More leather knives.

[dikman]

I decided to make a smaller (1/4 round?) knife from the saw blade and while drawing it out I thought there's enough steel to make a 4" wide round knife with an off-set handle. So I cut them out and thought the bigger one was going to make a very nice knife. Unfortunately the Knife Gods thought otherwise! I heated the bigger blade and quenched it in water and it promptly took on several interesting curves!! Me being smart reheated it, quenched it and quickly shoved it between two steel plates to flatten it. As I tightened the vise holding the plates there was a lovely "ting" sound and I knew what had happened. I overlooked the fact that the steel being so thin cooled too quickly. It's pretty good steel though, goes really hard when quenched!
Anyhow, I looked at what was left and figured I might as well make something out of it but didn't want to waste time doing a fancy handle so I found some very old oak (from a wine barrel) in the scrapheap and used that. It's surprisingly hard wood to cut.  Gave it a coat of BLO and called it good. The other little one has a laminated handle made from the oak and some redgum, I heated the handle and put on some paraffin/beeswax mix, which looked nice, until I put it on a buffer and the nice white wood went dirty!
The final problem I had was sharpening them, I used the paper wheel setup and could get a beautifully polished edge but could NOT get that really sharp edge you need for cutting leather. In the end I used a 1000 grit diamond stone to shape the edge then the strop, that seems to work.
I think I might make a short straight blade next, as it shouldn't warp when quenching, and maybe use up some of the antler that is too small/too much pith for a bigger blade.

[toxo]

Don't think it matters how you got there but you might have made a banging push knife and an excellent overhand drag knife (if you roll that way). Well done.