First Attempt At Making A Knife, Part 1

Making A Knife, Where I Started With Mine

The where to start is a easy one, get some steel and a piece of paper then start telling everyone how you are going to make a knife, quite easy I'd say (especially the procrastination). Then comes the harder parts, actually starting with it. I have very limited experience with metal work, but I have always been quire interested in it and wanted to give it a go.

My brother (@driekus) and I have been speaking of making knives for quite a while now and nothing really came of it because we both were quite busy and were never available at the same times. So he finally gave up on me about a month ago and made his first knife without me, it did great on Steemit and can be found here.

So today we finally had a bit of time and I was able to go over and start with my project, he was already busy with a second project but that is still "hush, hush". On Friday we started discussing different types of steel and where to get them, luckily we have cousin that could help us out a bit with the sourcing of the material needed. We were lucky enough that he had a piece lying around that we could have for free. My brother went off in search of some more good material for future ventures and finally bought four pieces which we hope to turn into some great works of art.

So for the steel.. What I had to work with in my hour and a half was an approximate 30cm x 3cm piece of steel that is 6mm thick. When I had my first look at the steel I noticed a slight dark spot closer tot he edge which was caused by the cutting torch used on it. So our first task was to gently heat and cool the steel to make sure that it had an even hardness (in theory). As you can see from the picture the heating led to some interesting color patterns.

The Design

What I decided to make was a very slender dagger, I'm still on the fence about the exact design. I'm by no standard a great artist, I have some ideas which I think is great but never really practiced my drawing. First I started out by tracing the outline of the still hot steel, a bit overexcited I know.. Then I plotted points of the design I had in my head and started drawing the lines.

State of the art equipment, I know right. A broken ruler and a pencil I had to sharpen with a scalpel I found lying around, got to love the house I grew up in..

Below is the finished rough potential designs:

We are both leaning towards the first one, hence more detail put into the drawing to give a bit better idea of what the end product should look like. As a matter of interest with the last one I drew a bit of inspiration from the new Black Panther movie, I wanted it to look a little more like the spears they used. Let me know of any ideas or suggestions you might have to improve or add tot the design.

The next step was opening the picture on Coreldraw and tracing the outline, this makes it easier to ensure that all the lines are straight and curves curvy. Having a computer program to help is quite nice as you can see:


The Coreldraw drawings were made by @driekus .

That was unfortunately all we had time for, next we are going to print the drawing, cut it out and transfer the design onto the steel.

I know this was a long read for not a lot of progress but there is more to come so stick around.

Animated Banner Created By @zord189