Homemade Marking Knife

[Andrew Swartz]

I didn't realize that there is a different process for tempering A2. Does anyone know of a website that outlines the tempering process for different kinds of steels?

[Joe Chritz]

I don't have a website but all the hardening and annealing information on steel is available in some of the machinist handbooks.

When I was making a lot of custom knives (well a lot to me) I looked at doing heattreating myself. It didn't look to be cost effective for knives but for a marking knife it would be easy.

Another option is to gring an old file. Keep it from turning red by quenching often and you are set to go. Many many knives were and still are made from files and old saw blades.

If you are looking for small quantities of steel check local scrap yards, they sometimes have O1 or other common tool steel available.

Also a place like Atlanta Cutlery or Koval Knives would have small quantities as well as handle rivets, pins, tubes and the like. I bought tons of stuff from them several years ago.

Joe

[Jonathon Spafford]

Another option is to gring an old file. Keep it from turning red by quenching often and you are set to go.

It doesn't even have to go red to soften the steel... if it hits blue your gonna have to reharden it.

Andrew, I have some websites on heat treating, but I think they all deal with the traditional steels like 5160 and 1075 etc.

Check this out though... might have something. http://ftpforge.chez-alice.fr/Blacksmithing.pdf

[Jerry Palmer]

Files are way hard for trying to work without annealing if you've got to remove any significant amount of metal or do much in the way of cutting. They are mostly simple HC steel, so fairly straight forward to work with but thicker ones like farriers' rasps can be tough to get and keep hot enough for annealing.

Some time back some block plane blades that didn't pass muster at LN managed to make their way out into the wild in an annealed state. I picked up a couple off of ebay to use for some shop made planes. Used one of them to make a DT plane and had a heck of a time hardening it. It is tough to get them to cool down slow enough to get good hardness. Since a DT plane does not suffer from extended heavy use, I was able to get the A2 hard enough, but don't think I'd want to mess with the stuff a lot with my very limited arsenal of metal working stuff.