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home built knives

Iv been building home Built knives lately using old meat cleavers i bought from goodwill. The other day i started cutting up an old bed frame to fit in the trash dupmster. Bed frames i found are an extremely hard steel im not sure What kind of steel though, has anyone else used this steel for blade making? Does anyone with a higher knowledge of blade making think It would work?

Most likely it is mild steel and not good for anything better than a letter opener. Unless it is a spring portion of the bed it will just be an exercise in practice for the real thing. Just not enough carbon in it to get hard and hold an edge. If you want to try making blades from junkyard steel look for springs (coil, leaf, etc) and then it is a guess but likely 5160 which makes an awesome blade. This one is from an old Ford truck coil spring.

Bush - sharp looking blade. If I ever get into it, figure I might as well drop some coin on decent steel cuz the knife is never going be better than it.

Knife steel is relatively inexpensive to buy and working with known steel is so nice. Most knife steel come annealed as well so if you are just doing stock removal as apposed to forging the blade you get very workable steel that only needs to be heat treated in the end. I buy a lot from Kelly Couples and a hundred or so bucks makes a lot of knives. I buy 15n20 and 1080 to make Damascus and use junk yard steels to make some stuff. A really fun knife steel is crane cable or chainsaw chains. You can do some cool stuff with those and a forge.

I just read that most Bed frames are old Rail road rails and are 1070 or1075 carbon steel so im thinking It could just work It does seem to spark rest well when you hit It with a grinder im thinking ill give It a shot at the very least It will be Good practice

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