This is a new knife project that is almost entirely courtesy of the woods and the deep earth; it is forged out of ancient spring steel with a carbon content of roundabout 0,75-0,9%, and presumeably nothing else. How funny this is if you are accustomed to modern spring steel with its relatively coarse (yet normally fine enough) grain, is illustrated by the story of its making. When I first tempered the blade I treated it quite conservatively, as I always do. If you don´t overdo it, it´s even better for the blade if you quench and normalize it one time more. It turned out soft, or so I thought. Knives from this old steel always tend to feel fluffy while they actually are not. Okay, I thought, there´s enough carbon in it, so I lost a bit of a patience and treated it like "bam", not quite gently. Culprit is, it was too brittle, so when I tested it, the tip broke off. It then sat in my drawer for a while until I thought, well, there´s still enough of it left, make it work.
At a recent hammer - In at Kai´s (by the way, thank you again, bro!), I reworked the blade and did some heating the blade. I simply wrapped a wet rug around the handle and heated the blade until it showed a golden hue. Then I ground the edge line and spine line down a bit and redid the edge bevel, and here it comes.
Blurry pic, I know... but you can see there´s a hollow forged in for balance. The blade now comes in at 90 mm. The handle is made from ancient bog oak from an ancient mine in the Muttental and is some 150 years old, put on with modern mosaic pins. The steel is approximately 100 years old. I like the fact that all materials were given by the woods and earth which will be its natural habitat.
I will make a clipper sheath for it, and it´ll be ready to rumble...;-)
