This story has a couple of different angles to it. First I've been wanting to do a build of a simple knife in the back of Flayderman's book, “The Bowie Knife” for some time. Seeing Lin do that awesome Sheffield the other day finally got me off top dead center. I decided instead of doing it in plain carbon steel I'd add my own twist in the form of some special Damascus steel. I hope to get it done for the upcoming AR Knife Show next week.
Secondly I have a customer who being a real rock hound is kind of enthralled by the legend that the knives made by James Black, the famous (via Jim Bowie) Bladesmith of Washington AR used Meteorite in his knives. My customer wants me to forge a Damascus bowie incorporating Meteorite into the blade. A couple months ago I received a 5# chunk of what looks like a rock from him. The thing is solid metal and magnetic as can be. Anyway long story short I decided maybe I could do a little experimenting for this project and do this knife for the show at the same time.
I'm not nearly as good at these build-a-longs as these other guys but hope you get a little something out of it anyway.
I tried to cut the Meteorite with my little band-saw first and burned up a blade in a few seconds, this thing is very hard. I could have cut slices with an abrasive grinder but didn't want to have that much waste material. I finally just put the whole rock in my forge and took it up to 2200 degrees. I proceeded to slowly try to forge it into some usable shape. I was able to “work” off a small piece that weighed around a pound. It was a very slow process since any time I tried to make progress the meteorite had a tendency to crumble. After six hours of careful work with my press and hammer I finally had something that resembled a bar of steel just shy of a foot long, 1 1/2” wide X 1/8” thick.
Topic: Antique Bowie Repro with a twist (Read 1585 times)
