Thread: "Ting" Day...Help me troubleshoot please

Originally Posted by shooter74743

but I'll get back out there and get it right. Lessons like this just make you truly "know" what to do and not to do. A day of work down the tubes in just seconds in the quenchant.

No matter how much info and correct answers you might receive, practice makes for the best experience. If we don't screw up things once in a while we never learn. Nothing really wrong with that.

For a knife of that type, I would leave 1/2" of hardened steel. 4 ish mm is not enough, considering that there is a huge amount of non hardened steel applying force to it.
The good thing though is you can just anneal those knives, remove the part that was cracked and try again.

Thats what I was thinking on the two large ones. Sure won't be the first blade to start out larger, only to end up smaller...

Haha. Yes I've made 7/8 razors that were going to be 8/8's
Knifemakers don't make mistakes, they make smaller knives.

Originally Posted by Maximilian

No matter how much info and correct answers you might receive, practice makes for the best experience. If we don't screw up things once in a while we never learn. Nothing really wrong with that.

Yes...if you are not breaking blades, you are not making enough blades.

Originally Posted by Mike Blue

Yes...if you are not breaking blades, you are not making enough blades.

Keeps my ego in check. I finish one, think I'm getting pretty good, maybe better than pretty good then I'll break a couple trying to straighten. It's a journey that only leads to more mistakes. That's kind of the beautiful part though. We'll never be rid of problems to solve.

There are all sorts of advice about mastering a craft. One famous comment about that was that a master simply learns to hide (or correct) any mistakes made in the final product better than a journeyman.

IMO opinion, having watched any number of craftspersons who qualify as masters of their arts, one observably consistent behavior that I enjoy is seeing them avoid the mistake in the first place. That is Mastery. Then again, they are human and if their fingers are not crossed just so, or they are not holding their lips just right, or the spouse is having a bad day, or a dead mouse floats to the top of the quench tank, all manner of mistakes (juju) occur regardless. LOL

Originally Posted by Mike Blue

Then again, they are human and if their fingers are not crossed just so, or they are not holding their lips just right, or the spouse is having a bad day, or a dead mouse floats to the top of the quench tank, all manner of mistakes (juju) occur regardless. LOL

I've learned that if I get signs that today is not the day to do something, I find something else to do.

Probably mentioned this before - ran into a knife maker in Colorado that said you had to quench blades North to South to avoid cracking. Just one more bit of folklore. Like the floating mouse, Mike.

That folklore "north to south" is dead wrong or we only have the meat of the story. My forge is aligned north/south as well as the quenchant tank (ice chest)...you wouldn't happen to know "the rest of the folklore story" would you? I think I missed something. Note: I didn't purposely align stuff that way, it just happened to end up that way.