The Making of a Heavenly Knife.

[bldsmith]

Lets do another one.


I received a request from a gentleman wanting me to make a couple of knives using his meteorites. I took on the challenge. I have done this in the past so it really is not new but still challenging as I never know what to expect. I received the Meteorites and have begun the process.

Next I want to smash them and break them up as much as possible. Into my press.

The smashed and broken pieces. Weight of the original material.

Since there was so little of the original material I needed to add some from my personal stash. This is actually granulated meteorite.

And the pieces I will add of my Campo.

 

[bldsmith]

Here is the combined meteorite and granulated material. 1 1/2lbs of Meteorite.

I will add the Meteorite material to some powdered 1095 steel. It will all go into this 4x4x6" steel box.

Powder and Medeorite mixed

And into the can.

Now I need to seal the box and get it hot. I did not take a picture of this part. Just welded a cap on the end and pressed the powder down as much as I could cold.

Now I need to forge it out.

 

[bldsmith]

Keep drawing it out until I get to where I need it.

I had to do some other work for a couple weeks and started on this again yesterday but broke my press. I fixed it today and started up again. Here is the billet after I finished up for the day. I cut it in half and am working on the lower portion.

I am hoping this will have streaks of nickel meteorite with nickel meteorite flecks on a dark blade. Kind of like the night sky. This is all I have got done for now. I will keep this up to date as I make progress.

 

[Ratdog68]

Very cool project, and a very unique Damascus blade.

 

[RattlesnakeDan]

Very cool. Only thing I found was some Leaverite. Leaverite where you found it my dad says.

 

[Oso Grande]

Very cool stuff

 

[Chopperdrvr]

I'm very impressed. Where does one get meteorites or powdered meteorite? Not that I would ever attempt something like that.

 

[bldsmith]

I got mine from the gentleman who approached me regarding the first project I did. I did not need all the meteorite he gave me but he did not want it back. It is Campo which does not have the cool patterning that the Gibeon does. Apparently his source had literally tons and tons of it from South America. He also had the granulated material. This is probably from saw cuts slabbing other meteorites. The granulated stuff is worth 10x the whole. DOn't know why but it is. The previous knives I made all went to China. Having the meteorite in them made for fast sales.

 

[bldsmith]

Just came on from the forge. Will be posting more shortly.

 

[bldsmith]

Ok, Here is another day. Lets get things warmed up....

That is the bar from the last post. I will be drawing it out making it into a more usable size for knife blades.

Now here is some action forging the bar and drawing it out. I would recommend turning your sound down a little. It is rather loud. Also please excuse the shaky video, hard to forge and video by myself.

[youtube]

After a few heats I have now drawn the bar into .25x1.25x31"

Next I will forge the tang of the blade. It will look like this.

 

[bldsmith]

The job I am working on requires 2 knife blades. I normally make twice the number for a couple of reasons. First if anything happens to some of them I do not have to start over again. Second It is good to have a couple on hand for future orders or show stock. Does not take that much longer to just forge a few out. In this case I decided to just go ahead and forge the entire bar into blades. First all the tangs.

Next I forge the profiles. These are rough profiles which will be cleaned up on the grinder. I can forge bevels in but have found it much more efficient to just grind them from here.

I did do a hardening test just to make sure these would actually harden up. It did, hard as glass as we like to say. Broke a small portion of a tang off and had really nice small grain structure. I did not take a photo of this as it is very hard to capture.

Now let's take a look at what the pattern may look like. First I grind all the scale off and clean it up to 400 grit.

Then a quick dip into Ferric Chloride to bring out the pattern.

And here it is..

Came out like I had imagined. All the silver streaking is the meteorite. I could have made it look more like traditional Damascus but then it would be hard to tell what the meteorite was. This way I can assuredly point out the parts that are meteorite. The large streaks are the chunks I broke up and the smaller ones are from the granules. In all from light off to finish it took a little over 4 hours to do this portion. A bit less than an hour per blade today. Not too bad. Now on to the grinding on Monday. Will post more after the grinding.

 

[Ratdog68]

Pretty cool how it has that streaking through the sky look to it.

 

[rrv333]

Way cool! I can't wait to see the finished product!

 

[Chopperdrvr]

That's a slick looking pattern.

 

[bldsmith]

Pretty cool how it has that streaking through the sky look to it.

The streaking reminds me of a time laps photo of the night sky. Or one heck of a meteor shower.

 

[bldsmith]

Sorry I did not get out to the shop yesterday. Helping a friend rebuild his house after a fire.

So lets get things going again. Here are the blades I have on the bench right now. All in different stages of completion.

The meteor blades are in the upper right corner.

I need to get them rough ground along with the blades just below.

I use my 2x72 belt grinder. THis is a 36 grit belt and it can really remove the material.

An hour or so and 2 belts later they are rough ground.

I need to set the shoulders. For this I use a precision ground fixture of hardened D2 die steel. It allows me to file the shoulders flat and square.

 

[bldsmith]

For the Filing I use a round edge bastard file. The rounded edge keeps the inside corners from being to sharp. This can cause stress risers and possible cracking either during the quench in the heat treating or during use.

And both sides filed.

The profiled blade with nice square shoulders.

That is all for today. spent 10 hours in the shop doing some forging and this grinding. I did get all the meteorite blades to this stage. More later.

 

[Ratdog68]

Good tip on the round edged file. Nice pile of blades there.

 

[bldsmith]

Well today was not a productive as I would have liked but I did get a bit done. A lot of cleaning up the profiles, setting shoulders on the other 6 damascus blades. Removing scale and making everything parallel. Now onto grinding. First I need to establish the center of the blade. This is done with a height gauge.

This scribes the center-line to grind to.

Next I set the edge by grinding a heavy bevel. This gives me a better visual of how far I need to grind.

Now to rough grind the bevels.

And the end result of the day to this point.

I still need to finish grind these. This will refine the bevels and make sure they are even on the blade. I will take pics when I do that.

I hope this is not getting to boring. There is a lot of tedium making knives. This is one reason I try to have more than one project going. It allows me to do different processes when I get tired of one. That's it for today.

 

[Oso Grande]

Please keep it coming. It's fascinating to see all the steps that go into this.