Merino Forge: First Stainless Chef Knife

Murray Walters from Merino Forge in the Southern Tablelands posted a photo of his first stainless steel chef knife on the Australian Beginner Knifemaking Group on Facebook this week:

Now that is a nice looking chef knife! What is interesting is also how Murray is using specific materials to speed up a couple of the steps involved.

Murray went for AEB-L stainless steel in pre-hardened billets. These are great as they come heat treated already and means you can start designing and grinding the blades without having to have equipment for dealing with stainless steel hardening. 

As with all grinding on hardened blades, the steel is quenched frequenctly while grinding to not overheat the steel. When working pre-hardened steel this is a bit more challening than normal profiling as you need to remove lots of material and still keep the steel cool. 

Here the profile is done and the tang is ground in with a carbide faced file guide. The file guide is placed on the line where the handle will meet the tang with the carbides facing the tang. The tang is ground down to the slightly thinner than the sides of the blade, for a tight and clean blade/tang fit. If the tang is for instance ground to 2.5 mm and the blade is 3 mm thick, that is faster to get a nice fit on going into the handle.

Murray is making 4 of these, here they are all fitted into handle blocks of Golden Sandalwood and Rosewood

Even though the blocks are from the same woods, we can already see how the grains will come out with different figure. This is another great aspect of working with natural materials, and wood especially. Within the same type of wood, even the same block of wood sometimes, there is room for variety.

Shaping the handle to a comfortable shape after securely taping the blade. The grain structure is really popping on the golden sandalwood! The below photo is at 800 grit.

The two-tone woods of the golden sandalwood is really striking! There should be some happy people using these beauties.

And here is the completed result: 

Stainless steel chef knife with 170 mm blade length, total length 320 mm including handle. The handle is sanded to 1200 grit and completed with UBHF. 

The Merino Forge makers mark was laser etched on by Apes Monkey Business, a Veteran-run business near Wiseman's Ferry, NSW. 

Thank you to Murray for sharing the photos of his project!