I Forged a Knife

Lately I haven’t been sharing what I’ve been working on lately as I’ve been so busy with all sorts of client work.

I do want to share something I’ve done earlier this week which I thought was really cool!

Forging a knife

We went to a local workshop where Maarten from Zjakkoo thought us the basics of forging a knife.

From a piece of metal you put in the kiln, to shaping the actual knife. We got to do every step ourselves.

Shaping the knife

The very first step was picking the shape of the knife we wanted to make. I choose a pretty standard kitchen knife.

Then we had to hammer the steel into shape with a hammer. You do this by heating up the steel until it’s glowing orange and then whack it with a hammer on an anvil.

Eventually you’ll have a piece of metal which is shaped like a knife, but had to be shaped into an actual knife.

Maarten helped us cut the rough shape from the steel using an angle grinder. After that it was time to shape the knife on a belt sander.

I have to say I skipped over a few steps in the process like hardening and straightening the steel.

We also needed to fit the handle, and the rough result of that looked like this:

Finishing up

The finishing steps were to glue the knife in the handle using epoxy resin and sharpen the knife using whetstones.

All-in-all, I really enjoyed the process and felt like I left having learned a few new skills.

I ended up with a really sharp and nice-looking kitchen knife and felt proud of it.

The bottom knife was made by my wife, Loes.