Spyderco Forums

Most sawzall blades are some sort of high speed steel, no? Could you regrind them into usable knife blades as is?

I've never ground a sawzall blade down to make a knife. They may lack the thickness and hardness you would need for a good knife blade.

Larrin has an excellent new article that may help you.

https://knifesteelnerds.com/2020/06/15/ ... ife-steel/

Here's a knife I made one day at work, out of a piece of steel bandsaw blade. 0.040" blade stock, full convex grind, about 0.005" behind the edge at ~30 dps. The "handle" is wrapped electrical tape.
I did all the shaping and grinding with a handheld angle grinder (looks like it too. :rolleyes: ) Took maybe an hour all told.

I gave it to my wife and she actually likes using it in the kitchen because it's so thin and sharp. :eek:

Naperville wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 15, 2020 11:13 am

Larrin has an excellent new article that may help you.

https://knifesteelnerds.com/2020/06/15/ ... ife-steel/

I just read that! This was more an exercise of seeing a stack of sawzall blades on the dumpster, and being bored

They're super thin and flexible. I'd be curious too. I totally think you should make a couple and report back. :)

From experience and consequential research with helpful engineers at the bandsaw blade manufacturers, most metal cutting bandsaw blades will be a steel in the 6xxx category (6150 as an example). The cutting tooth will be an M-series (M2-M42) steel impulse hardened to produce a springy blade and a hard cutting tooth designed to cut metal. In very general terms, this type of steel band with teeth will be less than two inches in width. The teeth when ground will produce a red/orange colored spark until you hit the band steel and that will be more yellow white sparks. Grind off that portion of the cutting tooth and the steel will be a better knife material.

A better choice would be a wood cutting bandsaw blade that could likely be equivalent or equal to 15N20 (relatively equal to 1075 with 2% nickel). This type of steel blade will be 6-8 inches wide. The teeth are larger and will not spark red/orange when ground.

Any thin piece of even moderately spring hard steel will function as a cutting edge. It will not be the edge of performance, but it will work.

You CAN make knives out of old sawblades, but they won't hold an edge as well as an off-the-shelf PM2 in S30V. Here's a knife I made out of an old power hacksaw blade from my garage and a chunk of wood from my back yard. It stays with all my other kitchen knives and gets used, but it's not as good as the others. It was fun to make, satisfied my curiosity, and it's sometimes fun to use.

Might be able to make a nice fillet knife.

Haven't tried sawzall blades but I've used both meat bandsaw and metal bandsaw blades, circular saw/handsaw , drain snakes (well cleaned I assure you) and lots of other stuff. I've got 2 sawmill blades left still sitting in the garage... One is L6 and one 1095 according to the tags.

Making knives from scrap/found steel is a good way to work on your technique. They won't cut like a supersteel but they are handy around the house/barn.

I have a couple L6 knives made from old lumber mill blades. They're super thick and super tough, but the edge retention is definitely not stellar. Great choppers, though.

The planer blades in DeWalt thickness planers are M2 steel.

You can get the replacement blades by themselves.

Might be a good place to start for a salvage knife project.

They’re chisel ground, so if you had that kind of grind in mind, it would save time shaping the knife.

Here's one of a few I made from a starret redline hss power hacksaw blade. This is not the bi-metal blade, it's full hss.
Makes excellent knife steel.

The Meat man wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 15, 2020 11:14 am

Here's a knife I made one day at work, out of a piece of steel bandsaw blade. 0.040" blade stock, full convex grind, about 0.005" behind the edge at ~30 dps. The "handle" is wrapped electrical tape.
I did all the shaping and grinding with a handheld angle grinder (looks like it too. :rolleyes: ) Took maybe an hour all told.

I gave it to my wife and she actually likes using it in the kitchen because it's so thin and sharp. :eek:

Now I wouldn't want to use a SAWZALL blade to try to make a knife with. It seems to me that the steel in those types of blades is extremely flexible and I'm doubtful if that would make a good knife blade. Now I could be wrong because I'm not the metallurgist that Brother Larrin is. But on the other hand a good buddy of mine gave me a broken hacksaw blade off of a big industrial hacksaw. Those blades are a completely different animal than the hacksaw blades that most of us have in our tool shops. These industrial hacksaw blades are much bigger and thicker and seem to be much harder too.

I've heard over the years that the steel that they make many of the modern day files out of is a much better material for a knife blade. But as easy as it is to acquire a bar of high quality tool steel or any other premium alloy I think it's kind of a waste of time when you got access to top quality materials.

Several years ago i made this knife from an old piece of machine hacksaw blade: viewtopic.php?t=62574

JD Spydo wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 17, 2020 8:48 am

... Now I could be wrong because I'm not the metallurgist that Brother Larrin is. But on the other hand a good buddy of mine gave me a broken hacksaw blade off of a big industrial hacksaw. Those blades are a completely different animal than the hacksaw blades that most of us have in our tool shops. These industrial hacksaw blades are much bigger and thicker and seem to be much harder too.

I've heard over the years that the steel that they make many of the modern day files out of is a much better material for a knife blade. But as easy as it is to acquire a bar of high quality tool steel or any other premium alloy I think it's kind of a waste of time when you got access to top quality materials.

Industrial hacksaw blades are generally solid pieces of high speed steel (likely M-series steels, quite possibly from some manufacturers, Bi-metal).

What you should have "heard" JD are that modern day hand files are more than likely to be a much lesser quality steel that are case hardened to a minor depth just to harden the teeth.

Again spark testing will show this quite quickly. Or after making a blade, you'll find that you can't harden the material much. OLD files like Black Diamond or similar found materials are more likely to be good quality steel (1095 or W-series) through and through. It's best to test the steel for hardness before wasting more time on disappointment if you're not sure up front.

kwakster wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 18, 2020 12:49 pm

Several years ago i made this knife from an old piece of machine hacksaw blade: viewtopic.php?t=62574

What was your experience with that M2 blade. Do you still have it, use it?

That smaller M2 knife lies in my display cabinet as i still need to make a sheath for it.
I use it fairly often for cutting cardboard, which it does very well.
In the past i've even used it a few times to finish shaving my head when my electric clipper broke down.



Recently i used this larger M2 hacksaw blade (in the pic still with it's old edge) that i made about 30 years ago for practising convex sharpening by hand using several diamond files and DMT Diafolds, this to have a few reference points when resharpening an old (probably) dendritic wootz talwar sword:

https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/tal ... d.1627692/