Home Forums Gear Knives and Blades Knife Build..

Thought I’d give you all a quick run through build of a large Bowie I completed not long ago for a fund raiser for a co-workers daughter who is fighting leukemia.

I'm the first to admit I'm not the best knife builder in the world, so use these steps at your own risk. Also, there are more ways to make a knife than there are to skin a cat, fyi... This is the hyper-speed rough draft version of this build.

First off is design. For me, the biggest step in success when building a knife is making a plan. I like to get a solid blue print of what I have planned in my mind.





The next few steps are getting the metal annealed or drawn back to make the metal softer for easier working on. I chose ATS 34 stainless steel which is a very high quality Japanese steel. Stainless is very good about air quenching itself and re-hardening if it cools off too fast, which is pretty slow actually, so the annealing process took 40 hours of programming my kiln to get the metal slowly cooled off from 1600 degrees. Next I transfer the design to the metal and get it profiled and the rough grind in. Also the spine was hand filed for decoration.







The next next step is the hardening process. For this I took the steel (after wrapping in heat treating foil) to 1900 degrees Fahrenheit, then took the blank and quickly clamped it between 2 aluminum blocks and hit it, edge side first, with compressed air. It’s called an air quench and it got the blank hard enough my 65 HRC file wouldn’t touch it, nor any file in my shop for that matter.







It took another 40 hours of time and other kiln programming to temper the blade to get it around 60 HRC after sanding off the scale. I very slowly cooled it down from 410 degrees 2 times to get it to right around 60 HRC.







The next step is many hours of hand sanding to get the blade flats, flat, and making sure the blade geometry lends itself to be the most efficient for blade design and use. Also getting all the scratches running blade length and down to 600 grit.





Continued.....