Forging a Knife From an Old Ice Saw

oh snap now I was trying to lay an egg well well well what did Mother eBay provide for us today oh it's like an I saw or a hay saww I've seen these referred to as both this one has tiny serrated teeth whereas most of the I saw pictures I find show very large long teeth like a lumberjack saw so who knows maybe this is more of a hay saw in either case it's really cool and very Rusty and rust is a good sign because I think it means we're going to find out this is a non-alloyed forgeable steel and there may be some iron or something in here let's start checking that out the blade is divided into sections in case of damage you don't have to replace the entire blade and I can't see how those sections are attached to the spine yet I love how these old manufactured tools are constructed it's it's often very interesting I'm finding so here's uh for example the antique plane iron video the plane blade had a small sliver blade worthy High high carbon steel surrounded by iron iron is hard to come by these days but it was much more accessible than high carbon steel in the 1800s even more interesting was the antique Scythe we looked at which had a solid high-carbon steel core surrounded by mild steel seen here in this cross-sectional etching fascinating they were doing that 1800s here's the handle there's some good chunky metal back here that we might be able to put to use so what else here let's get to spar testing and figure some of this out I bet our blade is nice hardenable high carbon steel and the spine I think is going to be mild steel or iron the spark testing shows long flowering Sparks almost certainly high carbon steel that will be able to forge and quench into a hardenable suitable knife edge now as far as the spine very few Sparks very few Sparks and they don't split into more than twos or threes so again probably iron or mild steel mild mild steel probably iron let's see if we can get some of these sections off yeah check that out there's holes for rivets we didn't see those rivets with all the rust a't that interesting I'm going to go and drill out the rest of these I don't want to bend our blade material by uh chiseling it out if we can help it so how do I know where to drill well if you bang on the blades lightly with the jeweler's hammer it loosens things up to where you can make out a faint outline of the rivets on the spine we've gathered our high carbon steel bits now let's see exactly how hard they are you know a good HRC for a knife edge is going to be 58 to 62 for most deals so that's good 65 leaves some scratches 60 and 55 do not so very hardenable nice now the issue is how to get these together I have to strip all the rust off of them and now I have to forge them together probably to make a core which I'll sandwich some of this material around for sanmi so you can see there's several portions of the steeling going to be difficult to use this narrowed part here I'm not going to be able to forge weld that together with any efficiency and these holes here you know it's it's it's basically sort of either to cut the holes out like this or use just this part or cut tiny strips I don't know it's going to be tough y I don't know about that piece let's get our blade bits cleaned up and prepared for Forge welding I've decided to go ahead and stack them just whole like this we're going to deal with those holes by essentially trying to avoid them once this is all welded up we'll try to do some things to make sure we don't incorporate those holes into our Edge and that they're not revealed at the spine either all right we have our core material let's find our jacket material this is the handle and it just crumbles I think that is probably cast iron and that that's why it's crumbling let's go back to flattening out the spine of our cutter and see what we get it's forging just fine again I think that this is probably iron or mild steel probably iron so after flattening this looks like the best area as a candidate for our jacket material so we're going to clean this up and cut it up and then we'll get it ready for Forge welding here's what it's going to look like the soft spine material on the outside and our core material on the inside it's like a sandwich now we just got to forge weld all this together I've got the forge at sort of a neutral flame that blue we're going to take it out when the piece gets to Red Hot and apply our flux we're going to let the flux run everywhere and then take it over to the press and shut those gaps on the Press it's not welding when it goes to the Press cuz it's not a welding heat yet so we're closing the gaps and then we're going to put it back in the Forge heat it to welding temperatures and take it to the Anvil where we tap all the welds after the welds are set going to take it back to the press and flatten everything out now we have our piece welded together and the edges are cleaned so a quick dip in the feric chloride shows our Edge material is pretty well centered I'm going to take it back to the forge and draw it out a little more and see you know get a better idea of exactly what we have to work with at the desired thickness and as you can see we have some cracks opening up on this one Edge I suspect that's just metal fatigue from the iron and we're just going to have to be creative and work around that we'll have to forge SL grind our way uh around those I am going to go back to the Press though and draw out the tip a little more and then we're going to sort of Forge and grind our way around the the butt of the handle a little more next we're going to go over to the grinder and grind out our profile we don't Forge these to shape because our Edge material is midline right now if we do a lot of forging we can sort of upset that a little bit I like this I like the way this turned out this is great shape I'm going to do a small amount of bevel grinding here before we Gard it but not a lot as for thermal cycling our mystery steel we're going to do 1620 Fahrenheit 1500 Fahrenheit 1375 Fahrenheit normalization Cycles then a quench from 1490 into Parks 50 this was tempered starting at 350 degrees and I worked my way up slowly to 390 degre over three tempers checking the hardness after each temper final hardness here was right at 60 best I can tell with my files and that's where I stopped tempering all right moment of truth let's get this into feric chloride and see what we got wow very cool looks like a well refined iron around a high carbon steel to me but I could be wrong there's uh these interesting sort of bright areas between the jacket and the core I love it so I really like this effect here with this bright hone type of thing it's not actually a hone but um you sort of get that sense when everything is more Darkly etched the problem is there's no relief here this isn't typical Damascus right there's no ups and downs the bright etching steel is not raised over the dark etching steel like you would normally have which protects the oxides from wearing off to some degree and a typical Damascus pattern we don't have that here this is all sort of flush with each other there's no relief and so these oxides are going to wear off very quickly that's sort of the downside to something like this I think what I'll do is I'm going to chch it a little darker here and then I may just polish uh with MZ or something metal polish which will sort of give us an effect in between uh this in the last version I think let's see what happens I've got this side glued on I'm doing this differently than uh I do most scales but this is a forge finish and I've had to sand down from here a very specific uh line right there down to here to flatten the Tang so that I can uh fit the handles on so I have to do one side at a time I can't I can't drill and then attach them because I have to know exactly where to place this Edge for the scale right because it fits in a just right in a specific spot so I glue one side on drill the holes on this side and then I glue the other side on right where it needs to be and then drill the holes back from that side then put in the Fasteners and we're good to go it's a little different than I Norm do it but that's just how I do these Forge finish uh scales where I have to do some sanding behind the forge finish to make sure that this is flat well this is crushing so a split opened up during grinding or at least maybe that's just when I saw it after I got the 400 grid on the grinder and and even though this Burl is stabilized things like this can happen so I'm going to have to tear off this handle and start again that was incredibly hard to get off I had to like put in device and drive a chisel just right there and just drive it all the way down and that's crazy glex epoxy man sticky stuff all right finally a new handle is on let's look at this Edge at 3,000 grit and see what the steel can do now this newspaper print has been crumpled so there's some folds in it and it's going to catch on those folds sometimes and that's not a reflection of the edge or the sharpening that tends to happen on this fine news print paper uh things will catch on rough edges and they catch on folds so so make no mistake basically this Edge is a very nice Edge it really is let's get her oiled up for the camera and take some beauty shots so pleased with this you guys it looks incredible I love the effect I love the sanm the jacket material looks amazing etched the core material turned out to be really good knife steel as best I can tell I like the profile I like the handle material it's one of those projects where things went right things go wrong around here a lot and things went right this time so you know every squirrel finds a nut at any rate I'm also as usual just sort of mystified and interested and uh in awe with what they were doing way back when in the 1800s with manufacturing so you guys have a good one is

Channel: Green Beetle

Views: 31,527

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Id: XhSw-lMLUDA

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023