MovieChat Forums > Forged in Fire (2015) Discussion > Question for someone who makes knives

Question for someone who makes knives

posted 8 years ago by cliff-hartle
7 replies | jump to latest

I've seen many videos on knife making and would like to make a few small ones for chip carving but appears that they are missing two steps.

When making something from an already hardened hunk of metal I have always seen the metal being annealed to remove the hardening in order to work the metal. I'm thinking of things like a file which is already super hard.

Then after hardening the blade is tempered by heating in a hot oven for a certain amount of time to make the blade less brittle.

One last point, when they have them choose from an array of tools and hunks of metal like horse shoes and railroad spikes. Can things like horse shoes and spikes be hardened? I know there has to be a certain mix of elements to make a good blade that can hold an edge.

[–] jseymour-3 8 years ago

Some stuff can be, some can't. The spikes that a HC stamped into them are High Carbon and can be hardened. I'm not sure about horse shoes. I avoid mystery steel like that and go for virgin tool steels from a reputable source. But when you first start out, most do not know that and are going off whats readily available.

[–] cliff-hartle 8 years ago

But what about the annealing and the tempering.

[–] jseymour-3 8 years ago

If your forging and bring it up to forging temp the steel goes into a plastic state and it loses its hardness. If your stock removing then yes you need to anneal it. We had to skip this step on this show because of time. Also after hardening the blades were tempered off screen to speed things up.

[–] therealman 8 years ago

So you were a contestant?

[–] Chrissie 7 years ago

I have to second the question: Were you a contestant/staff person?

[–] larsped 7 years ago

It's Jimmy Seymour, a contestant.

[–] jseymour-3 7 years ago

Thanks larsped, I didn't mean to be gone so long as to not answer.