If you’re gonna build a 2×72” belt grinder, you gotta at least try your hand at making knives.

But if you’re gonna grind your own knives, even from bar stock rather than forging, you also want to heat treat them. You can send them out for heat treating (and probably get a more reliable result) but where’s the fun in that? So, you need a well-controlled system for maintaining ~800C, a bath to quench the hot steel in oil, and an oven for tempering the now hard but brittle steel to a good balance of hardness and toughness. So, first came the builds for controlling temperature.

Then we get to the rest. Finding nice looking templates or designing your own, marking the shapes into carbon steel bar stock, cutting them out and refining the profiles. Then the harder part - putting a nice clean grind into the blank and turning into a blade.

I’m definitely still learning but happy with how these are coming out. A friend came for a weekend visit and we took it a step further and made our own handle material from some used pants and resin.