Having completed my first, very rudimentary, knife I now stand in awe of all of the wonderful bladesmiths on this site. As a little backstory due to the rough economy our family Christmas get together this year will not have a ton of store bought presents. Instead each person is to bring a handmade gift. Guys bring something for a guy and girls something for a girl. Me being the weirdo that I am, I decided that I needed to do something different and hopefully cool. Having never made a knife and severely lacking in the metal working tool department I decided to go with what I had. I had a 4.5" grinder, a bench grinder, a nicholson file I use to sharpen my axe and broadheads and a 12" mitre saw blade that had seen the end of its usefullness (I know, a bad choice of metal but you sometimes you go with what you got).
As a template I used a neck knife that was given to me by Freeman during the 2008 white elephant. It was made by someone on the forum but not sure who. I traced the knife onto the blade and began to very very slowly cut out a rough pattern with a cut off wheel taking care not to heat the metal up too much so as to avoid changing the temper too much. It certainly helped that it was 10 degrees in the tool shed at the time. After cutting it out I ground out the shape I liked on the bench grinder, again very slowly. Finally I touched it up with the file put a slight edge on it and polished it by hand going from 180 grit wet/dry sandpaper to 2000 grit wet sanding from 400 grit up.
The handle is a simple paracord wrap with a lanyard made from the excess, again just going with what I had. In reading on here I have learned that there are million things that I will need to differently next time but figured I had to start somewhere and I wasn't going to let lack of time, money, or equipment stop me from at least starting.
Let me know what you think. BTW... The knife is 7.25" total length with a 4" cutting edge.
Here is the unpolished, unwrapped knife.
Topic: First Knife (Read 579 times)
