Thread: Hobby-level forging

I don't have tools for this but I believe I have access to a metal smelter...

I'm sure I can get access to a blacksmith workshop, a crude one but it's not hard to build a real hot fire pit with some coal. Metal smelting... I need some serious heat for, but I'm sure a few grams of exotic metals (I can obtain chromium and titanium, maybe tungsten) in a 200 gram blank of mostly high-quality steel (read: recycled DE razor blades) won't make stainless steel, but will make a rather hard metal.

Actually, I could use a nickel-based alloy; but if I made something like that, I'd probably base it on Inco, which means it would be difficult to shape into a razor blade form (I'd need to forge it into a wedge... at somewhere around 1500-1800 degrees) much less hone (it would eat your hone).

Metallurgy aside, I could probably make a decently hard blank with a hammer, an anvil, a forge. This would be cheap (hell, it's small, I could make the forge out of a coffee can and a propane torch, or a piece of firebrick).

The difficult part comes in machining the blank. First off, I have to cut it to razor shape. Then I have to grind it down to have a blade on it. Then it needs to be honed crudely on a wheel, I guess. Then honed by hand to put a shaving edge on it.

It's all the fine work that's difficult; but more importantly, requires tools I don't have. If I wanted to build a forging workshop, it'd take what? Not much I'd hope. Probably doable in $10,000 to start-to-finish make a razor? I suppose I could fit a computer-controlled metal grinder in that (metal lathe etc), those are nice. You program it to cut a piece of metal to spec and it brings a spinning grinding tool against it and does the deed for you.

And yeah, the metal could easily be heat-treated, and tempered.

EDIT: Wow missed the point though. I don't want to spend $10,000, I want to spend $100 lol... or as much closer to $100 than $10,000 as I can get.