Here are a few tried and true/ traditional designs. You will have to scale them. I am no expert. Knife designs are subtle. Just cause you can draw it does not mean it will fit your hand or balance properly. I highly recommend that you cut a design out of scrap and actually hold it in your hand. Try all your changes out of scrap before you use your precious high carbon steel. Your sawblades will probably be a tool steel such as L6 alloy. It will be very durable, will rust, will not get extremely hard by todays standards and is a great place to start. I recommend making a Bushknife style blade first. It will have simple facets and no high polish or fancy scales. Also, hardening and tempering will not be so critical. Plain utility is what you are after. Use 5min epoxy and brass rods to anchor your scales. Surplus flooring or cocobolo deckwood is a cheap scource of stable scales that will look good too. Google "greenpete knife making video" for a good basic tutorial. Above all HAVE FUN...........................Russ K.
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Last edited by Russ K on Sun May 15, 2011 10:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Thanks for the compliments guys. I don't use my plasma table for cutting out my blades. I forge to shape out of damascus steel that I make. This last year I have about quit making knives. Managed to burn myself out I think. Currently I am setting up my shop to start doing some powder coating work. I will attach a couple of pics of the knives I have made. If I can give advice about making blades I'll be glad to help ya.
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plain ol Bill
Hypertherm 1250
Duramax machine torch
Corel Draw X6
Sheetcam
Mach3
5 x 10 self built table
Lots of ineptitude
I would have posted some pics earlier but the Chino airshow is currently underway and the flight path is right over my house.
I have not made a knife since 2006. I intend too, my wife lost hers and I have promised to do another. I still have my personal shop with my knife making equipment. My wife had a diving accident in mid 06 that changed ours lives forever. For the good without a doubt.
The fixed blades were a project that I did for guys in our church going off to fight for freedom. It was the funnest knife making project I have done. I did it in collaboration with five other guys who had no knife making experience at all. It was a blast.
The folder (what I like to make most) features some "timascus" out of plain ol bill's shop for the scales/handle
It is a chem etch set up. I have two of them. I like the one from martronics because it does more than mark metal. It makes some awesome signs and stuff for our machines out of aluminum. It does glass too, but I have not tried that yet. I have the super kit thingy that also makes the stencils, so it is easy to customize and you do not have to send out and wait on your stencils. You can mark about any type of metal in two ways (ac and dc) One puts an oxide layer (black rust) on the surface and the second removes material and puts the black oxide in the surface. One you can feel and the other is pretty flat like a bluing.
Glad to help. If I can find some pics of the aluminum signs, I will post em. They are a thin aluminum with a 3M PSA adhesive on the back and "undeveloped" color on the front. You use a sheet of transparency paper for inkjet printers and print your art on it as saturated as you can for crisp edges, then expose it to a halogen lamp for a given time to develop the image on the stencil or aluminum sign. Works great.
A tip on plasma cutting a knife profile: leave a little extra around the cutting edge, about an .125" for your heat affected zone. This way you will have a hard cutting edge after you grind it to final shape. It does not take much heat to lose the hardness with tool steel. Even 500f will lose a few points on the Rc scale.
Wow WSS and Bill, I salute you in your craftmanship! Very impressive. Nice to see craftman putting out product with such quality such as these. Again I bow my hat to your work.
I saw the knife design post and liked the knives posted better than the ones I had made for some local varsity scouts. But I did do some chinese stars with the knives for these scouts. My husband was the scout leader and they all had way too much fun making knives and chinese stars. I don't have a finished picture because one of the scouts had a grinding wheel and they were going to finish the edges at his house. But my cub scout thinks there cool even without the edges sharp. So I figured this is as good a place as any to post these.
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Thanks for posting the Chinese stars, I have been wanting to cut a few of those out too.
I can remember when I was younger the local hardware store sold those.........
Me and a few friends had a lot of fun putting an edge on those things and sticking them in anything we could find to throw them at
I will say my neighbor at the time got sick of them going between the spaces in the fence and ending up in his yard.
Ahh, those were the days.
WSS, would you be willing to share the dxf files for the fixed blade "Tactical" type knives you made for the Church members that are serving ? If you cannot share the files, can you provide a little more detailed info on those knives.......type of steel, thickness, dimensions, etc. ?
They are absolutely beautiful and I have some friends that would really appreciate something like that for their upcoming deployment.
Any feedback on how they performed or held up to the demands of the soldiers ?
I would love to try my hand at some knives, any additional advice you could give a beginner ?
I can post a pic of the paper idea template. These were ground by hand from a 2" X 1/4" flat bar. A Hypertherm 380 w/hand torch was used to get some of the excess off before putting to a grinder. They are 440C SS, back when they were made we decided to go with this because it is reliable, however today there are quite a few proven materials that would probably perform even better.
I have the template floating around in my tool box, I will get to my scanner and then post it. Might as well turn it to a DXF too. These will feel large in a "standard" size bare hand but gloved they are a nice fit. You can scale the handle size and/or curves to your taste.
WSS and Bill, I salute you in your craftmanship! Very impressive. Nice to see craftman putting out product with such quality such as these. Again I bow my hat to your work.
