Jon Buescher
Well-Known Member
Now that I have my own forge at home I can't help but play with it. This means that I am starting to hammer out some blanks and practicing my forging techniques. After literally hundreds of hours of Youtube videos watched and countless articles read, it feels soooo good to swing the hammer in my own shop.
Now that I have rambled on....
I am going to have lots of smaller more basic knife blanks piling up as I forge. I currently do not have a belt grinder, my 1x30 got fired and sent to the recycle yard and my 4x36 just doesn't work for me. This means I am going to be doing several knives with files and sandpaper. I am practicing forging the shape very closely to save on that work.
What I would like to know is, what do you guys who file your knives to final shape do? I started today with a dry file and it seemed like it kept trying to plug, I grabbed a toothbrush sized wire brush and used that to keep the file clean, I tried wetting the knife and file with WD40 to see if that helped but it made it worse. I was watching a video on youtube several months ago by "Wranglerstar" where he was using a file card, do any of you guys use those?
Attached are some pics of the small knife I am making now, the pics are from yesterday. This morning when I got home from Physical Therapy I put it back in the forge and re worked it a lot, smoothed and evened the taper and altered the general profile some. I then "normalized" the blade 3x. I didn't have time to take more pics of the progress or the filing this morning
Now that I have rambled on....
I am going to have lots of smaller more basic knife blanks piling up as I forge. I currently do not have a belt grinder, my 1x30 got fired and sent to the recycle yard and my 4x36 just doesn't work for me. This means I am going to be doing several knives with files and sandpaper. I am practicing forging the shape very closely to save on that work.
What I would like to know is, what do you guys who file your knives to final shape do? I started today with a dry file and it seemed like it kept trying to plug, I grabbed a toothbrush sized wire brush and used that to keep the file clean, I tried wetting the knife and file with WD40 to see if that helped but it made it worse. I was watching a video on youtube several months ago by "Wranglerstar" where he was using a file card, do any of you guys use those?
Attached are some pics of the small knife I am making now, the pics are from yesterday. This morning when I got home from Physical Therapy I put it back in the forge and re worked it a lot, smoothed and evened the taper and altered the general profile some. I then "normalized" the blade 3x. I didn't have time to take more pics of the progress or the filing this morning