Blacksmithing at Home by Pat Marstall
My wife and I were watching some videos on how to make some leather stuff, and she mentioned at one point that to really do justice to one design she would need a skiving tool. This raised all sorts of questions, the primary one being, “What the hell is a skiving tool?”; followed closely by, “What the hell is ‘skiving’?” Well, as luck would have it, one of my favorite YouTubers (the wonderfully-named Torbjörn Åhman) recently made a video on how to make a half-moon leather knife, and it turns out that the steps could be largely replicated by an amateur like me using stuff I have lying around at home. The blade is made from an old 10” chop-saw blade that I had collecting dust in the corner. Chances are that I will find a reason to need the blade now that I’ve ruined it, but that’s the chance you take. I had three abrasive cutting wheels for my angle-grinder, and it turns out that I needed all three of them to cut out the shape from the high-carbon saw blade. But I just made it and didn’t need to break curfew for an unnecessary trip to Lowes.
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Next was some profiling on my wonderful 2x72” belt grinder which I basically just barely finished kitting out before the virus hit last month. Got everything most of the way to where I needed it, then I went to the heat-treat. I don’t have a heat-treating oven handy yet… OK to be fair I have a 50% constructed home-made one. But it’s been 50% completed for almost a year now. I’ve really got to get off my butt and finish up, but where will I find the time? That’s sarcasm, right there above. It can be tough to convey in prose. But I’m being very droll, honest. So my heat-treating process was a butane torch and a jar of canola oil that I collected after we did some quarantine fondue the other week. All I needed to do was to get the edge of the knife up into the orange range, then quench it into the oil. After that I sanded it down so I could see the metal and then heated the middle of the blade until the edge was starting to turn a golden color. Then I dipped the whole thing in the oil again.
