Thread: 4th knife. A surprise fathers day gift

OK, so its a little after the fact but I'm finally putting up some pics of my 4th knife that I made for my dad.
Its made out of some old leaf spring that I forged out to shape and then ground.
The handle is made of a small piece of oak, brass spacer and some Brazilian bloodwood for the rest, finished with some pins. One is SS in a brass sleeve and the other is just straight brass. I don't have any ferric chloride or anything like that to etch a blade so I just did another hot vinegar etch like the last one as I have found it to be quite rust resistant compared to no etch.
This one I tried making some clay for heat treating and did a water quench. I tried quenching a small piece in both water and oil and couldn't really tell much of a difference with my limited experience yet so I thought I'd bit the bullet and try a water quench. Was mostly a success. Got the blade hard but it did warp and twist a little but I was able to fix it mostly during the tempering by clamping it up with some straight material and then removed the rest of it with the final grinding. Its also super thin, so that had me sweating but it all came out good in the end and my dad and myself could not be happier with it!

In this first picture, the stub piece of leaf spring in the background is what I started with. I then cut it in half and started forging!


Here is the blade a little closer to its final shape with it's "twin" behind it. Did a little bit more hot work before I moved to the grinder.


getting the final profile done and grinding underway.


Getting a bit of a polish before heat treating.


Just after heat treat. the clay came off for most of the blade, but hey, gotta start somewhere.


pretty much finished here!


Just a quick little stand that I knocked up with the remaining bits of the bloodwood block and ITS DONE