I happened to be cleaning my shop the other day and found this ugly old thing…
It’s the first knife I ever made, forged from an old lawn mower blade. I don’t think it could have been any uglier if I’d planned it that way, but at the time I was pretty excited – not so much with the results but with successfully completing the forging process to make something.
My first forge was as crude as my first knife was ugly. For a forge I used a fire pit in the backyard, with a steel pipe stuck in it and a hairdryer taped to the other end for a makeshift blower. For those not familiar with the art, a simple fire alone will get hot enough to roast hotdogs, but not enough to heat steel so that it can be forged. Forging requires that you heat steel to the point that it will be soft enough that you can change its shape with a hammer. To get a fire that hot you have to blow air into it somehow. Blowing air is what turns a fire into a forge.
With my first ever ‘forge’ I heated my chunk of lawn mower blade to a bright yellow and hammered away. After a few hammer blows the steel cools off and will no longer be soft enough to manipulate its shape with a hammer. Back into the fire it goes, bringing it up to a bright yellow, and then returning it to the anvil for more hammer blows. For forge tongs I used a pair of old plyers and my anvil was a chunk of old ‘I’ beam I picked up for a couple of bucks at a garage sale.
This process went on for a while until I had the shape of a crude knife. I heat treated it, and finished the handle with some chunks of hardwood I found laying around the garage. For pins I used bits of metal from a clothes hanger.
Lawn mower blades are usually made from good tool steel, with enough carbon that it can be hardened to hold a sharp edge if properly heat treated. So while not very pretty, my knife is sharp and very serviceable – but I am not expecting to win any awards with it.
I still remember how exciting it was just to see hot steel move under my hammer blows and realizing I could manipulate and shape it. It was a lot of fun, even if my first few attempts turned out ugly.
I don’t think people should quit if their first attempt, or even first several attempts, don’t work out so well. Don’t be discourage by failure or ugly results. Fortunately, persistence pays off and if you keep at it, you will get better. Here is a picture of a knife I recently made, using the same process of forging. I forged this paring knife from the leaf spring of a car, and the handle material came from the wood of a honey locust tree in my backyard.
