What do you do for tempering/hardening the blades Dave ?. Is it just gentle grinding or do you heat them up ?. Theres a bloke on another forum im on has been making knives of recent, and he's been experimenting for that sort of thing(not that I understand it, not wood is it
)
I dont think he'll mind me posting a pic.
He's doing me a steak knife for cutting up my dinner, but I dont feel I can press him on it as its a freebie for some nice timbers I've sent him for the handles.
NOTE - THIS ISN'T MY WORK.
View attachment 109784
That's a nice knife, by the way. The level of entry for really clean knives is pretty high because there are so many makers. I have made knives, but more of the japanese style without bolster because that's what a guy with a grinder will do to avoid the grinding near the tang there (with the groove in the bottom). I don't have a setup to do that cleanly on a hardened knife.
The biggest gain with custom makers, in my opinion, is the ability to get a knife with a reasonably thin longer flat grind that's well finished and on a knife hard enough to hold a honed edge rather than be lower carbon with the intent to be steeled.
Stock removal method is probably more common on knives than custom chisels (I like to hammer mine to initial shape - they need to be annealed, anyway, and it gives me a chance to thermal cycle the steel without extra steps (which is heating in descending temperatures - something I need to practice, but that probably isn't getting much gain). Then, the chisels are (they're not really annealed from a metallurgical sense, but the temper is heated out to them and they air cool) soft enough to file and grind and then I reharden them - that gives me control over the hardness on the blade while leaving the tang less hardened so that someone getting rough first notices they may get a slight bend and knock off the behavior - files are notoriously hard and brittle and even when they're just ground and tempered back a little, they can end up being more brittle than expected.
commercial heat treat of a specific alloy would be more predictable, but I haven't settled into bar stock to use instead of files yet (will do shortly), and I hope to never have to use commercial heat treat as I think this stuff can be done well in a forge, as well as mediocre or short cycle commercial heat treat.
the mule below is a test knife that I made out of stock thought to be the same as V11 (admittedly, it's just laying in my shop covered with filth now). V11 has to be heated to a higher temperature and at the time, I didn't want to lengthen my forge to make big knife, but I may now in the future. It's hard (chisel hardness, definitely over 60), very thin and blindingly sharp aided by that thinness. It takes time to make knives because of the steps doing surface finish, and It's kind of a pain, so the shine mostly wore off - chisels being more of a draw for me.