My homemade 8/8 smiley

This thread was born in the "How Tall is Too Tall' thread and I'm moving it here as to not hijack the other thread.

Background: I found my way to this site from a knife forum while looking for info on honing stones some time around August 2013. Got intrigued with the possibility of getting a straight razor, honing it, and actually shaving with it, mostly to prove to my self that I really could make things sharp enough to shave with. Well, I survived my first shave without drawing blood and never looked back. I love this place. I barely pay attention to knives anymore

Fast forward 66 days with about 62 shaves and three restores under my belt. I have 4 razors, two of which are 6/8 vintage straight edge blades, a buca honed GD, and a pretty little smiling 5/8 "Parabola" that reached out from the BST and said "buy me".

Smiley edges seem to make more sense to me do to the concave areas on our necks. The trouble with my smiley IMO is its daintiness. What it has in beauty is offset IMO by it's lack of heft. It has a .150 spine FH grind and I'll bet is less than half the weight of my GD. Despite the clunkiness of the GD I like the weight of it. OK, so I like heavy razors and wanted to try a 7/8 or so. I also wanted to try another smiley blade. Then Papafish posted about wanting to make a razor. OK I'm going to try this. I've worked with steel my whole life so I'm pretty sure I'll be able to do it.

Pictures will be forthcoming. A generous B&B member is helping me out with a digital camera, but right now all I have is a film camera and I don't like wasting a lot of film.

Its been a while since I've done any blacksmithing work, so I decided to forge a blade in mild steel both to make sure that a piece of .25" x .75" bar was going to work out and to learn a few things. Being that the mild steel blade is just a pattern I can lay all caution aside and work and learn quickly and try out tooling ideas.

I know you can hone a smile into a razor with a straight spine, but that goes against my grain. I wanted a razor with a smiling spine. My first mistake was putting the smile into the blank before drawing out the blade. I reasoned that as I drew steel from the spine towards the edge it would tend to create a smile, but it also would be expanding into an increasing radius so maybe not. This work was done with a cross peen hammer which allows the smith to direct the direction of the expanding steel to a large degree.

OK this is getting hard without pictures. I should be able to get some up tomorrow or the next day. A piece of 0-1 tool steel is ordered and will likely be here soon.

I can't wait to see how it goes!

Subscribed! I researched the possibility as well recently but decided I'd wait until I get some proper tools. However I found this from Legion in 2011: http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/206522-I-made-a-razor?

pmaster said:

Subscribed! I researched the possibility as well recently but decided I'd wait until I get some proper tools. However I found this from Legion in 2011: http://badgerandblade.com/vb/showthread.php/206522-I-made-a-razor?

Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. Yea I thought I would wait too but..... I was thinking of getting another razor off the bay, then I thought why get another razor that is going to be so much like the ones I already have. Then all the talk about bigger razors and my thread about smileys. Its time came.

Papafish talked about using a file on another thread. That's what got me going. I knew I wanted to do the heavy lifting on a non heat treated piece of steel and I thought well if I'm going to anneal a file first, why start with a file.

That's where I got the idea! I should save that link...

I can't wait to see the end product. If it takes a few iterations to get things like you want, so what? I pretty much guarantee that you can sell anything functional for at least what you have in it, especially if it's a beefy 8/8! Then again, I wouldn't sell them, I would make an "Evolution" 7-day set . Good luck, and have fun!

OK Here are a couple of pictures of the razor shaped piece of mild steel that I'm practicing on. I started with a 1/4"x3/4"x5" blank.


This shows the out of control smile that I got from putting a smile in the blank before drawing out the blade. I stopped here because I had to come up with a plan to reduce the smile without pounding on the now thinned edge. A slot cut into a piece of scrap allowed me to straddle the edge.

Observations; 1. The tang is way to long 2.Because of the wide blade, that nice swooping heal adds too much length to the razor. I need to start more perpendicular to the edge to tighten this up.

I have progressed a lot farther but I have to wait to get another roll of film developed.

I could not help but try to make this practice piece look more like a razor.

I did most of this with a 4" angle grinder. I knew the hollow grind would be unacceptable, but it's just a piece of scrap.
I made a mandrel with a piece of neoprene between flanges to hold 1/2"x12" sanding belts that I plan on using for the hollow grind. I tried to freehand the hollow onto the toe of the test piece and ground into the spine, so I cut the toe back and tried again and got this.
It came out very good, but there is no way I could freehand a whole blade. I decided to make another mild steel practice piece to try out an idea that I have for doing the hollow grind with a fence.

Alright, I'm subscribed to this thread - but only if you agree to post progress pics every day until its done!

This is awesome

I'm subscribed!

Looks like you're making great progress so far; well done.

You may have seen this already, but it's what I thought of when I saw this thread, and it may give you a bit of insight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvFO3TqhDj0

Thanks for sharing your progress with us! I'm looking forward to more.

That is a pretty cool home-made setup! Looks like you're making good progress!

Here is a picture of my make shift forge made with a weed burner and loose stacked fire brick and my anvil.View attachment 386054View attachment 386056

And here is the, as forged, second prototype next to the, now shortened, first.View attachment 386057View attachment 386060
My plan is to bring this one up through the hollow grind and set a bevel on it. As usual pictures of further progress are stuck in my camera.

Thanks for posting the pictures!

Subscribed!! Looking forward to seeing how it turns out!!

That is a sweet forge!

Great to see what can be done in the shed with some hand tool and a bit of fire

My 0-1 steel just arrived. Today I'm working on building the fixture for doing the hollow grind on the second mild steel test piece.

It makes us take it all for granted that we can buy items like this for so little. My point is that years ago it was all made this way and made well. Looking forward to seeing it completed.

Good luck on the project.
The only change I would have made would have been to use a simple high carbon steel.
The HT is straight forward, bring it to temp then quench.
To get the best out of O1 it needs to soak a bit at a specific temp before quenching.
The only other thing I would say is O1 can be a bear to drill after forging.
Do your best to anneal it before trying to drill the pivot hole.