May 23 – The Skinning Knife Evolves.

May 23 – The Skinning Knife Evolves.

So each day that goes by gets me closer to Memorial Day and my chance to get to the range and trial my Remington.  It can’t get here fast enough!  I really want to see how well I did in accurizing it!

After doing a couple of chores around the house last night I had a chance to get back in the shop and further develop the skinning knife…a knife I will now dub the “Chaney Knife” since my daughter Chaney has already laid dibs on it when it is done.

So…first things first.  We need to get the final shape on the blade and reduce the thickness a little bit more.  I could do this with a hammer and forge, but frankly, grinding away on a belt sander is a hell of a lot more efficient and more precise.  

Hmmm....looks like a knife!

Next we need to polish it up a bit and add the saw tooth grooves with a die grinder…not an easy function…but with a steady hand it is doable.  I would note here that the knife is not really sharp yet.  It has a narrowed edge but the “blade” has not been put on yet…that will come at the very very end.  I’ve sharpened early before, and I have the scars to prove it!

looks like a clean knife!!

Now we need to really bring the blade to a point that it looks almost finished.  This allows me to see what the thing will look like (and feel like) when it is done.  This is sort of the equivalent of a rough draft.  As nice as this looks, I’m going to have to re heat the blade to harden and temper it  and that will completely ruin this finish and we will need to bring it back to this state again.  For now though we get an idea of where we are going…and I like the direction.

Looks like a badass clean polished knife!

It is at this point that we need to start thinking about the handle.  I’m figuring on placing a chunk of walnut on either side of the tang ergonomically shaped.  To help hold everything in place two pins will run perpendicular to the blade and will be exposed on the wood.  These do help in affixing the wood, but they also are decorative.  To help make sure everything is “square” I will drill the holes for the pins now.  It is important to do this now, before I harden the steel or it will be a bitch to drill through…and I’ll end up breaking more drill bits than I care to.

Looks like a badass cleaned polished knife with holes in it.

Ok…so now that knife looks…well…like a knife, and all the holes are drilled and everything polished….it’s time to ruin it!

I need to get this thing hot…red hot…and allow it to cool over a very very long time.  This is how we anneal it, and is the first step in the hardening process.  Think of it like this:  You have a bunch of molecules stacked on top of each other in a jumbled mess….that is what the steel looks like now.   When we heat it up the molecules begin to vibrate and move around allowing gaps to form between them.  If we were to cool them quickly they would freeze again in that jumbled mess ,with the void spaces and all, making the steel very brittle.  We need to cool it over a long period of time to allow the molecules to gently lay down on each other and keep those voids a minimum. 

So…step one:  Heat it up!

Fresh from the forge....the heat is slowly going away...but still at about 1800 degrees

Then Step two:  Put it in a pile of Mica over night.  This substance holds the heat around it and allows for the metal to hold it’s residual heat for hours as opposed to minutes.

sleep tight....I'll see you tomorrow!

Regardless, though…when the knife comes out tomorrow it will be blackened and burnished….not the prettiest thing out there….but not to worry…we have one more step tomorrow that will make it even uglier than it is now!