Making a Knife from a Nail

In April I was looking after a fire. We had just finished some yard work, and there were scraps to be burnt. So we made a fire, and I watched it.
Watching fires isn't very interesting. Sure, fire is cool, but after a while you're just sitting there wishing for something to do. That's what I was doing when I decided to make a knife.

Forging things isn't really very complicated, in theory. You just need to make the metal hot enough that it softens, and then smash it into shape. And then repeat, and repeat until it's the shape you want.

Now, the fire I had was big, but not very hot. Not nearly hot enough to practically forge things with. Luckily for me, fires aren't very hard to make hot. they just need air and fuel, which I had plenty of. For the air part, I connected a powerful blower to a metal ventilation tube which I aimed at the fire.

For the raw metal, I used a huge nail. I started by putting the nail in the fire and aiming the blower tube at it. It worked! The nail got red hot pretty quickly, so, I took it out of the fire with a pair of pliers to start hammering it. I did this a few times. Hammering, back in the fire, hammering, back in the fire, h- what?

Well, apparently I had left it in too long. The blade had melted away, leaving a sad jagged edge where it used to be. Let's try that again.

This time I used a bigger nail. Same process as last time, but paying more attention to how hot it's getting. And when it was the shape I wanted, I heated it up and then dipped it in water to quench it, which changes the structure of the metal to make it tougher. The forging was done! I now had a nail with a knife shape on the end. Next step: shaping.

To shape the blade, I used a Dremel (a high speed rotary tool) with a sanding bit to slowly grind away metal where I didn't want it. I also used sandpaper to properly angle the blade on the cutting side, and start to sharpen it. finally, I used a cutting bit to cut the 'handle' to the right length.

Shaping the knife

To finish the handle, I thought string would work well, so I tried winding it up with some ordinary white string. It looked great! I took the string off and did it again, this time gluing it on as I wound. It might seem like this wouldn't make a very strong handle, but in reality it works very well, as well as looking and feeling very nice. It's wound so evenly you can hardly tell it's string!

The last step was sharpening. I had thought it was sharp enough before, but I changed my mind. I decided I needed a sharper angle on the blade, so I took out a grinding wheel and ground! When I was done that it still wasn't sharp enough, so I used a couple sharpening stones. Then, finally, I was satisfied.

Finished!