How to make a knife yourself at home from scrap materials

A knife on the farm is a useful thing. It seems that there are no problems with its acquisition - choose for every taste. But here's the bad luck - it is quite possible to buy a low-quality product instead of a normal one, even having laid out a good amount of money. After the first open tin can, dents will appear on it. In a word, fortune is some kind of lottery. And you need a good knife. What to do in this case? The answer is obvious - it should be done. How and from what - now we will decide.

Whether to do it yourself, and why

Definitely, it is worth trying to make a knife yourself for a number of reasons:

• Firstly, one of you knows exactly what design and size the product should have, and what you are going to do with it.
• Secondly, you can choose the material yourself by taking tool steel or spring steel, and then you don't be foul on what the manufacturers are worth. Such a knife will not fail at the most crucial moment.
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• And thirdly, by tinkering with the manufacture, you can gain useful experience in working with metal.

If the thing turned out to be of good quality, you can always then proudly tell your friends: "Check it out, I did it myself!"

Steel properties depending on the purpose of the knife

There are a great many designs and shapes, but not only the shape of the blade or the size make this knife a hunting knife, and that one - a kitchen knife. Everything is a little more complicated - there are certain requirements for any kind of activity. So, in order:

• For hunting knives the main criteria are the hardness and ability of the blade to keep sharpening for a long time. If the steel is too soft, it can chise out on the bone during cutting. Although the blade is durable and tough, this property also makes it brittle.
• Tourist knife meets other tasks. This is already a multifunctional tool, sometimes used instead of an ax. Although it is made of solid steel, it should not be fragile, since such a tool will open cans, chop wood, chop branches. The butt of tourist knives is usually wide and massive.
• Survival knife similar to a tourist one, but for the sake of versatility, manufacturers often reduce the weight of the blade, the width of the butt, and the overall dimensions of the product. It is best to have the tools offered in the survival kit separately, along with a good camping knife.
• Kitchen knives, in an amicable way, they are made of the same material as hunting, but their blade may be narrower and thinner. Well, and the dimensions are smaller. As for the hardness and toughness of steel, the requirements remain the same.

If someone expects to make a universal knife for all occasions, quickly get this idea out of your head. It doesn't work that way. When choosing a material, you have to sacrifice some characteristics for the sake of others. There is only one option - to have several knives for different purposes.

Which steel to choose

I already hear comments - damask, damask. Yes, the option is cool, it remains to remember that not every experienced blacksmith is able to make it. And if you buy a blank, the cost of the product increases unjustifiably. It will turn out to be some kind of museum piece, not a tool for everyday use.

Suitable for our purposes instrumental or spring steel. I will not tire the reader by comparing different brands. If interested, open special literature. I will list the most popular steel grades:

• 9X18;
• 50X14MF;
• X12MF;
• CVH;
• 50HGA;
• 40X13.

I think this list is enough. If you find anything from the list, half the battle is already done.

Sequence of actions

The process of making a knife can be broken down into the following stages:

• Making a template. First of all, a sketch is made on paper, after which the image is transferred to thick cardboard, hardboard or something else similar. I especially recommend to be puzzled by this question if you plan to make several identical products. It is not necessary to reinvent the bicycle - the Internet is literally littered with the most ornate sketches and drawings, many of them are quite good.
• Purchase (manufacture) of a blank. An old Soviet file or a fragment of a saw blade is taken, for example, and the image from the template is transferred to them. You can buy a ready-made strip of steel, most importantly, of the appropriate quality.
• Shaping the workpiece by milling or on a grinding machine. If you have to make molding on a grinding machine, the task becomes much more complicated: it is quite difficult to maintain the geometry of the product.
• Heat treatment. Here, without a good specialist or reference literature, you can "fill up the entire sowing". We will go over this topic separately. Heat treatment includes annealing, quenching and tempering of the metal.
• Manufacturing of a guard, a handle and a knife pommel depending on its design.
• Subsequent assembling the resulting structure, sharpening and polishing the knife, with a test of it in business.

About annealing, quenching and tempering

In general, a lot of sensible books have been written using this technology. I will try to explain the essence of the process on my fingers.

If the steel chosen for the blade is difficult to process, you need to make it abouttjig before work. The essence of the process is to uniformly heat the workpiece in the forge until the steel stops responding to the magnet. After that, let it cool slowly. And then they are already processed on the machine.

The essence tempering - in a sharp cooling of a red-hot workpiece. In the same way as during annealing, the metal is heated to a state where it does not magnetise, and it is kept in the fire for about five minutes. Then it is cooled by immersion in used oil. If you don't want to mess with oil products, take, say, olive oil. And keep a fire extinguisher handy.

After hardening, the knife becomes hard, but very brittle. In order to compensate for this deficiency, carry out vacation metal in the oven. It is heated for a couple of hours to two hundred degrees, after which the workpiece slowly cools down by itself. It can be considered that the heat treatment process is completed on that.

In fact, this process has many subtleties. And here you cannot know them without practice. After a few unsuccessful experiments, you will be able to make a knife that you are not ashamed to show your friends. The main thing is, do not show to passers-by for money.