Thread: Knifemaking photo-essay (2)

1) This is a hardened, tempered blank I made six or seven years ago. After heat treatment the blanks have a hard, adherent skin of black iron oxide, which I sandblast off.

2) Surface grinding the blank with a 60 grit belt.

I now check the blank for straightness by looking along the top from the butt end. With practice you can see a bend of about 0.5 mm per 100 mm of length. I won’t go into detail except to say that I can generally either “hide” or correct a bend of less than 1 mm per 100 mm.

3) Surface grinding the blade flats with a 180 grit belt. I take off about 0.001” (0.025 mm) per pass until the 60 grit scratches are removed.

Tapering the tang.

The surface ground blank is about 3.7 mm thick. If, while tapering, I aim to remove a maximum of 1.0 mm per side on the tang, that would leave the butt end 1.7 mm thick. Given that the tang is about 110 mm long, the required taper is approximately 1 mm per 100mm of length. The magnetic vice is 300 mm long, so I would need to raise it 3 mm to get the desired taper.

4). The setup for tapering the tangs, with one end of the magnetic vice raised 1/8” (3.175 mm).