work in progress

[ZeroGravitas]

Will it crack in the quench? Let you know next week, it's either gonna be a blade or a learning experience
Forged from a 5160 car spring and rough ground, the blade is ~7/8" x 5", I'm going to leave the primitive forge marks on the spine and ricasso.

Forged blank and source spring


I wish I took picks of the blade pre-form. It's the blank but curved like a scythe, and when the blade bevels are forged, the stretching of the metal straightens out the blade.

This weekend I'll do the heat treatment: normalize three times, harden (oil quench, canola at 100 F), then temper at 375 F (light yellow) three times, and finally temper the spine only with a torch at about 600 F (blue). Heat treatment is pretty magical to me. I really like the fact that when the steel is at the right temp for normalizing and hardening (cherry red, critical temp) it loses it's magnetic properties. My high temp thermometer is a old speaker magnet.

[Netpackrat]

That's outstandingly cool.

[McClarkus]

Neat - I am someday going to use leaf spring to make some brutally tough throwing kinives

[Denis]

Wow.

Shiny magic.

Wow.

[Bullspit]

Nice anvil and nice anvil stand!

A couple of observations about cracking.

You might want to eliminate any sharp corners at the point where the tang enters the knife body. This is a source of cracking in quench.

Also, go a couple of grits up in polishing the blade. I haven't seen it, but I've been told that rough lines like that can cause cracking.

What kind of forge are you using?

[Bob K]

Really lookin' good.

[ZeroGravitas]

Bullspit,
I will work those 120 grit marks off the blade while it's still annealed...good advice; my blade making mentor said the same thing today. I did round the tang-to-blade corner, it's hard to see in the picture.

I'm using a 2 burner LP forge, it's sitting on top of the stove. Thanks for the compliment on the anvil stand! It's made out of a leftover 2" x 10", with each piece staggered to create the tool hanging parts. I think the design is from the $50 Knife Shop book by Wayne Goddard, I just built it, and moved everything inside a couple weeks ago.

[Mud_Dog]

Wow, that is an AWESOME setup! I must say I am green with envy.

The Budweiser can just adds extra finesse!

[Bullspit]

Your anvil stand beats my chunk of log by a mile. I would have liked to have seen your blade in various stages to see how you dealt with the curve.

Really a nice job to go from a round coil to flat blade like that. Hurry and get it hardened and handled!

[arctictom]

Nice work.