Knives

It's been a while since I last posted about bladesmithing, but I've still been at it. My first writeup got fairly good reception so for posterity I figured I'd finally get around to blogging my second blade.

A few notes: I finished this blade several months ago; I'm only just getting around to writing it up. (I'm finishing up my 5th blade right now as I write this.) I've since learned various things I've been doing wrong but I'll largely be covering how this blade was built at the time. Second, I've decided that I should start giving my knives names to help distinguish them rather than just "first", "second", etc. My forge instructor said my first blade looked vaguely Civil War-ish, so I have retroactively dubbed it "Ulysses", as in General Ulysses S. Grant. This blade is curved, so I hereby dub it Suleiman The Curvy!

A surprising number of people seemed to like the knife picture I posted in my opening post, so what the hell, here's more knife-pr0n. :-)  I was taking pictures all along the way as I made it so that I could post a process story at some point, and this seems as good a place as any.

Warning: Red hot metal ahead...

This isn't the railroad spike it started from, because I totally forgot to take a picture of it first.  But it's the same type of spike.  Railroad spikes are pretty cheap, low-grade steel, probably around 1030 carbon but who really knows.  Good for practice, lame for a really good working blade.