Cracks are part of the game. Knife making is all about finding the balance between sharpness/thinness and durability. For kitchen knives, you usually want to go as thin as possible, but the thinner you go the more likely you are to get a warp or crack during heat treatment. Today, a got a warp in my quench and was trying to straighten it out during the temper. But I went a little too far and it cracked. Gonna see if I can pivot and still make a functional blade out of it by shortening it to where the crack is and switching from full tang to through tang.

For the heat treatment, I did three normalizing cycles, a quench in canola oil, and a two hour temper at 375° F. Normalizing is to relieve stresses from forging. Quenching is to harden the steel. Tempering is to removed brittleness from the quench so it is both hard and durable.

I started a new hand forged chef knife. This one is going to be a hidden tang construction forged out of 1084 carbon steel. So far, I’ve just hammered out the rough profile