First of all you need your tools and stock. We use 1" round stock for our knives, usualy 52100. Hammers, tongs and a spring fuller, and latter on some sort of grinder. This is a hidden tang handled knife. You can slightly modify the instructions here for a full tang handled knife. We will get into that latter on.
We start by heating the steel and marking the beggining of the blade with a spring fuller tool. Be sure you leave enough material in front of the marking in order to forge the blade. |
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The tools you will need |
Using the spring fuller tool, mark the beggining of the blade. |
The marking is done. |
Now we start to bring material down to forge the blade. Just be sure yu leave plenty of stuff to work with. If you forge it too thin you might get short on steel when finishing the blade shape. |
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| Start close to the bolster |
And work your way along the blade. |
Start forging the choil carefully |
We will me making a gaucho style "S" shaped choil. You will start to forge the edge on the choil area first and then bring some of the material back towards the bolster. |
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| Bring the edge back to form the choil. |
Correct its shape and position carefully |
Start working on the rest of the blade normaly. |
| Finish the blade as you would do to a reagular blade. This profile is of a mediterranean dirk. Clip points and drop points also look good in this style. You may want to add a false edge afterwards. |
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| Work the tip. |
Give the final touch ups |
Just measure the bolster and mark it deep and round. |
| Now for shaping the tang you will have to mark the end of the bolster. This is best done by grinding around it. This must be 90 o with the bolster side for a good fit. You can use any sort of grinder, even an angle grinder fixed on a vise will do.If no power tools are avaiable you can carefully file it down. Afterwards you cut the shaft and start working on the tang from that on. If you are to forge a full tang knife, just repeat on the back side what you did to start the blade with the spring fuller tool and forge the full tang from there. |
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| Cut the shaft off and heat the bottom to start the tang. |
Start forging the tang. |
Final forging should look like this. |
After forging the tang we need to start the grinding. The bolsters junction with blade is best groung with the aid of what we call a "rolete" belt grinder. It is a horizontal belt grinder with a small wheel on the front that is just the right gauge for grinding the junction. For that you can use 1" diameter ball bearings. Some pictures of this very handy tool: |
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| Ricardo Vilar's Grinder |
Luciano Dornele's Grinder |
Luciano Dornele's Grinder |
I am sorry we didn't have any pictures of the blade before the handle was atached, but I can use a picture of another similar knife. Everything goes as usual from here: normalizing cicles, hardening, tempering, etc. and we go to the handle fit. The most important part is the area where the handle meets the bolster. This have to be perfect. |
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| Another knife hardened and tempered. |
Cut the handle |
Drill it |
| After the handle is ready and fitted use epoxy and pins, and your knife is ready for some abuse. You might wonder why we don't have any pictures of the finished knife. The truth is this knife was destroyed in a series of tests, being the vise bend the last one. |
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| Heat the tang |
And fit it |
There you go |
Thank you very much! I hope you all enjoyed the show. |
