Something Fikeslike

jdm61

itinerant metal pounder
Joined
Aug 12, 2005
Messages
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Well, Fikeslike in that it will be as I heard Mr. Fikes say a number of years ago "a sharp bar of steel with a string handle'" In this case, it is made from Don Hanson W2, so it will likely be "a sharp bar of steel with a string handle and squiggly lines on the bevels. In this instance, it has two bevels as opposed to the single sided grind. As it sits now, the blade is 9 inches long and the OAL is like 14 1/8. The spine is a healthy 1/4" at the choil and tapers a little bit to the butt and tip. The blade is about 1.6 wide. Kind of a medium camp knife unless I get goofy and do a clip point and make it a medium large fighter. :D The handle has some fine tuning left to do. IMG_0012.jpg
 
Well, it no longer looks like this. I was not happy with it, so I threw it in the forge again. No pics yet, but suffice to say that it grew about half an inch in length, about .15-.20 in width and developed a bit of a recurve in the process and the handle got a little swoopier. The final thickness is around .225. Film at 11. :D
 
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Final profile. I managed to pound or squish some hard, shiny scale into the surface, so it took a while in the vinegar bath to clean it up. I am pretty happy with the forge texture. IMG_0014.jpg
 
Not bad looking. The Brut-de-Forge look will work on a big knife like that. Get a good hamon on the sanded bevels and it will be really cool.
How far up do you plan on taking the bevels?
 
Pretty high up. like 75% or more, with a sweeping plunge.
 
First pass, rough ground and cleaned up to 165 micron with a Gator belt. I may go higher with the grind depending on how squiggly I want to get with the hamon. I discovered that scale has mass and thickness. The final as forged thickness was like .21-22 and after the vinegar bath, it is more like .20-21. The blade is pretty light and currently balances exactly one inch in front of the heel, so it should be pretty quick in the hand when finished. I did a rough "dry" wrap with the silly string to get a bit of a feel for what the height of the blade will be after it is wrapped. Of course, it will be a fancier wrap when finished. I am thinking blue underlay and black overwrap. A Turks head knot for a "guard" might be in the mix too. IMG_0018.jpgIMG_0019.jpg
 
One thing that I have learned forging this piece is that you have to really alter your calculations when determining much steel to use on a full tang blade compared to a hidden tang one. I used a slightly shorter piece of steel (opposite end of the bar, thickest part was the middle) to forge a bowie fighter that is 11.3 inches long from proposed guard position to tip, slightly over 1.5 wide and still like .31 thick at the plunge with a 5.5 inch tang that is a full 1/2 wide ad like .30 thick. I have not made that many full tang blades over the years and almost all of them had been stock removal blades made from steels like AEB-L and 3V until very recently when I started playing around with this brute de forge and string handle idea.
 
So does a hand rubbed finish and the attendant chasing of every tiny scratch kind of defeat the purpose of the whole brute de forge thing? :p
 
I recently did a brute de forge camp knife. I started hand sanding it, and honestly something just didn’t seem right about it. I went back and just scotch bright belt finished it and that felt more right.
 
Yeah. In this case, the hamon was not impressing at all so I experimented with Gator belts and 1000 "grit" cork with green chrome. Turned out pretty well. The handle, not so much First try and let me say that the allegedly simple task of wrapping a handle in string is not so simple. This is the "good" side. Please excuse the ugly fingerprints. :p
I recently did a brute de forge camp knife. I started hand sanding it, and honestly something just didn’t seem right about it. I went back and just scotch bright belt finished it and that felt more right.
IMG_0022.jpg
 
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