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Post by fullmetal56 on Aug 22, 2012 3:10:35 GMT
Hello everyone! I'm new...obviously. Here's the thing, very soon I'm going to begin making my own knives and maybe get into making swords depending on how well the 1st attempt goes (using the sword making guide). I'll be using S-7 steel. I found a site that sells 3ft long flat bars for around $120 and of that 3 feet I can either get a full blown sword or 3 or more knives depending on how big I want them to be. Not too bad considering everywhere else I found was either double that or didn't have it at all. I'm also using S-7 because I can't find T-10 or L6 Bainite for sale anywhere on the web. (By the way, if anyone knows where I can get either of those, especially the L6 Bainite it would be greatly appreciated if you could point me that way!) Anyways the place I'm getting the steel from obviously does heat treatment as well, cool, that will come in handy since I live in an apartment and could never do that here. My question is: Does anyone know of a place that can do differential hardening and do it the way I want? I don't really care if the knives I make are hardened that way but if I do make a sword and it comes out pretty good then I would prefer it to be differentially hardened. Or would that be a bad idea for an S-7 sword, would it be better to have the sword evenly hardened rather than differentially hardened? Any help would be awesome!
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Post by Lukas MG (chenessfan) on Aug 22, 2012 8:09:08 GMT
First off, welcome!! Cool that you decided to try your hand on blade making. It'll be a fascinating journey from now on...
Couple things though. Why do you want to spend such an outragous amount of money on steel? Why S-7 that apparently is so hugely expensive? If you live in the US, I recommend getting some of Aldo's 10xx series. 120$ gets you more 1084 than you can use in the next years. It's a very good steel for beginners and will give you a good blade. 5160 would be a good choice as well, it's what many sword maker's use. It will be more expensive than the 10xx series and you might find it not as easy to work with. I personally use 56Si7 (9260) which is also a wonderful steel. In any case, there are MANY different steels that will all give you good results if yiu handle them correctly (remember, the heat treat and smith makes the sword, not the steel).
Also, what kind of blades do you intend to make? Only katana usually require a differential hardening and those only if you want it traditional. There is no real advantage a DH blade has over a well done TH, more like the other way around.
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Post by fullmetal56 on Aug 22, 2012 15:35:31 GMT
Thanks for the welcome! I'm choosing S-7 because I can't find L6 anywhere. I want to use the best steel available to me. Me starting to make my own knives started because of how terrible I think current mass produced knives are and because of how expensive a cheap stainless steel knife can be, which I think is ridiculous. All my blades will be full tang knives, I've had more than a couple folding knives fold the wrong way on me and it's made me completely hate them for it. I'm also wanting to make the "ultimate" knife for myself. The best knife possible for my needs.
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