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Just a quick update:

I got back from the Show Tuesday and have been catching up on things around the house. Hopefully I’ll have a couple new things to post early next week. I’ve got a a few more things to put handles on. I also picked up some “scotchbrite” type belts at the show and am going to play around with satin finishes. There should also be some pieces out of CPM-154CM in the next couple of weeks. Guess it is time to look into filling the Liquid nitrogen Dewar.

This is Torrey, wife of the Podforge, guest posting while he’s away at the Oregon Knife Collectors Association annual knife show in Eugene, Oregon.

So I get to show you the good stuff: two knives finished just in time.

First up is this beauty: full tang, the metal tapered at both ends. The metal is 1075 high carbon steel, differentially hardened to make the hamon. It has a coin finish, creating a two-tone metal gray that continues the gray-blues of the handle.

The handle is stabilized giraffe bone, dyed blue. It is both pinned (black G10) and epoxied together to last, approximately, forever.

Let me say another word or two on how the metal is tapered at both ends: the symmetry and grace is compelling in ways I never expected. I was lukewarm on this design when it was a sketch, and when it was in CAD, and when the plasma robot made the blank.  The top and bottom curves are nice–but just nice–until the symmetry emerges in both planes when the blade and the tang are ground.

Now here’s the one I thought would be my favorite of this set: a paring knife style made of 1075 with hamon, finished by hand to a high polish.

The grain in the cherry wood handle is set off by red G10 surrounding the hidden tang. It’s all held together with a single black G10 pin and epoxy. Because the wood is not stabilized, but finished instead with cyano acrylate (that’s superglue to the rest of us), it will last slightly less long than forever.  

Describing this knife is more difficult. I’ll make an analogy: when I’ve taken the kids to shop for shoes, I watch their faces. If they love the way it looks, that shows–those are the ones to try on. But once the shoes are on the feet, I look for the face of compromise: are they making adjustments for comfort or gait? The rights shoes–especially the shoes for everyday wear–are the ones that leave their brow unfurrowed, their eyes relaxed. That’s when they’re no longer worried about the shoes, but can now focus on what they can do in the shoes.

That’s how I feel about this knife. This one isn’t as eye-candy as the other–it doesn’t demand you stare at it for minutes at a time to appreciate its beauty.

It’s more insidious than that. Once it gets into your hand, you don’t want to put it down. It’s comfortable there, like a pointy, sharp appendage that just belongs there.

So there they are, folks: two new knives, showing now at Elemental Forge’s table at the Oregon Knife Collectors Association show in Eugene. If you’re in the area, stop by!

One of the joys of machines is that you can watch them make scrap out of good material really quick. Some minor issues with the Plasma robot meant I scrapped some steel earlier in the week. I made some adjustments and got my first couple of actual blanks produced. There are some trade offs. The high carbon steel produces more dross than mild steel. Well it really isn’t “dross” more like bead of re-solidified metal on the backside. I will keep playing with feed rate but I don’t think it will ever really go away. Since it is re-solidified it also has the distinction of being hardened, so I will need to draw the hardness back or stress relieve the pieces. This isn’t a big deal on the 1075 so far. [It will be interesting to see how stainless behaves.]

I have the first 2 blanks ground and ready for heat treat. I want to get a few more pieces cut and ground before I fire up the forge and pull out the quench tank. I was hoping to have more pieces profiled Wednesday but went to make some adjustments in the cad files and spent the day fighting with CAD, the Gcode parser and the gCode itself.. grumble.

Anybody that says that using CNC is cheating “cause you just push a button and get parts” has never spent the time to actually get a CNC machine to produce the desired part starting from “zero”. It isn’t necessarily easy and there is quite a bit of up front work. Not including the initial pen or pencil drawings of the designs I’ve got probably 2-3 full days of work into each design. I’m not sure if it will actually save me time. It most likely will in the long term if I make enough similar knives. What I really like is how accurately I can translate my designs to finished steel.

Anyway Wednesday was full of the grump from dealing with the quirks of the programs, so to deal with that in the afternoon before dinner I grabbed a knife that had cracked in the heat treat many moons ago and decide to finally try grinding a tapered full tang. The blade n question was being clay hardened and water quenched and managed to crack about halfway down the edge. [The dreaded “TINK”] I had cut it off behind the crack and tossed it in the “perhaps I’ll make a bench knife out of that” bin from whence I pulled it to try a tapered tang. For some reason getting into the zone in front of the grinder just makes things better. Anyhow, the taper tang turned out well enough that now I think I’ll use it to test some really fancy expensive glue I have that is now expired. I’m wondering if it really does have as short a shelf life as it claims. I figure I’ll glue some handle slabs on without pins and see how long it takes for them to fall off.

That is the update for now, I did get the G-10 I had on order Wednesday, so I’m still on schedule to have some stuff together by next Wednesday.

Yesterday I managed to get the air compressor set up with a water trap and regulator mounted on the wall, and finally tried out the plasma cutter freehand. DANG the plasma cutter is a bit scary. You pull the trigger and a jet of ionized gas almost instantly blows through the steel, Yikes. Anyhow, the plasma cutter was acting like there was an air leak inside so I turned it off and let it sit overnight to bleed out the capacitors. This morning I cracked open the plasma cutter and fixed the air leak and then mounted the torch on the Robot. This tool a little fiddling as I needed to open up the mounting clamp a little to fit the torch. Once that was finished and the torch adjusted I fired it all up and made some test cuts for speed on a .25inch thick piece of mild steel. A quarter of an inch is probably the thickest I plan on cutting right now (especially with this plasma cutter) so I figured it would be a decent place to start with the test cutting. Up next some .125 inch thick high carbon steel.

As proof that it happened I give to you one video: