Knifemaking Tuesdays Week 35 - hardmilling blades and engraving Media

This week was spent hardmilling all the Norseman blades, engraving the logos, and starting assembly. I started out by testing a new machining theory that, in my head, seemed like an awesome idea, but in practice sucked big time. For the cutting edge on my knives I have chosen a 15° angle on each side, so I wanted to try using a 15° endmill to do it in one pass. Turns out the tool is actually called a 75° endmill. Doing it this way was very difficult to find the optimal depth of cut so that it gets the whole edge but doesn't undercut, basically it was a huge pain and it lead to a lot of edge chipping. I used a USB microscope to zoom in and see the edge at around 100x magnification. Next up we showed how we practically ruined a whole run of threaded spacers, then were able to fix them. We then realized that some of the handles weren't fitting together as perfectly as they need to. Turns out that something, somewhere, made a small mistake on a few of the handles, causing them to line up quite wrong when assembled. So Erik spent a few hours matching handles to ensure that every assembled knife fits perfectly. After ditching the 15° endmill idea I worked out the final bugs in my hardmilling code and show the entire process for that, including 7 tool changes. I explain how subroutines work and how excellent they are.
I bought a bunch of cool new engraving endmills from www.2Linc.com, these things are sweet! I was previously using 1/16" 4flute ball endmills for all my engraving, but cutting into hardened stainless steel can be very difficult on a tool, and that ballmill has very little material at the very tip, so it kept shearing off. I've blown through 10 of them this month. It's nice to finally have PROPER engraving tools, and they work excellent. We wrap up by showing 13 knives being assembled, it's so cool to see them coming together!

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