Josh Dabney Servicemember Knife build. (pic heavy)

Josh Dabney

Moderator
I think most of us probably have similar views that we owe a debt of gratitude to all of our men and women in uniform who risk everything to provide our security, freedom, and protect our way of life. Making a knife for a soldier is to me a great way to express my thanks and I'm greatful to have the oppertunity to participate in this project and thanks the fellas who made it all happen- Justin, Murph, Bill, Dave, Boss, and Aldo to name a few.

I've never served or been in a hostile enviornment so I can only speculate the requirements of a Combat Duty knife. It goes unsaid that form will definately follow function but an appealing form sure isn't a bad thing if funtion isn't compromised. I thought hard about what I would personally want in a knife under the harsh curcumstances it will likely face and here's what I came up with-

1st priority is an effective fighting tool. To me this means nice and pointy while being stout enough at the tip to take anything thrown it's way without damage and thin enough at the edge to be laser sharp, an efficient cutter, and easily maintained. I also think it's very important that the handle is designed to protect the users hand from the blade in extremely stressfull split second situations.

2nd priority is that the blade is stout enough in general for extreme utility chores that a kitchen knife or hunter would likely never see. The typical caveat "it's a knife not a screwdriver or prybar" just cannot be applied to a combat knife IMHO. I imagine that a soldier would grab the most convenient and possibly only tool available to do just about anything necessary.

I think if these requirements are met then all other typical utility chores we use knives for will take care of themselves. I guess by this I mean I wouldn't mind if my Combat knife wasn't the MOST effective knife for opening boxes, letters, mail etc, and believe that for most general tasks like this the effectivness can be judged more accurately by how sharp the blade is than its geometry.

I thought I'd give you guys some insight into my train of thought for the design choices and grind style I put on my knife.

I am open too, and would appreciate, any comments, commentary, critique, or advice reguarding my thinking, design and build.

Pics to follow shortly -Josh
 
I pretty much always work from a sketch and attempt to follow my "blueprint" as close as possible.

Here I traced my blank on paper a couple times and drew up a couple concepts.
Servicememberknife004.jpg


I decided to go with the bottom concept but didn't get any process pics of profiling or grinding the main bevels but the blade is a combination grind with the main bevel and swedge being ground freehand on a 10" contact wheel.

After some research and consulting with a buddy experienced working A2 I decided to go ahead and HT the blade myself.
My method for HT was this- Foil wrap, double crimped, with a stamp sized shred of brown cardboard paper inside the envelope and placed in the cold Evenheat.
-Ramp to 1450 and hold for 15 minutes then ramp to 1775 and hold for 45 minutes.
-Remove envelope from oven and plate quench while spraying compressed air between the plates.
-Temper immediately in kitchen oven at 400 degrees 2 hours. For fun I file checked the blade after this temper and a brand new chainsaw file wouln't touch it !
-Temper in Evenheat 500 degrees 2 hours then air cool
-Temper again in Evenheat at 500 2 more hours.

Here she is HT'ed with the bevels and swedge cleaned up to show the grind lines
Servicememberknife005.jpg


Edge thickness at HT .022
Servicememberknife009.jpg


This shot shows the tip geometry at HT. I ran the hollow grinds straight off the tip to keep the blade full thickness on the flats all the way to the point. Planning a flat ground tip this is the geometry I wanted with my hollow grind but even if I wanted it to be hollow ground completely I would've ground it this way pre HT so that the quench plates would make contact on the flats all the way to the tip of the blade.
Servicememberknife010.jpg


I tend to do alot of cutting with my thumb or finger resting on the spine so I didn't want the spine too thin right in front of the thumb ramp. I did however want to have a swedge to take a little extra weight off the blade. This is just a shot of the spine to show the flat on top of the swedge.
Servicememberknife011.jpg


Stay tuned...
 
This is the rest I've got right now :)

Now I've got the blade HT-ed and ready to flat grind the tip of the blade. This proved to be challenging geometry to get symmetrical ! It is however extremely close after a little -tag your it- from left side to right, LOL. I still gotta do some more hand finishing of these two flats before I'd call them complete but the machine work is done.
006.jpg

007.jpg


In the next two pics I've colored both the edge and spine with a sharpie to highlight the edge thickness and the shape and stoutness of blade directly behid the point of the blade. Going back to my train of thought on the geometry for this blade I feel like I pretty much nailed what I was shooting for.
Edge-
008.jpg


Here's the tip shot of the spine. While flat grinding the tip and chasing those grind lines I determined after some serious studying of my grinds that there is a symmetry issue on the "diamond" shaped spine that I couldn't resolve with the flatgrind. The issue of imbalance here is actually a product of the hollow ground swedge and although I haven't done it yet I gotta go back to the contact wheel and make the swedge just a teeny bit deeper on the left side in the pic (right side of blade). This imbalance should show clearly in the pic
009.jpg


This is where I'm currently at but will keep posting as more progress is made.

Let me know what you guys think of this grind. It's a very challenging grind but I think the end result is gonna be worth the sweat involved.

-Josh
 
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Wow, Josh!! Those grinds are awesome! Almost makes me want to re-enlist! Can't wait to see the finished knife - whoever gets it is bound to love it.
 
Josh, agree with all of the above. Looks great. Hope you get to cut something before you ship it out,
would really like to see what you think of it's cutting ability.
Good I would guess? Well Done,
Dozier
 
Torture testing

I got some time to continue working on this knife over the weekend and give it some tortue testing just to see how she holds an edge and just what kind of ABUSE she'll take before failure.

I'm not talking about an ABS style bend test here but more of a cutting, hacking, stabbing, twisting, let's just see if I can break the tip off this sucker kinda test.

Of course this isn't and wasn't meant to be a scientific test that could be used to compare the performance of one knife to another and all results are of course subject to my opinion only.

Mainly if this sucker is gonna break i wanted it to happen right now here in my garage not in the sandbox.

Pics to follow- :biggrin:

-Josh
 
1st order of business is to get a hair poppin edge on the blade.

I'm still at .020 edge thickness so I started by coloring the bottom portion of the blade with a sharpie which just makes it easy to compare the grind from the left side to the right.
Servicemembertorturetest013.jpg


At this point I'm using a 1" slack belt to put a short convex edge on the blade.
Servicemembertorturetest015.jpg


Progressing with the convex. I haven't done convexed grinds alot so I'm going slow and easy with light passes a little at a time.
Servicemembertorturetest017.jpg

Servicemembertorturetest018.jpg


Now I'm going to move on to hand sanding to blend the top of the convex into the hollow grind. My sanding block is a piece of G10 with cork gasket material glued to it.
At his point I'm using some Norton 320 grit paper. A little slow going but nothing drastic happening either which is a good thing.
Servicemembertorturetest020.jpg


Progressing slowly. Here you can see how that sharpie helps to show you exactly what your getting with the blending efforts.
Servicemembertorturetest022.jpg


Now we've got our edge thinned down a bit and a slightly chubby 400 grit edge convexed right to a burr and we're ready to move on to the stone and strop. I always put the final edge on my knives the good ole' fashioned way. There are plenty of methods out there that give fantastic results such as paper wheels or just using the grinder to sharpen but my logic is this- How is the user of this knife gonna sharpen it ? My guess would be that 99% of knife users will use a stone and sharpen by hand so thats how I still do it.
I'm using a Lansky fine stone and a leather strop loaded with white jewelers rouge to get a hair popping edge.
Servicemembertorturetest023.jpg


Time to cut up some stuff !
 
I just got a tonneau cover for my truck so I had this cardboard laying around so I made a bunch of cuts to get an idea of her edge holding ability. Cutting this much carboard was enough to lose the hair popping sharpness the blade had but she continued to be what I consider working sharp throught the rest of my cutting. This is what I consider normal from my experience with other knives that will lose that scary sharpness relatively quickly but remain usefully sharp for a long time thereafter before needing a touch-up on the edge.
Servicemembertorturetest028.jpg


Continued on to carving on this 1x4 a bit making some curly cues, whittling one end of the board, and hacking and twisting into the small knot that was conveniently on the edge of the board, and using the tip of the knife to bore a hole throught the middle with a result of zero noticable change to sharpness or damage to the edge.
Servicemembertorturetest030.jpg

Servicemembertorturetest031.jpg

Servicemembertorturetest029.jpg


Continued with my bad habit of stabbing the tip into my grinder bench and bending over and twisting
Servicemembertorturetest032.jpg


Not that expect anyone to purposely drop their knife on concrete but accidents do happen so what the heck. Here's a shot after dropping it tip down form approx 6 feet onto the driveway. Score= knife 1 concrete 0
Servicemembertorturetest025.jpg


Still no damage thus far. This last act of abuse actually did put a couple flat spots on the edge. I'm not 100% positive if whittling the nail flatened the edge or if it was slipping off the nail body and slamming into the head of the nail that did it but either way it flattened the edge as opposed to chipping it out which is a positive in my book and indicative of fine grained steel thats not overly hard. I would expect either large grain structure or extreme hardness to result in chipping at the edge.
Servicemembertorturetest026.jpg

Servicemembertorturetest027.jpg


After the nail I went back to my sharpening stone and returned the edge to shaving sharp in about a minute on the fine stone. Except of course in the area where the flat spots are but I was mainly just wanting to see how much effort it would take to resharpen after some use. I will of course be using the grinder to set the edge back to new condition.
 
That last pic clearly shows that I didn't get my convex edge nearly thin enough above the edge and I basically removed the convex on the stone while sharpening so I'll be going back to convex that edge to a thinner geometry.

I don't use any guides while sharpening so I cant say I'm precisely at 15 degrees per side but thats what I was shooting for while sharpening.

Overall I'd say this knife is good to go and will be a reliable performer while at the same time being easily maintained.

Let me know what you guys think !

Thanks, Josh
 
Not only a great project, but an awesome explanation of how and why an edge can perform so well! Thanks Josh!
 
Great tests, Josh. It took some big cojones to drop that beauty from 6' onto concrete point first. That knife ought to withstand several trips to the sand box and back. Super workmanship!
 
Great job Josh! Thanks for posting all the pics and info. Looks like a survivor there, should be an awesome knife.
BruceM
 
nice job on thinking through the geometry and the testing Josh.
 
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