- Joined
- Mar 12, 2013
- Messages
- 1,167
Hey all!
It's been an awfully long time since I posted here... I've been working on digging myself out of a big pile of orders! Nearly caught up now (for the first time in 3 years!) which is awesome. I'm starting to do more videos and stuff again now as I have time!
Over the last couple of years I've been slowly working my way towards making my knives using a method that I find really exciting: hard-milling. This basically means that I will be heat-treating raw rectangular blanks of steel and then CNC milling the blades out of the already-hardened blank.
To do this I had to do a bunch of work on my CNC machine to get it in good enough condition, as hard-milling is a fairly strenuous task for a milling machine.
At the start of the year I did a complete rebuild of the CNC, thought you guys might like the video!
There are a bunch of reasons why I wanted to move to hard-milling:
I have done a bunch of testing and haven't seen any performance issues with hard-milled blades. From what I've seen any blade that's carefully hard-milled has the same performance as a blade that's finished and then heat-treated which is awesome!
On the right you can see a blade that's come straight off the CNC from the new hard-miling process, this blade is A2 tool steel at 62.5HRC:
Because of the level of finish I can achieve on the CNC now I am able to go straight to hand-finishing using EDM stones. After a bit of work with a 400 grit EDM stone the blade looks like this:
Being able to go straight to hand-finishing without any grinder work really speeds up my process and also eliminates a source of errors and rejects. It also makes hand-finishing fun as there are never any stray scratches to finish out!
And here you can see the final result! A2 tool steel at 62-63HRC, with DLC coating. G10 handle scales:
It's been a really fun journey to get to this point! I really enjoy pushing the limits of my techniques and the last little while has certainly done that! I'm very much looking forward to being more active on BF going forward!
Would love to hear what you guys think of the new process! I'll hopefully be finishing a new video showing the process within a few months!
-Aaron
It's been an awfully long time since I posted here... I've been working on digging myself out of a big pile of orders! Nearly caught up now (for the first time in 3 years!) which is awesome. I'm starting to do more videos and stuff again now as I have time!
Over the last couple of years I've been slowly working my way towards making my knives using a method that I find really exciting: hard-milling. This basically means that I will be heat-treating raw rectangular blanks of steel and then CNC milling the blades out of the already-hardened blank.
To do this I had to do a bunch of work on my CNC machine to get it in good enough condition, as hard-milling is a fairly strenuous task for a milling machine.
At the start of the year I did a complete rebuild of the CNC, thought you guys might like the video!
There are a bunch of reasons why I wanted to move to hard-milling:
- Better surface finishes: Because of the difference in the way a hard steel cuts versus a soft steel I can produce better 'as machined' surface finishes when hardmilling. This means I have an easier time hand-finishing.
- No losses due to warping in heat-treat: I typically lose 3-5% of knives after heat-treat due to warping that makes them not fit the sheaths correctly. Heat-treating blanks before machining makes them less likely to warp, and the ones that do warp matter less because very little work has gone into them at that point.
- Drastically reduce overall process length: If I machine a blade before heat-treatment I have to wait until I have a bunch of other blades ready and then send them all off for heat-treatment together, wait for them to come back and then do all the finishing and so on in a batch... If I hard-mill them then I can do all my final finishing and so on straight after they come off the machine. This basically lets me reduce my batch size from 100 down to 1 single knife... Which in turn lets me drastically reduce my overall delivery times. This also improves flow through my process because rather than working on batches I'm working on taking a single knife at a time through all my processes.
I have done a bunch of testing and haven't seen any performance issues with hard-milled blades. From what I've seen any blade that's carefully hard-milled has the same performance as a blade that's finished and then heat-treated which is awesome!
On the right you can see a blade that's come straight off the CNC from the new hard-miling process, this blade is A2 tool steel at 62.5HRC:
Because of the level of finish I can achieve on the CNC now I am able to go straight to hand-finishing using EDM stones. After a bit of work with a 400 grit EDM stone the blade looks like this:
Being able to go straight to hand-finishing without any grinder work really speeds up my process and also eliminates a source of errors and rejects. It also makes hand-finishing fun as there are never any stray scratches to finish out!
And here you can see the final result! A2 tool steel at 62-63HRC, with DLC coating. G10 handle scales:
It's been a really fun journey to get to this point! I really enjoy pushing the limits of my techniques and the last little while has certainly done that! I'm very much looking forward to being more active on BF going forward!
Would love to hear what you guys think of the new process! I'll hopefully be finishing a new video showing the process within a few months!
-Aaron
