BARR KNIVES

ESSAYS ON KNIFEMAKING

• History of Knives
• My Beginnings
• Stock Removal
• Off-Hand Grinding

HISTORY OF KNIVES

A knife blade by itself is a thing of singular purpose, to cut. The first knife was likely little more than a conveniently sharp rock or broken piece of dried bone. When not easily available, early minds would eventually turn to making their own sharpened edge so as not to depend solely on capricious Nature to provide one. So important is the ability to cleave, to make distinctions, that the knife is Our First Tool. If a person were dropped naked anywhere on earth, it is the one thing that would best ensure their survival. They have become inseparable from human existence. Certainly there are people in the world who can claim to be incompetent with or find no use for a knife, but that is more a reflection of our wealth as a society than a lack of use-fullness. As we spent time honing our intellectual skills so that we could more effectively make distinctions, so did we spend time sharpening the blades that made the physical distinctions, giving to them greater effectiveness and elegance in the same ways we do our intellect.

I have always enjoyed working with my hands. Eleven years ago, my future wife and I lived next door to a finish carpenter in Manhattan Beach, California. His name was Brent and when his garage door was open I knew he was in there working. He had all of the woodworking tools that I couldn't afford and he also knew how to use them. I would visit him and try to learn just by hanging around him. When I learned that he made knives, I was awestruck -- not by the technical expertise in his work, but by the fact that making one's own knives was in the realm of possibility. It seemed so incredible to take raw materials; steel barstock, brass bar and rods, and wood, and turn them into a shining, mirror polished tool with one sharpened edge and a polished and pinned wooden handle that was like no other in the world.

MY BEGINNINGS

I decided that I wanted to make a knife and set out to learn how it was done. I began to buy the available magazines and read everything I could find at the library, which wasn't much. I started getting catalogs for knifemaker supply houses, poring over them for hours, and learning what equipment was available and their associated costs.

I started out with some steel from a garage sale and used my big belt sander to shape it into something vaguely like a knife. I had been told by a few makers that a belt sander was a fine way to get started. Later I learned that when they said belt sander, they meant a bench mounted sander, not a floor sander set upside-down on the ground. Trying to grind a piece of metal that way is difficult at best and might better be described as foolhardy. I did finally get it shaped like a knife, but before learning that 4130CM isn't a good steel for a knife. I put it aside and pressed on. That piece is one of the very few knives that I have ever thrown away. I don't like throwing anything away that has any potential left in it.

I have always been an information hound, and when I aimed myself at knifemaking, it revealed itself to be a huge field for research. At first there were only the periodicals and catalogs to guide me, but I got a how-to book by Richard Barney and Bob Loveless and tried to duplicate their procedures. I knew I needed a grinder of some sort and soon bought the very cheapest belt grinder I could find in my catalogs. At around 400 dollars, it wasn't by any measure cheap.

The terms sander or grinder are generally used to describe any of a number of tools utilizing abrasive-backed paper or cloth for light to moderate stock removal. Most woodworking sanders will make a quick pile of sawdust out of any piece of wood you care to aim them at and the consequence is that all of the stock removed by sanding or grinding is turned into dust. That is fine little shards of metal and silicosis inducing (kaff kaff) dust. For that I created the giant silver sucking snake, or GSSS, and it helps to keep the black loogies at bay.

If you've ever operated an electric sander then you know the danger of leaving one in the same spot for very long. It quickly makes a dent in the surface that you wanted nice and smooth, and if you were working on a big flat surface you now need to take much of the rest of the flat down to the level of the deepest part of the dent. This is usually accompanied by some good hopping around and cursing by the crafts-person.

Many woods have a way of packing up in the abrasive that renders the abrasive useless. Even if the abrasive isn't worn off the paper, the pulverized sanding dust begins to fill and smooth out the rough surface of the sandpaper. The amount of clean, sharp abrasive available on a 2x72 inch belt would be the same as a stone twenty-two inches in diameter and weighing around 150 pounds. This quality is what makes the disposable abrasive backed cloth useful for the finishing of irregularly shaped objects of both wood and metal.

It takes a lot more work to shape and polish metal than it does for most all woods. The greater power of metal grinding equipment gives them greater versatility and consequently there are a greater variety of machines called grinders than there are sanders.

A grinder is used for stock removal or polishing of practically anything. A grinder may use a stone wheel of specific abrasive grade, or grit mounted either horizontally or vertically, or an abrasive belt that is run stretched between rollers. The belt has the advantage of versatility, since I can run the belt over a flat surface for sanding flats or over a small diameter wheel for sanding curves and contours. I can also use the belt without any backing, called slack belt grinding, for shaping and polishing contours and transitions. All of these applications can be done on the same belt grinder.

The stone wheel grinders do their job with a grinding wheel and are limited by the shape of the wheel, and that they either use the side of the wheel or the edge of it, which may or may not have a specific contour. What the stone wheel grinders lack in versatility they more than make up for in the quality of surface finish, at least in the case of precision grinders. I am not talking about the 39.95 bench grinders available at Wal-Mart, but industrial type surface grinders that can grind a surface to a tolerance of .0002 inches. That's 2/10,000th of an inch.

My eighth-grade science teacher, Mr. Rude, said that the average human finger can discern irregularities in a smooth surface down to 1/40,000th of an inch. Just a little fact, but it impressed me greatly and it comes back to me often while inspecting the fit and finish on a knife or anything of close tolerance. One of the most enjoyable aspects of knifemaking is the laying on of hands to the work. The experience of forging hot metal is particularly visceral; shaping red-hot steel with a hammer feels very powerful. Every person should have the chance at least once to strike a hot iron.

STOCK REMOVAL

Knifemakers commonly describe themselves as either stock removal makers or bladesmiths. In truth, all knifemakers perform some kind of stock removal on their work. When steel is heated to upwards of 1300 degrees, the oxidization process is wildly accelerated so that even if you beat it into the perfect shape, it comes out of the fire looking like hell. And I have to grind the hell off of it to best expose what I've wrought. There is an association of knifemakers in Arizona whose goal is to promote the making of knives without power abrasive tools. This certainly makes for quite a challenge, but it's just not for me. I don't think many of the great cutlers of history deliberately avoiding using the common tools of the trade. At least the surviving body of work suggests quite the opposite, that past makers of fine blades put a lot of effort into the mounting and finishing of them. Even so, there is some cachet attached to bladesmithing and to blacksmithing in general, if only because the art is so dangerous, efficient, exciting, and romantic.

My own use of the forge is mostly one of expedience. I built my forge for about $150 in materials and a few months of gathering information. My first torch, an oxygen/acetylene kit that used disposable cans of gas proved inefficient for heat treating blades. The oxygen tanks were good for about 10 minutes constant use, which is what it takes to get a piece of steel uniformly red-hot. And let me tell you, if you have a red-hot piece of steel, you had better have a good grip on it. I don't want to drop it while it's at forging temperature. First, if the flooring is hard and it hasn't landed on the knifemakers squishy parts, the knife can get nastily bent or gouged, messing up those nice grind lines. Now there it sits, slightly dented on the hard cement floor, or burning its own silhouette into the soft wood or carpet. Once I would get it picked up, it wasn't hot enough any more and I would have to start over with the torch, using the last of the oxygen tank.

The difference in the two classes of makers is in the forging, or hot forming of the steel. I don't have the physical capability to take blacksmithing very seriously, but I can take advantage of the hot-forming abilities of steel to make my life easier. One disadvantage of stock removal is that in order to make a knife blade 15 inches long that is 3/8 inch thick where the handle meets the blade requires that you start with a piece of steel 15 inches long and 3/8inch thick. That is a huge and heavy piece of steel and in order for it to be made into a well-balanced blade most of its mass needs to be removed/turned into grinding dust. That's tedious, costly, dangerous and just plain tough to do by off-hand grinding.

That's why some knifemakers' work appears overbuilt and still carries the shadows of the big rectangle whence it came. Most beginning stock removal makers will start with this giant slab of steel and grind it to an outline of some large Bowie pattern, do the blade bevels and put a handle on it. This creates a heavy monstrosity that is unsuited for cutting and usually ends up as a wallhanger.

I should know, I have my own wallhanger on my shop wall, and I've seen nicer versions of this same knife offered for sale in the trade magazines. People call it a Bowie, but it's more of a Harvey, as in Harvey Wallhanger. The sap on the blade is from its only test of function. We took down an ornamental tree in our backyard and I used the knife to chop the 13-inch diameter trunk in half. The weight of the knife made chopping difficult, the handle dug in and was uncomfortable in spots, and I would have gotten blisters had I gone much longer. After chopping that one tree, I took it downstairs, hung it on the wall and that's where it lives.

Unfortunately, that is the third of those Iron Mistress style knives that I have made -- it was just the first to survive long enough to test. The Iron Mistress style of Bowie knife was popularized as Jim Bowie's choice of knife in the movie of the same name. I don't personally believe that this was the case, but since Bowie's knife wasn't recovered after his death, proof seems impossible. So the answer to the often-asked question "What is a Bowie knife?" boils down to educated guesses and marketing.

OFF-HAND GRINDING

The experience of grinding a knife blade out of steel is similarly powerful, delicate and dangerous, but in different ways from forging. In forging, the material is plastic and often if something gets too small in one dimension, it can be forged back larger, or upset. The process of grinding is one-way and leaves little room for error when working toward a high-quality end-product. That is why most of the final grinding/sanding on the visible surfaces of my work is accomplished by hand. Toward the end, the danger of damage is greater from a small error.

Even if a maker can forge a top-quality cutting instrument, the visible quality is determined by the fit and finish, which is in turn dependent upon the grinding and sanding operations.

Here is my high-tech hand-sanding apparatus: sandpaper clamped to a piece of wood. It works surprisingly well and has proven to be the most cost effective tool in my shop. It involves working up a sweat, but the amount of hand-sanding required is dependent upon the quality of the machine grinding, so the better I get at off-hand grinding, the less hand-sanding I end up having to do.

Here is a bit of hand sanding in process. The upper blade has been initially sanded with 180-grit sandpaper and the lower has had the 220-grit sanding done. The process is repeated on all the flat surfaces until the desired finish is achieved, or forever, whichever comes first. I have heard it said that an artist never really completes a work, but just gives up on it. An especially accurate statement with respect to hand sanding.

I see myself doing less and less off-hand grinding due to my gimpy right hand, I am preparing for that by learning to use my milling machine to make my own grinding fixtures.