Forging a Knife with an Integral Handle PART 1

welcome today's project is inspired by Master Artisan Joshua Prince at Prince Works Forge go check him out but today I will try to forge a knife with an integrated ornamental handle a key ingredients this bar 52100 steel of this coal Ironworks 16 ton press and myself that is an actual picture of me by the way I'm going to put a point on this 52100 steel round bar which will be the tip of our knife before isolating the heal of the blade from what will ultimately be the bolster and after that we'll grab some steel for the handle here we are widening our blade and trying to get some steel at a good spot to make sure we can draw out a heal for our blade I really need some better drawing dieses or fering dieses for this type of thing but I can usually make this system work reasonably well man look at this blob on the Anvil when it comes to preforms I'm pretty lost preforms are the me and pl of forging you put all the steel in the correct shape and dimensions so that subsequent forging processes will be efficient and effective and getting you where you want to go sometimes preforms don't look much like the final product that's sort of the case with knives a lot of times so if anyone is watching this channel to learn about good preforms for knives you're out of luck the good news is that I usually pull things off and get where I need to go in the end but it ain't pretty you can see here that I've done a pretty good job at shifting steel to the heel area so we have a nice steep angle from the bolster to that edge at the heel um with some more peening we can do even better e for great now it is time to start the rest of the bevel and work our way up towards the tip of the knife which should straighten it to some degree here we go time to start the handle again this is heavily inspired by Joshua Prince's gorgeous work I've never tried anything like this before so there's going to be a lot of trial and error here I'm not sure I have like the right setup to do all this let's see how it goes what I'm realizing here is that before I get too far into the handle I really need to finish up the The Edge and the blade and make sure everything's exactly like I want the profile is exactly like I want it I'm done with the heal all that stuff because once I draw out the handle into a thin piece of metal it's going to really be impossible to continue work on the front of the knife you know I won't have any really good place to grab that won't heavily distort my forging I'm trying to flatten the spine a little bit with these wax and pull the nose up a little bit usually works okay I think the thinner the knife and the less material there is forward and at the tip for example the less it does but it's still does a little something here we want our handle to be convexed up or concave down of for comfort you know it has to be rounded is what I'm saying so for some reason I thought I could accomplish that by just laying the the knife on this mild steel round sitting loose on top of my Anvil and smacking it a few times that is not the case I gave this the old College try but for some reason I'm going to move on to a different technique I don't remember I don't remember exactly why I didn't think this was working now you can make fun of me all you want but let's see you try to fabricate something like this you know what it's fine it worked I mean it didn't work but it didn't fall apart either so it was mashing things things up too much so I moved over to some pening this cross pen okay maybe a ball pen okay okay okay and back to the Anvil know without the proper tooling or sage block stuff this is just the best I could do is on the Horn of the Anvil and ultimately it works but it took a lot of Heats like you're not even seeing a quarter of what it took to get this done this knife was in and out of the forge like all afternoon so if there's any carbon left in the handle I would be shocked so to be clear this is mostly forged to shape but not entirely I had to take down some sharp bits there that knob and then the edges on the handle weren't exactly even with each other side to side so I had to sort of grind those even and take down some sharp areas on that as well basically there's just some symmetry issues with the forging all right onto the rest of the bottom of the handle I am ambitiously planning some scroll type stuff preferably forged out of one piece of Steel for the bottom edge with the Scrolls sort of Forge welded onto it coming up into the handle like maybe one of these pictures I actually tried that with the these various bars of mild steel and it was impossible the the lengths always changing you're losing the roundness the width it's always getting wonky and so I just cheated a little bit and went to the mill and sort of hollowed out this I think it's a 38 inch piece of mild steel it's pretty good you know it's not going to be forged out of one piece of Steel now but we can work with this we can attach the rest of it to this but we do have to work on this to get it the correct Contour so the question is when I heat this up and sort of knock it around will it retain its concavity or will it tend to flatten out a little bit worried surprisingly it did all right I just have to cut off the end here and then we can get on with the rest of our handle now we're going to revisit that in part two so you guys stay tuned I'm going to get that video out really quick it should be too long in the meantime thanks for watching you guys have a good one

Channel: Green Beetle

Views: 12,178

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Id: xSpo84nAwpI

Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024