Knife 56 – A Fully Forged Hunting Knife that I broke cold forging
- Blade – 4 3/4″
- Overall – 9 1/4″
- Scales – Stabilized Spalted Beech
- Handle Finish – Hand rubbed Tru-oil
I forged this Fully Forged Hunting Knife that I broke from another tine as shown in knife 36. I wound up breaking it. I knew I was not finished forging it but I ran out of time, so I just left it sitting on the anvil. The next day I only had a few minutes in the shop. I picked up the knife and noticed a slight warp. Sure, I should have known better but my experience working with mild steel sort of kicked in and I gave it a couple good whacks with the hammer. Boom! A duh moment.
You will often hear this kind of finish described as “Brut de Forge” or “Brute de Forge” – meaning “rough and unfinished”. Part of the blade is left in an “as forged” or partial “as forged” state.
I asked if this would have happened if it was already normalized. Thermocycling will help with the coarseness of the grain.
Tempering will give it bend without the break and leave an edge that will hold its sharpness.
And Lesson learned, do not forge below forging temps.
Fortunately, there was enough left of this Fully Forged Hunting Knife that I broke to turn it into a hidden tang.
Thermal cycling is a process in which material is cooled and heated in cycles.
Normalizing is to bring or return a substance to a standard or normal condition or state.
As knife makers we thermal cycle our steel to return it to a normalized state, so we call it normalizing or normalization.
I needed to make sure this metal would normalize correctly. After straightening the tines, I found just a light hammer blow would cause the metal to break as shown in the photo to the right. So, I ran a test.
To normalize it, I brought it to nonmagnetic three times, and let it cool in the vise. After normalizing a tried several times to break it and it did not break after several hammer blows.
It was then heat treated as described earlier. The normal test all passed after tempering as well.
Hand crafted, hand stitched 7-9 oz veggie tanned leather sheath
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