belts and those two parts are very cost inefficient.
The belts are expensive on their own but my time is even more expensive so forging at the end of the day saves me time and you as a customer therefore costs to get to what I'd like you to have.
Also I want to expand a little on the forging process itself so you may get a better picture of that. It's easy for me by now and I guess it looks easy in the videos as I hear that quite often but what's happening is rather complicated and needs some practice to do.
No need to actually do the following at home but just to imagine: The plastic properties can be simulated at home with some play dough to get a feel for the difficulties. Now everyone knows how easy that stuff is to move to a certain shape but what you've got to do to really get a feel of the difficulties of forging is to try to move that stuff to a certain shape using only blacksmith style tools.
The steel obviously is harder to move too even when red hot but that's not where your problems come from, but only a time issue. So that makes no difference to the parts that are hard to do at forging but just increases time. The thing that makes forging hard is that you can't hold the blank with your hands and also just move the material with some very rudimentary shaped tools like hammers and dies. So a lot of thinking is involved but once you've got the process and steps figured out its quite easy.
As a side note also bear in mind that the different forging steps can't be executed in a random progression. There is a totally different and irreversible outcome if you, for example, draw the heel at a different time in relation to drawing out the blade and so on. So that's very important too.
Hope that draws a clearer picture for you and as always. Any questions welcome.
but I I’ll happen today
