Please help! I need advice.

[BrianO]

I have been a member on here for sometime and recently I decided that I would try to duplicate a good friend of mine's knife. Anyway, I was given a large stack of saw blades that are about an 1/8 of an inch thick. I traced the outline of it onto the saw blade and cut it out with a plasma cutter. My question is the edge of the blank is slightly discolored but the blades were almost cool to the touch right after I was done. Does this discoloration change the temper of the blade. And by the way how are used saw blades for knife blades.  

Thanks for the advice and I look forward to learning alot about this.

[Ragnarok Forge]

Any time you heat cut metal it affects the temper of the steel.  Right now the colored areas are to soft to hold and edge well.

In general saw blades can make good knives.  Are they round blades, lengths of cut up heavy band saw blades?  If you can find out who manufactured the blades you can call the company and they will tell you what the steel is.  

You are most likely going to need to anneal the blade, grind in the bevels, normalize 3 times, harden, and then temper.  These steps are actually fairly easy to achieve in something as simple as a charcoal barbque.

Another trick would be to plasma cut another one wide of that actual blade shape and then hand rasp or grind to shape without heating the steel.  Dipping in water keeps it cool.

Lots of folks on here can help you work thru the process.  Or if your a patient guy you can ship me the blade when it needs to be normalized / hardened / tempered and I can take care of that and ship it back to you.