Tanto WIP

[Aglifter]

I forgot about PMs not working - I thought I sent you an email as well. If you send me one through here, I have received them in the past

[randy]

Yes, the PM function is not active. Clicking on the e-mail button at the bottom of a post will generate an e-mail to the poster.

Great to hear from you HS! Resetting the GC Extraction Timer....

[HTRN]

Trouble is that it's virtually impossible to buy carbon steel here...

Scrap leaf springs?

Leaf springs tend to be 5160.
Coil springs tend to be 1095.

At least in US vehicles.

[Highspeed]

Good news, bad news. Mostly bad actually.....

The good news is that we now have internet at the farm thanks to something called WiMax whatever the hell that is.

The bad news is that the forged tanto is dead - mostly my own fault.
I was doing some finishing work on it, to save on grinding later and it fell out of the tongs and off ( what I laughingly call ) the anvil. Which wouldn't have been too big a deal but I've been experimenting with a Japanese technique where you wet the surface of the anvil and the face of the hammer, so the scale 'explodes' from the surface of the blade and doesn't get hammered back in.
Anyway, the anvil is supported on pieces of 4x4 wood and they had collected a fair amount of water while I was forging.
The blade landed on the soaked wood and the next thing was " Hissssss.....tink, tink, tink " - I actually heard it crack....
It's not recoverable, the cracks are too bad and in too many locations

My next moment of genius was to burn up a billet of damascus steel, because it came up to temperature faster than I expected. That annoys me because carbon steel is a precious resource here at the White Rock Forge.

I can't work on the stock removal tanto because I don't have any belts for my grinder ( three weeks the bloody things have been on order, talk about 'manana' - I do like the Spanish but I really wish they weren't quite so lazy )

So now it's Plan B, whatever the hell that is.....

[Aglifter]

Order via your friendly contacts in the US? Is their a Spanish equivalent of Grainger?

[Bullspit]

Ouch. I hate to see all that work go away just like that. Looking forward to your future progress.

[Highspeed]

Order via your friendly contacts in the US? Is their a Spanish equivalent of Grainger?

It's the shipping cost due to the weight that worries me about that, the cost of the steels I need is peanuts ( relatively speaking ) I should find out how much per #lb it might run to.

Another complication is that we don't have a mail service on the mountain so it's got to be shipped to our PO box and I don't know if they have a weight limit on packages. Getting anything couriered is a nightmare if you are in the boonies like we are. The satnav databases don't include our location, or the roads leading to it ( and g-d forbid anyone might know how to use an actual paper map any more )

Trying to buy specialist steels in Spain is like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling. I have tried to join a couple of Spanish knife making forums to see if I can make some contacts, but get this :-

Forum numero uno won't even let me register, it seems to be incompatible with every browser known to mankind and has a Captcha system which makes decoding Enigma seem trivial ( who invented Captcha ? I'd like ten minutes alone with them, in a basement, with them tied to a chair and me wiring their private parts to a source of extremely high voltage )

Forum numero dos lets me register, but then tells me I have to private message an admin before I can post. When I try to do that the software says I don't have permission to send private messages Typically bloody Spanish that is......

[Highspeed]

Ouch. I hate to see all that work go away just like that. Looking forward to your future progress.

Thanks mate. It's the nature of the beast I suppose. I'm pretty familiar with working high alloy steels from my gunsmithing days ( making tools and reamers ), but when you get down to knife thicknesses the margin of error seems really small.

Now I got internet at home I'll check out your knifemaking threads, see what I can learn.

[First Shirt]

Get a rough idea of shipping costs, and let me know what you need (type as well as amount), since my SIL makes custom knives for a living (and must be doing pretty well, he's got a six-month backlog), and he probably has some of what you need, or can get it cheap, if we can beat the local price (cost+shipping), we gotcha covered!

[Aglifter]

Hmm... So much for the days of "Toledo Steel" I suppose.

What if you stopped thinking "knife steel", and started thinking "industrial steel"?