Making a knife from steel cable. Forged rope knife. Blacksmithing tools and materials

There are quite a few on sale now a large assortment various knives good quality. However, knives are very popular hand forged. Such products have a special energy. DIY knives can be made in different ways. The most difficult method is the hand forging option. It is worth understanding that forging makes it possible to make a durable blade of excellent quality that can last quite a long time. a large number of time without losing its qualities.

A knife forged from durable material can last for many years without breaking or losing its quality.

In order to forge a knife, you will need to have some knowledge about metals and their properties. In addition, you need to thoroughly master the forging tool. For people who decide to make this product with their own hands for the first time, it is important to familiarize themselves with some recommendations.

How to choose the right material for making a knife?

Figure 1. Design of a forged knife.

To make a high-quality blade, you need to choose the right steel for it. The cutting characteristics of the knife and its strength will depend on the choice of material. To select the correct metal, it is important to know what properties such a material has. You will need to focus on 5 main properties of steel:

1. Wear Resistance - Steel's resistance to wear and tear through use. This property will depend on the hardness of the material.
2. Hardness is a property of a material that indicates its ability to resist the penetration of solid materials into it. It is worth knowing that solid material is less subject to deformation. Strength can be measured using the Rockwell scale.
3. Strength - the ability to maintain integrity when exposed to atmospheric forces.
4. Plasticity is the ability of a material to absorb and distribute kinetic energy upon impact and deformation.
5. Red resistance is the resistance of a metal to high temperatures and the ability to retain its properties during heating. The minimum temperature for forging steel will depend on the material's resistance to heat treatment. It is recommended to choose hard grades, working temperature forgings for which the temperature is more than 900°C. It is worth knowing that the melting point of this material is approximately 1500°C.

All these characteristics are interconnected. The predominance of one of them leads to the deterioration of the others. Each property of a material will depend on the content of alloying elements and additives, which include silicon, tungsten, molybdenum and others.

Figure 2. Types of knife profiles.

The presence of all alloying elements and their use in the required proportions in the steel manufacturing process, as well as knowledge of their properties, allows us to create steel for the required purposes. Each of these steels has its own marking. It is worth noting that Russian and European brands have different designations.

Russian manufacturers, which are often used in the process of forging blades with their own hands, include steels marked U7-U16, R6M5, X12MF and others. European grades include steel 1095, M-2, A-2 and others.

A detailed description of the metal grade can be found in the “Brand of Steel and Alloys”.

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What tools are needed to forge a knife with your own hands?

To forge a blade, you will need to have a special blacksmith tool, but you can also use amateur tools:

1. Hammer 4 kg.
2. Hammer up to 1 kg.
3. Vise.
4. Machine for point.
5. Stove.
6. Anvil.
7. Welding machine.
8. Bulgarian.
9. Blacksmith's tongs or ordinary pliers.
10. Adjustable wrench.

Forging tools: hammer, vice, adjustable wrench, blacksmith's tongs, chisel, tamper.

You should know some nuances regarding the stove. You will need to reach a temperature of approximately 1000-1200°C, which cannot be done in an ordinary oven. In this regard, it will be necessary to improve the stove. The structure is made of metal with thick walls, after which a pipe is attached into which air from the vacuum cleaner will be supplied. Coal is suitable as fuel.

Before making a knife you will need to make a sketch. A knife is a simple object that consists of a blade and a handle, but these elements have many components. In Fig. 1 you can see a sketch of the structure with all its components. Existing types profiles can be seen in Fig. 2. Once the appropriate profile has been selected, you can proceed to creating a sketch. Professionals do not always use drawings, but beginners will need them.

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How to make forged knives from a file or cable?

The file is made of wear-resistant steel, and therefore knives are often made from this tool. Such blades will have a good cutting edge.

A knife forged from cable is inferior in its characteristics to others, but the blade has an unusually beautiful pattern, reminiscent of Damascus steel.

The first step is to clean the tool from scratches and rust. This action can be done using a grinder. If necessary, you will need to cut the workpiece to the required length from the file. After this, the product is welded to a reinforcing rod and inserted into the stove. The product must be heated to the required temperature, after which it will be possible to begin rolling the product to the desired thickness. Next, the tip and cutting edge are made. It is recommended to make the shank of the knife from this tool under the attached handle.

The cable must be split until it is red, then removed from the oven and sprinkled with borax. After this, the cable must be heated to 1000°C, removed from the oven again and started forging. The blows are applied with a hammer, and it is important to try to keep all the fibers together.

The end result may be a strip of steel that consists of several layers. It will be possible to forge a knife of the required shape from it.

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We forge a knife from a drill ourselves

Drills are often used to forge knives. This is due to the fact that these products are made of R6M5 steel, which is suitable for blades. It has a good level of toughness and is easy to sharpen.

You should know that large drills consist of a working part made of R6M5 steel and a shank made of ordinary steel. Drill small sizes in most cases they are made from P6M5.

A file knife has excellent cutting properties.

If you plan to forge a knife from a large drill, you need to immediately determine where each type of steel is located. To do this, you need to sharpen the drill to length. In places where ordinary steel is present, a large number of sparks will be generated. With an alloy steel drill point, there will be few sparks. This procedure will need to be performed in order to determine where the knife will have a blade and where the shank will be.

Forging is performed as follows:

First of all, the fire is lit in the stove, after which the blower is turned on. Next, you need to wait until the fuel starts to burn strongly. After this, the drill is placed in the oven. This must be done using pliers so that the shank is located outside the fire. If forging is performed for the first time, it is quite difficult to determine the first time whether the metal has heated to the desired temperature. In this regard, more than one drill will be damaged. In order not to spoil a large amount of material, it is recommended to first practice heating and forging on reinforcing bars.
You will need to remember what color the metal was and when it was easy to forge. It is also worth considering that in sunlight, even metal heated to 1000°C will not be light.

After the drill heats up to a temperature of more than 1000°C, it will need to be removed from the stove, and then secure the lower part of the shank in a vice. After this, you will need to take an adjustable wrench, press it against the top of the drill and straighten the spiral using circular movements. All actions will need to be done quickly so that the metal does not have time to cool, otherwise the drill will break. If you can’t complete all the steps in one go, you will need to reheat the drill and repeat the process. The end result will be a relatively smooth strip of metal.

At the next stage, you will need to forge the drill and roll the metal to the desired thickness. To do this, you will need to heat the metal to the required temperature, take a heavy hammer, and then level the steel with strong blows, giving it the required shape. The end result will be a steel strip approximately 3-5 mm thick. During the forging process of the material, you will need to constantly monitor the color of the product. As soon as a dull color appears, the workpiece will need to be returned to the forge.

Next you will need to forge the tip of the knife. It is worth knowing that the product will need to be given a round shape, while maintaining the required thickness of the structure. Forging should be done in such a way that the blade is slightly pulled in length as the hole is made. You need to hit carefully.

The next step is forging the edge for cutting. To do this you need to use a light hammer. The metal moves down to the edge, and you need to start from the middle of the blade. The cutting edge should be thin and the blade should remain straight. All blows must be delivered carefully. It is important to monitor the color of the product.

Next, the shank is forged. First of all, the shank of a round drill is heated, after which the product is rolled out with strong blows of a hammer. The shank can be narrow or wide. Everything will depend on the sketch drawn up.

After the metal has cooled, it will be possible to grind. You will need to remove excess metal to make the knife even and give it shine. After grinding, the product can become 2 mm thinner, resulting in the knife having less weight. On at this stage The blade can be sharpened and hardened.

Making a knife from steel cable is quite rare. In order to make such a knife, you need to put in a little more effort than when forging from a regular steel bar.

Forging a knife from a cable begins like regular forging. There are just a few little secrets. Firstly, this concerns the shank. Many craftsmen make a knife shank from a cable in the form of a finished handle. It looks very unusual and beautiful. And here there are two approaches to making a handle. Take a thick cable and then weld its end, making it a monolithic piece. Or make a handle in the shape of a loop, and forge a blade from the ends. Secondly, forging a cable is a difficult task due to the scattered wires that make up the cable. To make a knife, you will need to weld them together. But this is a whole art and you shouldn’t expect that you will get a knife out of a cable the first time. Welding can be done in two ways. The first is to electric weld along the large grooves. The second is to perform forge welding. The second option is more complicated and at the same time preferable.

So, having chosen the method of creating the handle, we proceed to forging the knife. To do this, heat the cable until it turns bright red. Then we take it out and sprinkle it with borax. Then we send it back to the crucible. This is a simple way to prepare for forge welding. Borax is a salt of tetraboric acid and is used by craftsmen to weld individual layers of steel. Essentially, it is a flux that facilitates the melting process and protects the molten metal from oxygen and eliminates metal oxides. Borax can be found in the public domain without any problems.

After the cable has been treated with borax on all sides and it has heated up from 900 to 1200°C or more, we remove it from the furnace and begin to forge it. We strike with a heavy hammer, but at the same time we try to keep the cable fibers together. The difficulty of forging a cable lies precisely in this. But with practice you can achieve acceptable results. In the end, the cable can be heated and forged as many times as desired. But at the same time, every time you heat it in the forge, sprinkle the cable with borax. The result is a monolithic piece of steel consisting of many layers, almost like Damascus steel. After which all that remains is to forge the blade of the required shape.

Tempering a blade begins with heating it from light red to orange. After which the knife is lowered into water or oil. In this case, add 2 - 3 tablespoons to the water table salt per 1 liter, and the water temperature should be 18 - 25 °C, oil 25 - 30 °C. Hardening is carried out quite quickly and for everything to go well after hardening, the blade must be released. The steel hardening itself occurs in the temperature range from 750 to 550 °C. The moment of hardening can even be felt when the steel begins to “tremble and groan” in the liquid. As soon as the process ends, the blade must be removed and allowed to cool naturally.

The blade is tempered after hardening. The process itself involves weakening the internal stress of the steel, which makes it more flexible and resistant to various types of loads. Before tempering, the blade should be cleaned of possible scale and then heated again. But the temperature during vacation is much lower. The knife itself must be held over the flame and observed. As soon as the entire surface is covered with a yellow-orange film, remove the knife from the heat and let it cool naturally.

Sometimes quenching and tempering are done with oil or water, and sometimes through oil into water. This type of hardening is done very quickly. First, the blade is lowered into oil for 2 - 3 seconds, and then into water. With this approach, the risk of doing the hardening incorrectly is minimal.
Forging a knife with your own hands seems like a simple task. In addition to the fact that you will have to swing the forging hammer quite a lot, even without experience in the matter of forging metal, you may not be able to forge a knife the first time. Therefore, you first need to get good at it and practice a little, and then start forging a knife.

In search of the idea of ​​​​making perfect instruments, craftsmen try to use the most unusual materials and available means. The blacksmith realized one of these homemade finds. He showed how to make his own forged knife from metal cable without sketches. If you do it according to pre-prepared drawings and drawings, thinking through everything down to the smallest detail, this is what craftsmen who specialize in making knives do.

Two videos from the “Kovko Kova4” channel show the technology of making a knife from such a durable steel material as cable. The first video is cable welding. The second is about knife forging.

To weld a cable and make a forging for a knife from it, you must first prepare the material. There is a rope in the center of the steel coils, you need to remove it, it gets in the way. To do this, you will have to partially unravel the coils. In place of the rope, 8 mm wire rod is installed.

To prepare for welding, prepare 2 trims. We weld the edges with electric welding. Then we put them together and weld them together again. We also attach a handle that is convenient to hold. In the middle between the routes, 2 pieces of 8 mm wire were welded on both sides. The master didn’t do anything extra. Flux - borax. Sprinkled the heated workpiece. And again into the fire. Watch the video for everything else.

A blank of welded cable. Dimensions shown. If you cut the forging into three equal parts, clean it and reassemble it, you can weld it again. How to do it several times, changing the location of the scraps. The master himself did not set such a goal, but simply wanted to make a knife from a cable. Therefore, the workpiece was divided into two parts. These will make 2 knives. I noticed some dark spots on the cut of the forgings. Most likely this is the norm when welding a cable.

This shows the size of the workpiece after hammer forging. Before doing this, remove the scale with a brush. No cracks or pores were noticed. A forging for a knife will be made from it. The blade and handle will be formed. The bevels will be made on the cutting part. The rest of the work on finishing the knife should be done on sharpeners and grinders.

Buying a knife from a cable is almost ready. But if desired, it can be further shortened. The very length of the blade. The blacksmith left everything as is. The handle will have two linings. Fastening with three rivets. Three holes were made accordingly. A dark stripe appeared on the blade itself, visible to the eye. A small pair was seen on the tip. But during processing, all this should be ground off. Overall, the rope product turned out well.

Recycled raw materials will not allow you to make a blade highest quality. But many people like the feeling of other materials being reborn into cutting and piercing objects. For example, forging a knife from a file or chain, spring, valve, bearing, cable, drill.

Bearing knife

For knives, bearings from cars are used, usually with a diameter of 10-15 centimeters.

Rope knives

Cable makes good blades, but damask properties not high due to large patterns. Cable knives contain a small amount of carbon, so a Damascus cutting edge must be welded to their bodies.

Spring knives

Many people prefer to make knives with their own hands from springs that were made back in the Soviet period. Then high-quality steel 65G was used for the spring. The properties of the spring metal are increased due to the correct ratio components and technological heat treatment. If the spring knives are overheated, they will become brittle.

Chain knives

Recycled material such as chains is widely used for forging. Most often these are chains from a chainsaw, but there are also motor chains from a gasoline engine.

Valve knives

To make knives with your own hands, hollow exhaust valves are taken from the valve. Not every craftsman knows how to correctly pull the knife out of the valve. Therefore this is not the best option.

Drill knives

Good knives come from a drill. The tool steel from which the drills are made speaks for itself. If you properly harden a blade made with your own hands from a drill, it will not break under impact loads and will be able to withstand high bending loads.

File knives

To make it yourself, you first need to draw a sketch - the shape of the blade and handle, choose the mounting method, as in the video. The metal for the file is carbon steel U10. Its hardness is 57 - 58 HRC. These properties of the metal are preserved during forging, and knives made from a file are strong, have high cutting performance and can withstand heavy loads.

Saw knives

An alternative would be to use a powered rail saw. Their strength is even higher than that of files. Both of these products are ideal for forging knives at home. Since the old file is more accessible, we will consider the technology from it in more detail. You can also watch the process on video.

Stages of converting a file into a knife

Forging at home should be carried out with strict adherence to all safety precautions.

We will use:

• A file (preferably Soviet).
• Material for making the handle (plastic, bone, wood, etc.).
• Shoe polish and wax.
• Gas stove or other heating device.
• A machine, a vice and a grinder.
• Magnet.
• Sandpaper.
• Material for rivets (preferably brass).
• Glue for leather and metal.

First, we fire the file in the oven, as in the video. Heat it for 6 hours and leave it there until it cools completely. We do this so that the steel becomes the same as before factory processing. Instead of a stove, you can use hot coals from a fire. At home, you can use a gas burner for this. The future knife is placed on it in the place where the cutting part is supposed to be. A metal heat shield is placed on top so that it does not touch the file. The workpiece is sprinkled with salt, which should melt when heated. Process time – 6 hours.

Then they cut off all the excess from the workpiece so that it matches the drawn sketch. Now you need to drill holes for the rivets and harden the future knife. The workpiece is heated evenly until it glows the same color. The handle does not need to be hardened. If the steel is hardened, it will not be magnetic. This is a signal for further action. At this stage the workpiece should scratch the glass if done correctly.

The most important part of the matter is completed, you can begin tempering - the process of changing the properties of steel in order to reduce brittleness. To do this, you need to heat the knife in the oven for two hours. Then the knife is ground and brought to a smooth surface, as in the video.

The next step will be etching the steel with ferric chloride. The result will be the formation of an oxide film, which will protect the metal from corrosion. If ferric chloride is not available, you can use vinegar or lemon juice.

The final step is the handle. It sits on the glue and is riveted. Sharpening is supposed to be done manually, as in the video, since the knife is not afraid of scratches. In any case, hand sharpening is better than clumsy sharpening on a machine. Now the blade needs to be waxed. It is advisable to sharpen knives before the metal is completely hardened.

Instead of a false handle, you can use leather, which must be wound evenly and brought to a uniform state using shoe polish.

It should be noted that knives made at home are very resistant to mechanical processing and after hardening, they can only be sharpened using a diamond sharpening machine. With a regular sharpener you can only correct manual sharpening.

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