Knifemaking Tuesdays Week 28 - Blades! waterjet handles, blade fixture Media

This week I got to pick up even more cool stuff from the waterjet place, a ton of titanium handles! They also gave me a tour of the shop and let me shoot a bit of video, unfortunately not of knife stuff but of some other project they're working on. My brother Erik and I spent Tuesday and Wednesday finish up the huge fixture plate for making blades, and after a few huge goof ups it finally works. Setting it up on the Tormach we tested out the code for cutting one blade, making sure that it's perfect before we multiply it across the whole fixture and potentially screw up 12 blades. We made 3 test blades, all mostly good but with room for improvement. The new toroid endmill that we're using to create the edge geometry rocks the house! Leaves a super nice surface finish and removes a lot of material quickly. These blades are RWL34 Swedish stainless steel. Once we go through a few runs of handles then we can take them to heat treat this coming monday.

Next week, heat treat, hard mill blades and engrave them, make titanium handles, make titanium spacers/thumbstuds.

Blade Show starts 2 weeks from today, we're at table 20E. Be sure to stop by and say hi!