A buddy and I have been spending a couple of hours most Sunday afternoons making “take away” knife blades.
Rather than forging and shaping blade from a slab of metal, you start with 1/8" tool steel and grind, hacksaw, file and belt sand the shape if the blade.
There is a place in Alberta that will heat treat the finished blade for $17.50. So for 2 blades with shipping, taxes it would have come out to around $80.00
So inspired by a youtube video I made a mini forge out of fire brick:
It took about 10 minutes to get the blade to heat where a magnet wouldn’t stick to it, then another 10 to 20 seconds and it is dunked into a tin of canola oil to cool it rapidly.
So now all I need to so is temper the blades in an oven for an hour at 400 and we should be able to finish them up with handles (from the scrap walnut)
This is the youtube video:
