


What do I do now I took my angle grinder and got the rough stuff off. And I know Railroad spikes is too soft to make a good functional hard use knife blade. 32 Posted OctoI finally got all the stuff together and made a rought railroad spike 'knife.' Much harder than it looks on YouTube. That’s what we’ve been up to in January so far. 1 Not being a blacksmith or Metallurgist I know some limited basics of steel. Jerry and Chris did a great job and got results. It takes a lot of high-heat hammering to get it to move the way you want. Working with rebar can be a challenge since it’s much denser than the mild steel we use for hooks. We also made J hooks and rebar fire tools including a scrolled fire rake and poker. We made some S hooks that you can see below. Next up: Rebar Fire Tools and Forging with FamilyĮarlier in the month, we had Jerry and Chris out to the forge to learn some of the fundamentals. This is a good level of temper for a knife blade.Īnd finally we have the finished blades all polished, sharpened, and ready to go. In the picture above you notice a slight wheat color in the blades. This makes it easier to see the color change as we carefully heat it up to temper it. This second polish is done so the shiny metal shows through. The knives are set aside to cool completely before we polish them a second time. using even a mild railroad spike still sh. This hardens the knife and makes it fairly brittle. I have been asked to do this and actually I want to take a few of these to my show in Fredonia, Ny this weekend. Aaron’s knife has a large sweeping belly and a drop tip.Īfter the knife is shaped, we bring it back up to a red-hot heat and quench it in oil. Once the basic shape of the knife (plus a twist in the handle) is done, there’s a fair amount of grinding work and polishing to give it the final shape. cross peen instead of the standard 2.5 lb. To hammer thick steel like this, we use a much heavier hammer than we normally would. You can see videos of the process on Brown County Forge’s YouTube channel. By keeping the heat even throughout the piece of metal, we’re able to control where the metal goes a little better. You can see photos from the process below.įirst, we got the spike up to an even heat. The knives pictured above were hand-hammered from old rusty railroad spikes, ground into shape, polished with emory paper, hardened, tempered, and finally sharpened. We’ve been busy at the Forge this month making S hooks, J hooks, Rebar Fire Tools, and Railroad Spike Knives.
