To Make a Knife
As I noted in an earlier post, I have been getting into blacksmithing as a hobby. It is nice to work with my hands, since my day job is entirely behind a desk. A couple months back I attended a class at Tillers International , a local organization in the Kalamazoo area. The class was on making a knife. I had taken a basic blacksmithing class last year, so I had some idea of how to manage the coal fire forges, what tools to use to shape the blade, but the creation of a knife from start to finish was a new challenge. Steel is a fascinating thing. The carbon/iron alloy that our world is built on. It is capable of holding up sky scrapers, but it can also can be made so brittle that you can snap it with your bare hands. The process of making the knife was to create something hard enough to hold an edge, and resilient enough not to shatter. The picture shows our stock, a straightened piece of salvaged spring steel, my thumb, and the coal fired forge. I shared the for...