milkbaby
Well-Known Doofus
This is a practice knife that I hand forged from a strip of Alabama Damascus carbon damascus steel. I was shooting for "as forged" geometry with distal taper and as little grinding as necessary, but I made mistakes or learned lessons if I look at it another way.
One mistake was not cleaning up and flattening my forging enough. I also went too thin with the forged bevel and the edge. The knife warped badly in heat treat so after straightening as much I could, I still had to grind back a lot of height and re-flatten the blade road with grinding. Lessons learned for the future.
First hidden tang for me too. Learned that I have to get much longer drill bits to make the tang slot the way I wanted. I've been hoarding stabilized wood from a specific supplier for a few years and was happy to finally use his material on a handle. He's super friendly with good selection and pricing, so I was glad to finally use some of the material I got from him.
This was a tough project for me with the pandemic going on. I had the blade forged, heat treated, and cleaned up when my girlfriend broke up with me out of the blue. She was the only person I'd been spending time with during the pandemic thus by default my only support system, so this sat around unfinished about a month. It's my heartbreak knife, I guess.
One mistake was not cleaning up and flattening my forging enough. I also went too thin with the forged bevel and the edge. The knife warped badly in heat treat so after straightening as much I could, I still had to grind back a lot of height and re-flatten the blade road with grinding. Lessons learned for the future.
First hidden tang for me too. Learned that I have to get much longer drill bits to make the tang slot the way I wanted. I've been hoarding stabilized wood from a specific supplier for a few years and was happy to finally use his material on a handle. He's super friendly with good selection and pricing, so I was glad to finally use some of the material I got from him.
This was a tough project for me with the pandemic going on. I had the blade forged, heat treated, and cleaned up when my girlfriend broke up with me out of the blue. She was the only person I'd been spending time with during the pandemic thus by default my only support system, so this sat around unfinished about a month. It's my heartbreak knife, I guess.