The blue stuff is indeed blue and not just taking on the color of the bucket. I did some significant grinding on these to get them to their final profiles. Spikes are a mild steel (meaning basically low carbon, meaning that they won’t harden enough to make good knives), but they’re neat as curiosities and turn out to be pretty easy to rough forge. I’m interested in this partially because I’ve joined a local blacksmithing guild that makes things like hooks for the gift shop of the facility we meet at.įinally, the latest class of things I’ve made have been railroad spike knives. One of my next projects will be to make myself a jig that’ll help me make more consistent hooks. These hooks aren’t really functional because they’re too rounded, but I’m pretty pleased with how symmetrical they came out (not perfect, of course, and the shadows make them look more misshapen than they actually are), as I just eyeballed them and didn’t use a jig or anything. I had never tried doing twists or making hooks before, so I tried making a few candy canes and hooks. I haven’t put these to any real use yet, and I should, to test whether they’ll hold up to any use. I was able to form better bevels in these when grinding than with the others I had made. These were pretty quick and fun to make, and while they look rough, they were good practice for quick blade shaping. I wasn’t able to sand these all the way out as I had hoped to. You can see where I split the wood on that one in a couple of places when drilling pinholes. I forget what wood I used for the brown-handled knife, but the darker handle is Macassar ebony, which is very hard wood that produced very powdery, sort of acrid dust when I sanded. I left the other knife (which is a little smaller) fairly rough too. The big hammer marks in the knife with the brown handle I did leave in place intentionally because I thought they made a neat stippled pattern. Having taken a break from knives, I wanted to try some more, so I rough forged these two in an afternoon from 1084 steel. It’s the second knife I completed, and the first of high-carbon steel. In spite of all the flaws I can see in it, I’m proud to have made this one, a custom design that I had to troubleshoot a lot to make it work. The blade is fairly sharp but it’s got a lot of scratches on it and some hammer marks I wish I had smoothed out. It took me six or seven tries to get this one forged to the profile I wanted, and the divots in the camel bone (that’s what makes it jigged) were a real pain to work with. The steel on this one is 1084 and the handle is jigged camel bone. He liked the drop point, the big belly, and the bit of recurve. It looks more like a small kukuri than a Bowie. He had said he liked the idea of a smaller Bowie, and this is one of the designs I came up with after looking at a lot of knives. These first two images are of a knife I designed for/with my best friend. I also have a sort of graveyard of failed attempts at knives (one in particular) and a bunch of square bar forged into points and spikes for technique practice. Anyway, here are a few things I’ve worked on since April. It’s really inconsistent, as is my progress. I’ll sometimes go for a few weeks (or probably months) without doing much of anything, and then I’ll go on a tear of doing a little forging for several evenings in a row or doing a lot of work for several weekends. I can get a blade pretty sharp, but not as sharp as I’d like. My blades show a lot of hammer marks and scale both because my skills and patience are lacking and (conveniently) because I do like the rougher aesthetic. My skill has increased some, but my work is still very very rough. I’ve made a few things since, so this is a catch-up post. I last shared blacksmithing projects in April.
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