Knifemaking Beginner and No Clue which Steel to Use?

The 2 Best Knifemaking Beginner Steels

Knifemaking Beginners attention!

Ever wanted to know which kind of steel you should use for making your first knives?

You are in the right spot!

In this video Dave will show you the best blade steel for knifemaking beginners.

Dave started knifemaking and blacksmithing in Ireland in 2013. Back then when he first started making knives he had no clue which steel to use.

There are multitudes of steel formulas that have been designed all optimised for specific tasks. As a beginner knife maker it can be daunting to pick through all the jargon, chemistry, TTT diagrams and finally know where to get a steel.

That sounds already overwhelming right?

No worries … in this video Dave simplifies the choices and explains why to use which steel.

And to make it even easier for you Dave made a list of all the beginner steel – find the beginner knife making steel list below the video.

Enjoy – any questions contact us.

Knifemaking Beginner Steels – Dave suggestions:

– 1075 steel 3.2mm x 38mm x 1220mm
– Thicker pieces 1075-125-1.5-17
– Beginners Knife Making Kit (The beginner’s knife making kit is an excellent choice for… beginner knife makers. It contains all the materials and instructions you need to be successful in your first simple knife build.)

For the more advanced knifemakers check out our steel guide.

Transcript

Hi guys. This is the first video I’m going to do to kick off a series on just how to start knife-making. I want to do this so that people can probably get through it with the least amount of frustration. It’s a great hobby to have. But I’m going to talk about the first thing you need to get before you get the power hammer and the forge and like the electric kiln that’s clicking away beside me.

You need to get a little bit of knowledge and specifically I recommend knowledge about steel. The right steel for the job is important but not as important as knowing how to get the best from a particular steel.

I say that because you hear things thrown around like 5160 is great for making large knives and bowies and your 80CRV2 for making swords, 440C for stainless cutlery.

You know, all that is important. But it’s not as important as the heat treatment was to make that blade do its job. So, if you’re just starting out, it’s likely that you don’t have a lot of the right tools to work some of the more complicated steels. I will cover that a little bit more later on. I don’t want to get too technical or make too much of a metallurgy lesson. I just want to focus on how to help beginners start the process.

I get asked a lot. What’s the best steel to use for making this type of knife or that type of knife? I’m just getting started. It’s probably the wrong question to ask. Again, the first question you should ask is, “How can I heat treat any type of steel?” and if you don’t have say a blowtorch, you don’t already have a forge set up, you don’t have an electric oven for – you know, that will take you up to 1200 degrees Celsius. But you do have something like this, little Bernzomatic gas torch. A great steel to start with, its a simple carbon steel, 1075 or 1084.

Now you might have heard from other people that you can just find old steel, old steel like springs, files, bearings. You know, sure a lot of great knives get made out of those and those are generally made with the same type of steel that knife makers really enjoying using. But there’s a big difference between say this rusty worn out leaf spring that I cut out of my old housemate’s – his boat trailer and a clean bar of SUP9 that I’ve bought from the store I know it is SUP9. I can look up how to heat treated and I can at least try and get the best from the bite. I will have a process. I will have a repeatable process.

So if there’s anything amiss, I can go back, look at what I’ve done and correct it and then slowly work towards getting repeatable results. The reason I say you might not be able to get repeatable results with steel like this is that there are a lot of variables. There are unknowns. Firstly, I can’t be guaranteed the composition, especially if it’s something cheap like a boat trailer spring.

I can’t even look up what the makers of this were using. Some makes of cars, you can find it. You know, some of the other variables do it have fractures in it. Springs undergo a huge amount of load. This one is particularly rusty. It’s impacted with salt water probably dozens of times.

That’s conducive to chewing away little spots before it starts to fatigue and sure enough, there would be stress fractures in here that open up as the spring flexes. Definitely, when I’ve been forging this one, it didn’t behave anything like 5160 or SUP9. It didn’t feel as heavy under the hammer and it started to kind of split a lot earlier than I thought it would. Not particularly high, not particularly low temperature.

So we replace these springs for about 25 bucks and so that’s a pretty measly type of steel.

So back to 1075. It can be heat-treated by the beginner simply because it’s a very barebones sort of steel. It’s iron and carbon with a few other things added in. It gets used industrially as actual cutting blade and also as spring kind of material.

You can heat treat this with a small blowtorch and if you’re starting out, the cheap tools like blowtorches that are going to do the heat treating I find – you know, you might not know if you want to progress with this hobby. So it’s good just to have something accessible that you can get from Bunnings and just get a move on with.

1075 being such a simple steel doesn’t need a soak time. So it is very hot flame that comes out of these torches. But it’s a small flame. It’s going to be hard to keep too much steel at the same temperature for a long time. So if you’re doing something like W-2 or 80 CRV2 that need to be soaked for a little while, you just aren’t going to get consistent results trying to keep a 4.5-inch section, 850 degrees Celsius with a little torch like that.

You might get it too hot in the centre whereas the back with the handle of the blade is starting to cool. When you go to quench that, you will have inconsistencies in hardness, which can lead to failure or it might just never really be fully at the right hardness – right temperature, sorry. When you quench, the hardness just won’t be there at all.

1075 and 1084 on the other hand, they don’t need a soak. They’re such simple steels and they’re what’s known as a eutectoid steel or close to eutectoid.

They’re in a happy place where you don’t need to soak them for too long now. It’s around 815, 830 degrees Celsius and then you get them straight into an oil. It can be a cheap oil you’ve got laying around the house. You know, olive oil, peanut oil, canola oil. Don’t use old motor oil. It lets off fumes. It’s probably not the most consistent of substances all the way through, which won’t give you a consistent quench across the length of your steel.

It’s just not best practice. It’s going to make a mess. It’s harder to get rid of. So this steel being close to eutectoid doesn’t need to be soaked. It also isn’t going to break the bank. If you mess up a few of these blades, it’s not going to cost you the earth. Like you can get to buy it for 30 something dollars from Gameco, I have links in the description.

Relatively thin you can get it. That’s easy. I mean you’re not going to have to grind a heap of stock away. Small stock is going to be a lot easier to heat up. Consistently, it’s also going to cool down fast when you get into the oil. Putting the steel into the oil is probably one of the things I – I find that the most fun. Heat treating and forming on the knife is great. Putting the handles on them, not so much. I get bored.

I have lots of very nice knives sitting here at my workshop with no handles on. But yeah, choosing the right steel and knowing how you’re going to heat treat it will make a world of difference. When it comes to finishing knives, I have knives that actually hold their edge. At the end of the day, that’s what you want. Everyone wants a knife that’s going to be flexible and hold an edge, when in reality, you’re just sort of moving between those two points based on different properties of the steel and how close you can get to the optimal properties through heat treatment.

Anyway guys, I feel like I get a little bit side-tracked talking about steel. So just to summarise, 1084 and 1075 are great steels for beginners because they can be done with very rudimentary equipment. It’s because the temperature to heat treat it isn’t terribly high, 815 to 830 degrees. It’s just past the critical temperature and will becomecome non-magnetic.

That’s another great feature with these steels. You can test them with a magnet as they kind of – they will start to look an orange colour. Don’t heat treat steel by going and looking at the colour of it. With 1084 and 1075, get yourself a good magnet like – I like to use welder’s magnets because I can stick them into things if I need to do a heat treat this way or I can tie them up and let them dangle and as I hold a piece of steel close to them, if they’re still magnetic, I will see the magnet angling towards them.

So you will easily have means of telling if you’re heat treating them correctly as you’re heat treating them. Once the steel just becomes non-magnetic, as I said before, it doesn’t need to be soaked. You just go straight into the oil Knifemaking Beginner Steels.

It’s inexpensive. So if you mess up a few of these blades, it doesn’t matter so much. It’s accessible. It’s a steel that you can use for as long as you like because it’s easy to get Knifemaking Beginner Steels.

Some guys don’t stop using it. Look at Ian Stuart. He just uses a 1084 for like every one of the blades he has ever made that I’ve seen. He might have used other steels. I don’t think so. He really likes 1084. You can have a lot of fun with it because it’s so simple.Knifemaking Beginner Steels

Once you get that heat treatment down, you don’t have to worry so much about the heat treatment. You don’t have to keep spending money just yet, until maybe you want to do some other more creative things. It gives you time to think about your grind, your handles.

There are plenty of other things that can go wrong in making a knife besides just getting your heat treatment correct. So why make the heat treatment hard for yourself to begin with?

Overall, as a steel, 1084 and 1075 are good steels. When I’m on the phone with people and they’re saying, “I just want to start out. What’s a good steel? I just want to use the good steel to make a knife. I just want to make one knife and then I will get it out of my system. I won’t care anymore.”

I know that’s not true through. Like one knife, they will look at it and think, “I can do that better. I can do that better. I can do that better,” and all of a sudden, they’ve made five knives.

1084 and 1075, we don’t recommend them to beginners because they’re cheap by any means. It’s for the reasons I’ve outlined already. Carbon steel blades make a good kitchen knife. They make a good outdoor hunting knife. They make a good anything. I use 1084 as like the carbon bit in forge welded axes It is kind of – it’s half the component of a lot of people’s carbon steel Damascus. It has got a lot of versatility in that steel and that’s why people will use it for their entire knife-making career. It’s fun to mix it up with other steels. But just as a beginner, it’s a great place to start.