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Old 06-28-2019, 10:30 PM
jimmontg jimmontg is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2016
Location: Now live in Las Cruces NM.
Posts: 1,345
My first, from start to finish knife, not made from a tempered file was O1 and I did the initial grinding with a 3x18 hand held belt sander clamped to my picnic table outside under the ole shade tree I had 1/8 and 3/16" O1 and nobody told me not to grind it almost finished down to 1/32 edge cuz that's what I did before heat treat.

I had experience as a sheet metal mechanic including aerospace and I remembered that somebody had torched off a piece of 3/16 L6 to make some parts from and I couldn't cut the edges where it had been torched on the bandsaw so I cut the parts with an air die grinder and then commenced to try to bend them without the edges cracking. lol We had a heat treating department, the company was that big. I asked the heat treater about the cracking and he just laughed. Told us not to use heat on the material and couldn't we read it had heat treating specs on the work sheet, but that was on the next page so I didn't care what it did and never read the parts that had nothing with me. I had a secret clearance and that's what you did, or didn't do.

He told me how to ht O1 in my charcoal barbecue. I heat treated the precision ground O1 in my charcoal forge now and I noticed the knives if ground thin in 1/8" tended to be a little wavy on the edges. So I made my first knives out of thick 3/16th and I ground them surprisingly flat with my 120 grit belts on my little 3x18 belt grinder. Then I began to teach myself hand finishing using a book I bought at a gun and knife show. There were maybe two quality makers at those shows and my knives were the third best quality knives, for no reason other than I put a nice finish on the metal and wood of my knives yours would've been fourth place. Now this was the early 90s and man there was a lot of crummy knife makers in OKC that sold at the weekly knife, gun show, and flea market

Last edited by jimmontg; 06-28-2019 at 10:44 PM. Reason: wording
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