Making some knives

[MauleSkinner]

It’s my daughter’s boyfriend’s birthday tomorrow, and I decided to make him a set of crook knives. They’ll be here in a week, so I have a little time.
While I was at it, I decided to make myself a knife as well.

The steel is O1, 1/8” thick for the crook knives, 7/64” thick for mine. A few hours with a hacksaw and files, and removed file marks with a sharpening stone. I didn’t have a good form for bending the crook knives, but they didn’t turn out too bad.

Ready for heat treating!

Ok…struggling with photos…hopefully I’ll get that figured out soon.

[MauleSkinner]

Well, photo uploading is eluding me. Never mind, I guess.

[Aram]

Well, photo uploading is eluding me. Never mind, I guess.

I can upload them for you, if you like. PM incoming

[Aram]

Here you go

[MauleSkinner]

Thanks, Aram!

Obviously the bottom two are the crook knives. I plan to make the handles in two pieces for those, with a mortise in one side and then glued together.

For my knife, I decided to try through-drilling the handle for the tapered tang, and peening the end of the tang to help secure it. The goal is something similar to a Mora 122 to complement my 120 that I use for whittling.

[MauleSkinner]

Heat treating today…

No serenade,
No fire brigade,
Just pyromania!


A local store had the “one log fire” on clearance, so I decided to give that a try. Light the center, and used my leaf blower to force air to get it good and hot. I used a locking pliers to hang the blades into the fire. By the time it burned the center hole big enough for the crook blades to fit, it had also burned through a split in the other side…you can see by he one picture that he log burned through on the bottom because of the blower. I had to hold both the blower and the steel in just the right place to get it to work. Didn’t work out as well as I hoped, but it still worked.

Quenched in peanut oil and wiped off, next I’ll scrub them with a scotch rite pad and temper them in a toaster oven.

Aram will hopefully have the pics up soon.

Thanks for looking!