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The birth of a knife – Day 1 – Design …

Hello everybody,
For some time I'm an avid reader of the bushcraft.ro forum and myknife.ro. The main topic which interests me is the manufacturing of knives. Even if I’m not a fan(atical) nor professional user of knives (as you know I'm a computer engineer) I'm using regulary a Victorinox Officier Suisse and a CRKT Bull and I'm quite satisfied of both. But the engineer inside me is interested in the practical side of manufacturing so I'm planning to do exactly that: make a knife from start to finish all on my own.

Being a city-guy I don't have access to blacksmithing tools (forge) so for the moment I will stick to using already "prepared" steel. From what I learned by documenting on the internet a good source of steel are the HSS table saw blades. These preliminaries are what I know from some time. So the question is what took me so long to test. The main impulse is that on Saturday I found on the street a used table saw blade. So now I don't have any reason to continue waiting.

Having the steel the second question is to find a design for my first knife. All the knifemaking gurus consider this as being the "passing the Rubicon" moment. This is the point of no return... symbolically speaking.

In this field I'm a quite decided guy so I drawn the shape from a single stroke of my hand and left it that way... but I'm satisfied. I know many of the knife aficionados will find some drawbacks but for the moment I don't  want to change anything.

From the metallurgical point of view all I know is that it's some kind of HSS steel, 1mm thick and 120mm wide.

In the second part I will try to cut the rough shape using a Dremel tool. I don't know how will the Dremel behave but I don't have other options but to try

Wish me luck ...