# Forged suji



## milkbaby (Jun 16, 2020)

This is a practice knife that I hand forged from a strip of Alabama Damascus carbon damascus steel. I was shooting for "as forged" geometry with distal taper and as little grinding as necessary, but I made mistakes or learned lessons if I look at it another way.  

One mistake was not cleaning up and flattening my forging enough. I also went too thin with the forged bevel and the edge. The knife warped badly in heat treat so after straightening as much I could, I still had to grind back a lot of height and re-flatten the blade road with grinding. Lessons learned for the future.

First hidden tang for me too. Learned that I have to get much longer drill bits to make the tang slot the way I wanted. I've been hoarding stabilized wood from a specific supplier for a few years and was happy to finally use his material on a handle. He's super friendly with good selection and pricing, so I was glad to finally use some of the material I got from him.

This was a tough project for me with the pandemic going on. I had the blade forged, heat treated, and cleaned up when my girlfriend broke up with me out of the blue. She was the only person I'd been spending time with during the pandemic thus by default my only support system, so this sat around unfinished about a month. It's my heartbreak knife, I guess.


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## Bensbites (Jun 16, 2020)

The blade looks awesome. Sorry about the GF breakup. That’s hard enough without a pandemics.


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## kbright (Jun 16, 2020)

Nice colors on the handle material, and I like that dimple under the ferrule. Did you use a split dowel to sandwich the tang?


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## milkbaby (Jun 17, 2020)

kbright said:


> Nice colors on the handle material, and I like that dimple under the ferrule. Did you use a split dowel to sandwich the tang?



Thanks and no it's not dowel construction, just made the slot directly in the stabilized woods. The handle isn't that heavy, the balance point is at my maker's mark. A gyuto would be relatively blade heavy with this specific handle.


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## milkbaby (Jun 17, 2020)

Decided to have a little fun testing:


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## ForeverLearning (Jun 18, 2020)

really like this, I really want to try that style handle, I forget what the feature is called at the back of the handle? Sorry about the breakup, never good news.


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## ian (Jun 18, 2020)

Is that your ex’s brand of water? If so, good riddance.

(Turning loss into rage into physical violence against inanimate objects is my usual post relationship path. Sorry to hear it.)


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## ma_sha1 (Jun 18, 2020)

Really pretty handle! Sorry about the break-up, good time to tinker thou.


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## milkbaby (Jun 19, 2020)

ForeverLearning said:


> really like this, I really want to try that style handle, I forget what the feature is called at the back of the handle? Sorry about the breakup, never good news.



Thanks. I usually stick to the classic "coke bottle" handle shape with palm swell. There's that "kickback" or swell at the butt end too which in theory helps the hand from slipping back too far off the back end of the handle. Probably not as important in a slicer or even a kitchen knife, but more so for a chopper, fighter, camp, or other type knife that you might swing with force.


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