What belt grinder knife jig would you recommend?

[VandymanG]

I have a simple harbor freight 1”x30” belt grinder currently. I’m wondering what knife jig those of you with experience would recommend to someone gradually working their way into making their own fixed blade knives. Any advice would be appreciated. Well any except get a new belt grinder cause I can’t currently afford that now.

[zhyla]

I started with exactly that. $30 HF grinder and an assortment of belts.

The main issue with grinding blades is holding onto them. It’s actually not terribly hard to grind a flat bevel, especially on smaller blades. There are blade holding jig designs out there. You can probably come up with your own. I tried but eventually just switched to wearing welding gloves to protect my fingers and vise grips to hold the tang of the blade.

There’s a trick that if you get the blade grinding and then just kind of let it float a little bit and wiggle it up and down it tends to flatten perfectly.

Second issue is grinders that weren’t intended to for knife grinding run way too fast which makes messing your blade easier and dissipating heat more of an issue. This is more an issue with the post heat treatment finishing of the blade than the initial stock removal.

I kept an eye out for a used 2x42 grinder and that was waaay better. But Craftsman stopped making those so they aren’t terribly common to find. So much cheaper than a proper 2x72.

[TBoneEsteban]

Definitely the Harbor Freight grinders run too fast. There are quite a few ways to slow them down, if you are handy.

I got a couple of these for my 1x30:
https://shop.currycustomcutlery.com/col ... ngle-guide

And they work like a boss.