Long Time – No Post and Striking Knives

It’s been a while since I posted anything on here. Spring has been busy and I have been in the shop some, but overall when I get overloaded with work, life and trying to carve out time for anything, I just stop managing time well. Or I should say even worse than usual.

So, sitting back and writing something coherent seems an impossible goal vs. scrolling in spare time and becoming even more jelly-minded.

I anticipate that I’ll be back to more regular posting at some point, but not in the next several weeks.

If I’m in this kind of self-described irresponsible but infrequent kind of situation – you know the type if you’ve been in it, when every second of your waking abilities could be consumed by something else, but you still sneak in the shop for a few hours to evade reality, I tend to do small things that people propose rather than binding myself into some big time soaking interest.

That’s been washing tung oil to see if it will dry harder and faster, a few odds and ends that friends have requested, and some knives.

Above is a pair of knives made out of 52100 that will fit a common mill knife handle. I didn’t even know what a mill knife is. These knives are a case, which has become uncommon for me at this point, where I don’t know for sure if I didn’t affect the temper when grinding. I’ve gotten good at not having that happen, but strangely enough when freehanding these bevels with a belt sander and a spray bottle, finer ceramic paper is actually better than coarse paper. Coarse is far better dry.

Why? The spray bottle is leaving a film of water on the belt, and you spray intermittently on the tool for two reasons – to make sure the water doesn’t boil, and to keep the belt wet. On coarse paper, the water ends up residing between the piles of ceramic grit and I think it just isn’t as effective.

I’ll send these out, anyway. I can make another pair if needed. They would be fine for me, but I kind of feel like if I make something for someone else, it ought to be the best they could get and the standard is higher than things I make for myself.

then someone I don’t know in England asked if I would make them “a knife”. Since they won’t go in a heavy duty knife, I said I would make them a knife for cost of materials, but I just needed to know what they want. By the time exchanges were done over the last few days, it turned out they wanted four.

these are 26c3. It’s not like it’s a burden to take on something like this. Everything you make is a little different and good can be done on the first try. Better than just good takes a little thinking. In the case of these knives, the induction forge will heat the steel as long as it’s around 0.1″. The bevels are ground on after the fact, but I have no interest in heating a big square and grinding a whole lot more than the bevel, so they are cut near to a point but with a blunt edge. That point, the induction forge comes a little short on. So for the last of the work in the heat treatment process, I have the torch going again. Which is a little bit of an art – you’re pushing to get the whole knife in good shape, and then get the thing into the forge for really only about 5 seconds to get the tip where it should be and then quench. if you don’t do it, the point is soft. Who wants a knife that will be good after a tenth of an inch is ground off? Not me. These should be blistering. At the same time, it would be easy to overheat the tip because it brightens color very fast. Instead of being soft, it would break off easily.

A mama-bear situation occurs in the middle, and figuring that stuff out is what makes you really own the knowledge rather than just reading about it. It’s what I like.

These are also all quenched in brine now. Brine has a bad reputation, but in fast transition steels, it’s just better. 26c3 is not difficult to heat treat, but it’s fast transition. If you push the heat up a level, it will do OK in fast oil like parks. But you can back off a bit from that and get it in a faster quench like brine and it will just be shitting in tall cotton level. That brings another obligation – no cracks and control warp. Which I’ve figured out as part of this.

The 26c3 knives are 64/65 hardness after a double 400F temper. that’s just stellar. They’re not undertempered, they are just very crisp and will break no more easily than would O1 knives at 61 hardness. they probably will tolerate a little more abuse than O1 would at that.

For scale, those knives above are 0.1″ thick (the first two are 0.8″) and all but the one narrow knife are around 0.75″ wide. They’re all pretty substantial.

If my brain is tired and I don’t feel like inflicting gen. pop with the normal disorderly stuff that I usually post, for some reason I can still go to the shop and manage to do something useful with things like these striking knives. if there was legitimate money in making random tools like this, it would almost seem like I’m doing the wrong thing for a living. But 10 hours a day of freehand work and tired eyes, I’d probably want to go back to making a living at a desk.

Hope everyone who reads here is doing well. No crisis here or anything that caused the lack of posts, just lack of all of the ingredients that make “i’m going to go post something” happen.