Making a Pioneer knife Part 1 - designing and milling blanks

This is a first episode of making my first ever, series of four knives made with use of CNC milling machine. What is more important, knives are made with help of my brother Kamil, who will program the milling monster and work on: 'how to do things'. We have never done such a thing and hope that it will end with a success :) If it will be cool enough, I will make it my first knife model - ready to made on request. That is way, I called it "Pionieer".

The knives are half-finished now. I am showing first step of the story. Step that we made over a month ago.

Of course it started from a designing. I wanted it to be a tough, compact, multi purpose, field knife. Similar to the one I made about 5 years ago LINK. The blade has a lenght of 9,5cm and it is 21cm overal. I decided to use 4mm D2 steel.

From a couple of my sketches I made a CAD drawing. While my brother was programming the machine, I prepared the steel for milling. After a couple of hours we were ready to cut.W made four blanks, one after another. 3mm diameter carbide cutter was used. I made a short video of the milling process.

In the next episode, I will show how we managed to make rough grinds without a grinder... with use of bull nose cutter instead.

Titanium PRYBARS for Maciej

About three weekes ago I've got a very interesting request from my customer - Maciej. The order refered to make two almost identical prybars, big enough so it can be used as cubotans. I knew immediately that it will be perfect task for my milling machine. We have decided that 4mm Ti-6Al-4V titanium will do the job... The lenght of the prybars is about 12cm so it will fit perfectly to the hand.

Here are also some pictures from making proces. I got a sketch from Maciej. Then I make a digital version of the drawing and add some modifications to the project, so the prybars can now be also used for M6 hex nuts and as a 1/4'' bit wrench. I used my CNC milling machine to cut it out from a titanium bar. Then it was grinded, hand finished and stonewashed (with use of stonewashing machine that I have built with my brother last weekend). After stonewashing process I have polished one of the prybars with diamont paste and made anodization with a burner, so this is the only difference between them. It was really fun to make them and I  have just started to make some more prybars, but this time smaller, door key sized ones ;)

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