Articles
Articles published on this page will be on various topics related to knife making and will range from knife design and development to detailed metallurgical aspects of knife making. I am a Metallurgist by profession with over 40 years experience in commercial heat treatment so if you have any questions please let me know and I’ll publish an answer.
If you’d like any specific topic to be covered please just click on the contact form at the bottom of the page and let me have your ideas on what you’d like to see.
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Busting a Few Heat Treatment Myths
As well as debunking some of the myths out there about heat treating blades, I thought it would be useful to cover some of the principles, so that we’re on the
same page to start.
The four key processes in blade heat treatment are: stress relieving, annealing, normalising, hardening and tempering.
QUENCHING KNIFE BLADES
QUENCHING Following much discussion on Facebook recently (Jan 2017) I thought I’d put pen to paper (or at least today’s electronic equivalent) in the hope that I can answer some of the more commonly recurring questions. My main problem is trying not to make this too...
Custom made Fairbairn-Sykes commando daggers
I was both honoured and humbled recently to be asked to make 5 Fairbairn-Sykes commando daggers for our 5th Special Forces in Phalaborwa to celebrate their 21st Anniversary. 1994 - 2015
Heat Treatment – General Principles
There are several heat treatment processes applicable to knife making and the intention of this article is to debunk some of the myths that surrounding this aspect of our art. The processes that we need to understand are stress relieving, annealing, normalising,...
Stainless Steels for Knife Making
Stainless steels are, simply put, carbon steels with enough added alloys to make them corrosion resistant. However, there’s more to it than that because there’s an added benefit in that Stainless Steels will, generally, produce the better knife when compared to Carbon...
Carbon Steels
In its simplest form, steel is an alloy of Iron and Carbon. It can be hardened if it contains sufficient, but not too much, Carbon. Theoretically, this range is from 0.008%C to 2.08%C (by weight) but for our purposes 0.5% to 1.2%C represents a steel that is practical...
CARBON or STAINLESS STEEL – WHICH SHOULD I CHOOSE?
A question that I tend to get from clients is whether carbon or stainless steel should be used for the blade. I would choose a Stainless Steel for most applications. However, there are some applications where I would definitely advocate a Carbon steel blade. For a...