Thread: Design you own razor blank and build your own.

I'm hoping it will hold for a long time, I only did a single temper.
I may send my first two hand made razors out to members for evaluation, once I'm confident that they will hold an edge...
I would like to know what the hardness is on them, and what other people think.

I have some damascus I've bought, and I plan on having a pro do the HT on it for me... It's too expensive for me to play around with...

One more thing guys as a side note... I think it's reasonable to ask for some help with heat treating, but in keeping with the spirit of this experiment we should all be trying to find ways to grind our own blades and do all of the other work. Please let me know if this changes anything because we just did a test run and it looks like it will work the way that I had hoped it would and we should be ready to go.

Here is a blank cut a few days ago out of 1/4 inch 5160 steel (I had the stock and I've seen where others have used it with success, so I figured i'd see how it looked)

I was planning on cheating & getting some help on the heat treating. I'm game for doing everything ourselves besided the HT. I think we would appreciate that particular SR more...

Looks good by the way!!

Looks great....

Looking good.
Toyed with the idea of buying a small knife kiln, I didn't get a good look from the wife when I mentioned it!! Ah well a man can dream, I'll after work on her and figure another way to sell the idea.
Thinning the tang symetrically I've found can be a bit tricky, any advice on this is welcome as getting the blade to close centraly in scales can be somewhat influenced by this.
Looking forward to some of the members efforts.

Deckard

If you don't have a belt sander, get some 50 grit sand paper and a flat piece of wood and just hand sand the tang...
It isn't hard to do before your HT
and polish your blank to as close to your desired final finish as possible before HT
it makes it a lot easier

Thanks Mike,

How about keeping it central to spine?
I figured it's best to put blank on flat surface and use some sort of gap/slip gauge and ensure gap is same when blank is turned over, obviously this would be done before thinning the blade. I understand there are ways of centralising in the scales if it's not quite perfect.

for those that are thining about a small kiln Tim Z was where i got my even heat and he had the best price around
not liek hes known for razors too hell of a nice guy and great to deal with
when i order my big one he willl be who i calll

I think there are some sort of regulations here in the UK regarding door interlock to live elements in electric kilns. Think I read somewhere that most US electric kilns are ilegal here, prices on TZ site are good though.

Looks like this is coming along nicely! I cant wait.

I agree that we should all do our own blades as far as shaping, grinding & polishing go. Personally, I will be sending out for heat treat and tempering.