I'm quite a fan of these German chip carving knives
so for an experiment, I'm gonna try to make some
out of this old saw blade. I'm cutting a saw blade
into strips, now you could use an angle grinder for that
but I like to use my plasma cutter.
I ripped, pretty much, the entire blade into strips cause
I think it's gonna take me more than one try to get this right.
Now, hardened steel is pretty hard to work with
so I'm gonna soften all this by
heating it up to red hot in the wood stove
so I just buried my strips of metal in the ash bucket
to let it cool down really slowly.
I'm surprised the paint is still on there, but with them
heated up and cooled down slowly,
now all the hardness is removed, which means
I can bend these relatively easily.
The next step us to grind it into a roughly
knife shape.
I started to wonder if it was really high carbon steel,
so I did a quick spark test, and I'm pretty sure it is.
I'm just smoothing out some of the graining marks
with this crummy little wet-wheel grinder that I found
at a yard sale.
Now, to get the hardness back, I need to heat it
to a dull red-hot, and dip it in
water to cool it down fast.
We're just trying to get it closer to the tang.
To get that part red-hot as well.
And, I think that's good enough.
Now, I also just hardened this test blade,
and that, in theory, might be so brittle
that it'll break if I bend it, so let's try that out.
Oh no. Oh, there it is.
But, it did take quite a bit of bending,
Given that this thing wouldn't actually snap,
I suspect this is not actually all that hard,
so I'm not even gonna try to temper it.
I'm just gonna polish it up now.
I'm doing the final sharpening by rubbing it on
a leather strap with some abrasive compound on it.
So, I can shave with it, but the question is
how long will it hold that sharpness?
Now, the thickness of this thing is about
a millimeter and a half,
which corresponds to about the thickness of the curve
of this six and a half inch blade.
I need to tweak the shape of that to precisely
fit into that cut.
I'm just drilling through the holes in the tang to locate
the rivet holes in the handle.
My rivets are just nails that I softened by heating up
and cooling them slowly. Glass rods would be better,
but I didn't have any handy.
So, that's the original, and here's my copy,
and it feels about the same.
So, I started making a second one of these,
and I think this one's a bit closer to the original,
except I made a really dumb mistake,
I cut this part off the wrong way,
because that way, when this pushes this way,
that's gonna come out of the wood, like this,
whereas really it needs to be in here, like this,
so that when you push on here, this side presses in.
So, this one unfortunately is junk.
I mostly use chip-carving knives, like this, to
round and chamfer edges of wood,
and especially in the corners. I don't have much use for
swords or daggers, so I figure by making a chip carving knife,
I'll end up with something that I'll actually use.