Rebar knives

T

tungsten_panda

Joined
May 15, 2015
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4
Hey all.

I've been asked to make a fillet style kitchen knife on a budget, so no spring steel for this project. The only other steel I have available right now is a few rods of domestic construction rebar. Do you think it'll make a good knife? If so, I have a butt load of the stuff so I'm wondering if I shouldn't make a few cheapy survival knives out of it while I'm at it?

Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks
 
Well in SA a good piece of steel goes for around a hundred rand or so, which is meant to be the full budget of the whole knife
 
Thanks. So moral of the story is, I can effectively do nothing special with all the construction steel in my yard? Guess I'll be making wrought steel tables and chairs then
 
He is in South Africa and doesn't have all the luxuries for steel selections we do in the States.

I would say you have a very good idea in making the wrought type furniture. Hopefully you could then sell that to fund some better quality steel. As suggested for this project though, a leaf or coil spring from a car would be better. Since it is a fillet type knife if you could find a scrapped band saw blade or saws all blade you might be ahead of the game.

Good luck!
Chris
 
Rebar is a weird steel because it's not made to chemical specs but instead to mechanical specs .So your nver quite sure what you have.
 
Years ago a good source of 12-16mm round stock was a tire iron. They were most all made from 1095. Today, no one even knows what a tire iron is.
If you have a junk yard with old autos and stuff, you might get some. Another good sources for suitable knife steel is straightening out a coil spring from a truck.
A spark test and a quench test should tell you if it will work.
 
Like Stacy said, a good source for spring steel is, well.... springs! If you can find some high tensile cable, it's likely some sort of spring steel as well. You'll have a few more options available if you're able to forge weld, as a lot of the more common springs and cables you're likely to find (outside of industrial applications) are smaller diameters. Cable will need welded regardless.
 
Rebar is kind of the ultimate unknown steel, even from one length to another. It has a high scrap content, and some pieces end up with a high enough carbon content that it can be hard enough to damage the carbide tips on metal cutting saw blades...or at least that's the reason one saw blade manufacturer gave us as an explanation why their warranty would not apply if we used their blade to cut rebar. So it's possible you could get lucky and have a "high-ish carbon" piece of rebar, but the heat treat process would be trial and error.

Old drill bits or milling cutters can be a good source of "somewhat known" steel, assuming you are forging
 
Mahoney is dead on about rebar, there. Very unpredictable. I've quenched it and had it snap like glass, other times, hardly any carbon.
Coil springs, as Stacy says, are good for junkyard steel. Better than leafs, if you have a forge.
The high tension cable I've used has been 1095 or "music wire" as best I could ever find out, and sure heat treated as such. Very shallow.
 
Can you buy files in SA? I have made a couple of knives from Nicholson files bought at Home Depot, and they made really good knives, and the files themselves were fairly inexpensive. Walter Sorrels has a good video on You Tube on how to make such a knife, and how to harden it.
Good luck!
 
Rule of thumb for using scrap metal for blades: if in its previous life it cut, flexed, or resisted impact, it's probably a good starting point for making tools. You still need to test. For example, yesterday I had a blacksmith come to the shop for help with a knife he was making for his grandson, using a lawnmower blade. I did a quench test in canola, and the file bit as well as before I quenched it. I tried again in water and it still was too soft for a knife. We set the lawnmower blade aside and started over with some known 5160.
 
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