knife making

[Mortblanc]

We kept two sand buckets in our shop. One was full and the other empty.

We would heat the item to cherry red, then pour half the sand into the bucket, place the red blade in the sand and pour the rest on top.

It would take up to 12 hours for the metal to cool, at which point it would be dead soft so we could drill or work it with files before doing the actual forging.

I would often forge a blade to rough shape, anneal it in the sand bucket last thing of the day and let it cool over night.

Next morning I would file the tang to shape, drill the holes for scales and do whatever initial grinding the blade needed. Then I would harden the nearly finished item ad take it home to stress relieve in the oven.

Many times I would have a half dozen blades going through the process, especially if they were small blades.

I always wanted several blades lying about when tour buses came through the museum. I finally wound up with hand made knives from my forge on every continent except Antarctica, in most European countries, several in Australia and a couple in Russia and China.

Big knives I only did as favors to close reenactor friends. That was mostly because as an unknown maker I could never get what a big knife was worth in money return for hours spent on the project.

So I would spend a week on a knife and gift it to a deserving friend with the understanding that they were never to sell it. They could pass it down to a family member, or pass it on to another reenactor friend, but never sell it.

In my area at that time we did a lot of American Civil War personas and I must have made and given away a dozen D-guard Bowies made from horse shoe rasps. Dozens of bone and antler handled primitive "long-hunter" knives hammered from 10" mill files.

We had a Stanley Tool Company factory nearby and one day a truck arrived at the door of the shop.

Burly guy got out and bellowed "Can you use some tool steel?"

I said "yes" and asked what it was.

"Its 1080, what we use for chisels. Some moron set the cut off saw an inch too short and we had to scrap it all. You can have it all."

There was half a ton of perfect tool steel in that truck! All of it 5/8" diameter and cut an inch too short to be a Stanley chisel. He even told me they heat treated it just like O-1. I also learned that it made a fair blade just laid to the side of the forge and air hardened. It made some of the best knives I own to this day.