longarm;
Good afternoon Dano, I hope that the day down in Oregon is treating you acceptably and you're all well.

Thanks for the positive reply, I appreciate it.

There was a knifemaker out of Calgary I believe it was who was grinding out blades on a disc sander which resulted in a different sort of grind line. I mimicked that as best as I could and cold ground the Simmonds D2 planer blades on a disc sander, but my grind lines are never as crisp as I'd like them to be somehow.

I'll get grinding and worry more about the feel and the shape when I need to pay more attention to some of the details.

Anyway they're cold ground - that is grind and dip, grind and dip - so the result is they hold a fairly decent edge and it's quite tough. It's not as good as say Paul Bos' S30V steel, but a bit better than say a Buck with their standard 420 steel. Not terrible for sure.

Here's another photo of them. The sheep horn was a winter killed California ewe from the mountain behind the house that an old mentor who is long gone gave me when I was first getting to know him. Interestingly we moved to very near where he found the horns - the California bighorn winter just 10 minutes walk up the road from where I'm sitting. Well better said there's usually a couple small herds that winter there.

[Linked Image]

The last thing I'll mention on using the planer blade as is would be that I was warned it was too brittle, so being me I put a chunk into the vice and tried to break it and then attacked it with a decent sized ball peen hammer on an anvil. Despite my efforts it didn't snap in half, though surely if I would have put a pipe wrench onto it I'm sure I could have made it fail, but typically we don't do that with our hunting knives I figure you know? wink

As I'm wont to say, there's a bunch of roads to Mecca - some paved and some look more like logging roads in BC or Oregon, so for sure the conclusions I've arrived at are fairly specific to our method of hunting and locality too.

Thanks again and all the best.

Dwayne

The most important stuff in life isn't "stuff"