Thread: Grinding without a belt sander.

My first four razors were done without a belt grinder.

It can be done without a belt grinder. It'll just be a lot more time consuming and trickier. I made my first real razor on a portable sander for sanding wood, which I mounted upside down so I could work on the little wheel.

I am pretty impressed with what has come forward in this thread. I know thisisclog has made some nice razors with a very haywire setup not that different than Scott's starting point. Keep them rolling gents!

You could use a wooden form cut to the correct radius and fix some of that abrasive metal cutting shop roll to the arc. You could have multiple radii to get whatever shape you wanted. Doing it by hand would reduce the ability to make mistakes quickly, which power tools allow. It would take more time and elbow grease, but be nearly as exact as some expensive grinders.

Use what tools you have until you have a need for bigger and better stuff. Tool acquisition disorder can be more of a problem than getting work done sometimes.

I’ve made 5 razors out of untempered files using a 6 inch bench grinder with Norton 3x wheels to do most of the work, followed with a scheppach 2500 wet grinder (a Tormek clone) to get the final shape.

The wet grinder is a bit slow (even with modification to get better performance) but does the job, and the more I practice the closer I can get with the bench grinder each time.

If I spent less time fantasising about bigger and better tools and more time grinding I would be even more proficient.

I tend to make do until I have saved up enough to buy the thing I really want. I waffled about on my first pro grinder until my wife told me to just buy it because I might as well splurge on myself for once instead of being frugal all the time.

I talked about this with other professional knifemakers, and we agreed that money's just money. It's what you can do with it that matters. If you do this for the experience of having made your own razor, then it makes a lot of sense to go slow and save money. If you decide that you want to make knives regularly, it's best to stop thinking about money as 'real' and instead just consider it a fictional number on a spreadsheet. You can express anything you want to buy in number of items sold, instead of dollars.

Once I got my first pro grinder, I knew that if I wanted to buy another, that would be x razors I had to make. Ditto for my oven. Or the planetickets for the Texas meet.

I'm going to buy some lottery tickets.

If I win, I'm going to make knives and razors until the money is all gone. You may substitute farming, raising cattle, any craft, or traveling the world meeting up with other like minded individuals in the appropriate spot.

I started using a straight razor to save money. Now I'm going to out of state meets to save even more!

Many of you sound like my mantra.
Want to end up with a million dollars being a woodcarver ? Easy. Just start with 2 million.

Originally Posted by mycarver

Many of you sound like my mantra.
Want to end up with a million dollars being a woodcarver ? Easy. Just start with 2 million.

Mine is "life is miserable until you have $200,000, after that it's easy"