I’ve had an interest in cooking and kitchen knives for most of my life. After getting back from my painting trip in November 2024 I wanted to invest in a better set of chef knives and I could either spend a few hundred to get a nice set, or spend the same amount of money and learn a new skill to make them instead with the few months I had over winter before the next trip, so here we are!

I decided to start with stock removal to make the knives rather than shell out a tonne for anvil and all the forging equipment, in-case i didn’t enjoy the process, this then lead to building a single Frosty T burner forge out of insulation bricks and a steel frame for heat treating and expansion later if needed, ordered some steel, and some tools to start shaping and grinding off material and got to experimenting. Here’s the outcomes of the journey so far.

The Forge

Starting out by jumping into the deep end with making a home made forge, capable of heating steel enough to fully heat treat, and eventually for shaping steel.

The same as most other processes along this journey it required watching a lot of different youtube videos to see how people had gone about making a forge, the different shapes and types the could be made and the pros and cons between them.

I decided to go down the route of using fire bricks over a contained lined with ceramic kaowool, just so I could take it apart and change the design later on if i needed to. The framework around it was make out of L shape steel brackets with threaded rods to compress the structure together.

As for the propane burner, i went for a ‘Frosty T’ design, as it seemed to be the design which gave consistent results, and most of the parts could be purchased relatively easily (apart from converting between USA pipe measurements/fitments and UK ones). This was attached to the top using the same threaded rods with a steel strip just bent into shape to hold the funnel partly within the top brick.

The Knives

First knife - Hatsukokoro style petty knife with hidden tang
1084 Steel, unknown wood handle — First knife - Hatsukokoro style petty knife with hidden tang 1084 Steel, unknown wood handle