5/10

Today I finished a knife that I have been working on over the past few days. While working on it, I knew that I wanted to give it, so I ended up giving it to my mom as a Mother’s day gift. To me, the knife had a lot of kinks and mistakes in it, but to my mom it was a flawless piece of art. I am certainly proud of the knife, but I am more happy about what I learned while making it. From the get-go the knife had its problems, like having the tang be in line with the top of the blade rather than placed in the middle. I worked around this by carving a channel in the top of the handle and tying the three pieces (two pieces of wood and one piece of brass) together with a brass pi lengthwise, which I ended up grinding into while shaping the handle. This was not a huge error structurally, and ended up looking kind of cool as an aesthetic element. The blade also acquired a slight warp towards the tip when I was heating it up for hardening. I later realized that I could have fixed this in the tempering process (tempering slightly softens the metal after hardening to keep it from being too brittle), but was too late when I found out. I was able to get most of the warp out by grinding the material, which also made the blade somewhat lighter. When forge welding the bit of tool steel into the edge during the first steps, I was amazingly able to use a relatively miniscule piece of tool steel, which the vikings would have been very proud of. This was one of the few things that worked near perfectly, but I will use a larger piece next time for aesthetic purposes (when the blade is etched you get a wavy line along the edge of the where the two metals meet). Ultimately, this process was a sort of comedy of errors, whatever that means. My errors were not catastrophic, and even worked out for the better in some cases. It would seem that I have found the silver steel lining in a less-than-ideal situation.