Working With Metal

I made a prototype of a dovetail scraper knife to be used with an offset marking technique, more of that at a later date. I'm using Japanese scraper steel bought from Dictum in Germany, I'm so glad they changed their name from Dick! The steel is just 0.5mm thick and so needed to be cut carefully  in order to keep it flat. I sandwiched the steel in 2 layers of 1/4" MDF attached with double sided tape, very useful stuff.

I used a standard 10 tpi carbon blade which did the job but didn't stay sharp for very long. The Japanese steel had already been hardened to Rc 54, so if I had any quantity to do I would use a Bi Metal HSS blade.

With the steel still sandwiched I cut the blade to length as well as the 45 degree end. The holes for the rivets were drilled before the MDF was prised from both sides. The resulting blade stayed dead flat without any turned edges and the finished prototype knife came out well.