Blade making is the meat and potatoes of knifemaking. Making a blade from flat bar stock can be done with simple tools. It is however time consuming and requires patience and determination.
Start with a piece of annealed O1 or 10 series steel. These steels are easy to heatreat and yield a super blade.
Make sure your bar stock is the correct thickness for the particular pattern and size of knife. There is nothing worse than a blade like a crowbar except maybe one that is too whippy. A good knifemaker will seek balance. Generally speaking if a blade is 5 inches or less 1/8 inch stock will be fine. Blades from 5 to 9 inches in length can go to 3/16. Blades over 9 inches can go to 1/4 inch stock. Knifemakers seldom need to go to heavier stock than 1/4 inch.
Draw the pattern out on stiff cardboard and cut it out. Check it for size in your hand trying to imagine it with scales on.
After you have given it twenty coats of looking over and made any adjustments deemed needed, transfer the pattern to your barstock by laying the cardboard pattern on the barstock and scribing around it with a scriber or sharp piece of steel.
Secure it in a vise and cut it out with a hacksaw as close to the line as you dare go without running over it.
File to the line, draw fileing it the last little bit helps yield a smooth surface and also helps to square everything up. By now you should have something that looks like a blade but without the bevels on it. To layout the bevels you need to first mark the centerplane of the blade.
To do this the simple way, take a small piece of hardened steel the same thickness as your stock and grind a pair of steep bevels into it so that they meet in the middle. Lay the blank on a sheet of glass or anything flat and use the sharpened steel to mark all around the edge. You now have a clearly scribed line all around your blank.
You also need to mark out the ridgeline on either side, if any. You can do this by eye or better yet make up a template of card to help place the ridgeline symetrically on each side.
File your bevels with the sharpest, biggest file you have. This kind of work builds character and induces a wry appreciation for the term "flat bastard". Because you are filing a wide surface you will have to bear down on the file more than usual to get it to bite. A sharp file helps avoid bending the stock and is much easier to control than a dull file. Its important to keep your surfaces as flat as possible so don't rush it and make sure you are fresh and able to concentrate on each stroke. File almost to the centerline leaving a little thickness, about 1/32", on the edge for finishing. You should do this anyway because the heatreat tends to decarburise the surface of the steel, so its no harm to leave a little meat on the blade until after the heatreat. This is your last chance to get the shape the way you want it so make the most of it and make sure its all flat and squared off.
If you can't get the control you want with a file slow down some more, or if you are close to finish size and getting desperate to straighten out the mess you have made with the file, try switching to handstones for flatting and final shapeing.
Mark out, centerpunch and drill your handle holes. Deburr the holes.
Heatreat the blade. Finish it with handstones if you can. Refine the surface with wet or dry emery otherwise, but stay away from the edges. Do not use emery for shapeing, it will round the edges unless you are very skilled or carefull so if you are not deliberately going for that effect its better to do as much finishing as you can on handstones.
You will find instructions for applying handles elsewhere on this website.
