So, I’m back in Maine on my mission to finally make a knife from raw materials. (Cue the caveat about making anything from scratch requires inventing the universe…) Unlike the Beginner Blacksmithing class, there were only two students in this session. Both of us had previously taken other classes, so we knew a thing or two. The other student brought a billet of twist Damascus he made in an earlier class. I was working on the provided 1084 steel. One of the first things mentioned was that 10-series steel is basic carbon steel with no other elements intentionally included. The last two digits being how many hundredths of a percent of the material is carbon. So theoretically, 1084 is 0.84% carbon and 99.16% iron. Of course, there will always be some contaminants and impurities, but these were not enough for us to worry about.

Unlike Beginner Blacksmithing, we only used the propane forge for the heating in this class. As there were only two students, we only lit one forge. There was enough space for both billets. The first operation was straightforward – take down the corners and begin tapering the tip of the blade. This gave me flashbacks to the last class when I had trouble setting tapers… but I had no similar issues this time. I’d learned my lessons there.

That red hot is too cold for forging, so it’s going back in the forge

Continuing on making the basic shape, we needed to set a shoulder at the base of the blade and continue the rough preform. One thing to remember is that when you strike hot steel, the displaced material will move towards all of the edges of the hammer. And working flat stock on the edge means each hit thickens the work piece. We don’t want that, as the flat stock started out thicker than the knife needs to be. So every other heat or so, it is important to go over the flat face to narrow the steel back down again. Though a combination of edge on and flat on hammer strikes, you will give the steel no option but to move in the direction you’re trying to coax it. Eventually, we did set a shoulder to define the base of our blade section. For anyone who missed the last article, a shoulder in steel is just an interior angle made by hitting the steel when its on the corner of the anvil. It has a couple of uses, including providing a place to lock the work piece against the edge of the anvil and help keep it from moving as you hammer.

It’s taking shape, but still has work to do

With the blade end crudely roughed out, we turned our attention to the tang. This starts with setting another shoulder at least twice as deep as the one we did for the blade. Why? Because the handle is going to be narrower than the blade at the ricasso (the unsharpened part just before the grip). This started a general flare on the tang that we then set out to exaggerate by spreading the end of it. Spreading was another operation I hated. A standard blacksmithing hammer has a square face on one side and a narrow, rectangular face on the other. This narrow face is called the cross-peen. It is used for this operation because while steel does move in all directions when struck, it moves more along the path of least resistance. The narrow profile of the face means it moves more along the shortest path to the edge. This pushes the steel mostly in two directions, away from the long edge of the face. A series of precise strikes will keep it moving in those directions, thinning out and widening the piece a lot faster than is possible with the square face. Mostly we wanted to create a flare and bevel the tang along its long axis from the ricasso to the end. I don’t know the reason why he wanted this bevel, he didn’t given an explanation on the why. But, I did as instructed, and got the basic preform completed.

It’s starting to look a lot like a knife blank.

Now, the problem with that blank is simple – the blade is still of uniform thickness. It’s fairly obvious to anyone who looks at a knife that it has a wedge shape from edge to spine. Rather than grind in all of that bevel and waste all that material, we got it started by hammering it in. There is a caveat. It’s that part I mentioned before about steel moving in all directions when struck. If I just started putting that bevel in as it stands, the blade would bend back like an inside-out sickle. To avoid that nonsense, we pre-bent it forward, so putting the bevel in would straighten the blade. I even got a picture of it with the steel still glowing. Though that threw off the camera a bit.

I debated hooking it further, but didn’t need it.

To hammer in the bevel is simple, you just need to keep the hammer face at a consistent angle off true while striking the steel. Oh, and matching that angle the other way when you flip the work piece to get the other side and keep the edge centered. Though at this point, it was an operation I was more than comfortable with. A bevel is just another form of taper. Anyway, putting the bevel in was the last hammering operation we were going to do. It was far from the last heating operation we were going to do. The first thing we had to do was normalize the metal. All this heating and hammering had grown the grain structure and work-hardened the steel. So we needed to undo that through a process called thermocycling.

I’m unclear on exactly why the process does what it does, but I can repeat how we achieved it. In short we heated the metal to successively cooler temperatures and let it cook to black in between. The important part of this operation was making sure that the heat was evenly distributed while not letting any area get too hot. Because we had a complex shape, there were plenty of spots that heated up faster, and proximity to the burner inside the forge also contributed to the uneven heating. So even during the heating, we pulled the blades out of the forge to let the heat spread though the metal several times. Once we reached our target color, we would rest the blade spine-down in the cold coals from the coal forge to cool to black. Why the coals? Because the options for setting it down were the metal anvil, the metal table, or the porous carbon coals. Of these, the coals (actually coke and ash) were the least conductive of heat, so it cooled slowly there. Having the heat quickly sucked out by, say, the highly conductive thermal mass of the anvil, would not produce the desired changes in the steel’s structure. Once cooled to black, we would repeat the heat to the next cooler color in the sequence. We went first to dull orange, then bright red, and last to barely glowing. Then we let it go to room temperature.

It’s still blunt

Once the thermocycling was done, we shut off the forge. We were not done with heat, but we were done with the forge. We went into the next room where all the expensive grinders were set up and went back to kindergarten. Actually, we were planning the profile of the knives. To do that, we traced the blank we’d forged onto scrap paper, then sketched out potential shapes for the blade and handle. Once we found one we liked, we cut it out and glued it to the side of the steel with spray adhesive. Funnily enough, despite all the high quality metalworking machinery, the box of art supplies lacked a pencil sharpener. So the instructor made use of the “Three-thousand dollar pencil sharpener”, aka, a belt grinder.

Just pencilling it in.

At this point, it was time for the students to start grinding. The goal was to make the shape of the steel approximate what had been planned out on the paper. There were two areas we were using for this operation. One was the flat region with a backing plate behind it called the platen. The other were the wheels at either end of this called the platen wheels. The only other region on the belt we would touch would be the slack, that is, the unsupported span between wheels where the belt has more give. We wouldn’t touch the slack until the very end when we put the sharp edge on. So, I used the three thousand dollar pencil sharpener to grind out the profile, aiming for a fairly classic clip-pointed shape.

I have finalized the shape. Get used to that profile.

Once the profile was in, we had another long grinding operation. This is flattening the tang. It was already pretty flat, but hand-hammering will leave a fairly uneven surface. To best fit the handle scales on, we needed something smoother. A continuous plane from ricasso to end was what was needed on both sides. This took a while, especially for the other student, as his blank was beefier to better preserve the pattern. Thankfully, we had magnets to hold the steel with, as it would be impossible to bare-hand this operation. We’d lose our fingers even trying. Once both faces of the tang were smooth and free of forge scale (the tell-tale sign we’d taken out the deepest of the hammer marks) it was time to drill the pin holes. We’re doing it now because the metal is the softest it will be while having the knife shape, and drilling hardened steel is a pain in the bits.

The drilling station is a place where a larger class would bottleneck. There are only three drill presses in the room. Since there were three operations to be done, they were each set up with the appropriate cutting steel for one and we moved the work from press to press. With only two of us, we never ran into any contention for the drill presses. If the class were full, there’d be a line stuck waiting to get into sequence. Anyway, before the first cut, we had to site the pin holes. We did this first with a caliper and a sharpie to mark where we wanted to drill, then a center punch to give the drill a place to bite into exactly where we told it to. With the center punch’s guide marks, we drilled the initial holes, then moved to the next press. There, a half inch drill was set up. We were not pushing that all the way through the steel, but instead using the conical tip to chamfer the edges of the pin holes. Last, there was a reamer set up to clean out the holes and remove any burrs the chamfer operation left inside.

A lot of prep work goes into making the later steps easier.

So, we were now ready to heat treat. The instructor set the heat treating kiln to fifteen hundred degrees and while it was warming up, we picked out handle material. I spotted immediately a brick of black walnut that I knew I wanted. The instructor was surprised that it was still there. But it had to be cut into scales. First it was split lengthwise on a band saw, then I took it to the pencil sharpener to thin down the halves to a more appropriate size. It was at this point that I suffered my only injury in this class. I did burn myself three or four separate times during Beginner Blacksmithing, each one a testament to stupidity. Hot metal is hot. This time, it was an accident. The first knuckle of the middle finger on my right hand brushed the belt. Now, the grinder belt has at this point gleefully removed steel and wood without difficulty. It cared not a whit that it had come in contact with human flesh. Thankfully, the contact was slight, and I pulled back quickly. It only took off the outermost layer of skin on a patch less than three-eighths of an inch across. While it wasn’t severe and barely even bled, I decided to work on something else for a moment.

Thankfully, it came time to load up the kiln and bake our blades. There was what looked to be a ceramic rack in there where we placed our steel in a neat row, two spaces apart. Because the kiln is small and the temperature differential is so great, each time the door opens, the temperature inside drops rapidly. So loading and unloading had to be done as quickly as possible without getting sloppy. We only needed to bake for five minutes, so in this time, the instructor took the lid off the quench tank and started up the ventilation to draw off any smoke generated. Thankfully, the actual quenching was not dramatic. While it had to be done quickly, and coordinated between the person whose blade was going in the oil and the people operating the kiln door, we avoided any flare-ups. So, no photogenic fireballs, and no burnt students.

The last operation of the day was tempering. Once cooled post-quench, we put the blades into a toaster oven a four hundred and fifteen degrees for two hours. Yes, it was an ordinary, run of the mill consumer toaster oven as found in any appliance section. Since we put it in at five in the evening and class was over for the day, my last picture is actually the first picture of day two – the knife post tempering, along with my handle scales.

This is technically a day 2 picture. I couldn’t get a shot of it in the toaster oven.

Continued on Day 2