dragoncutlery

hyper therm 45 will do 1 inch/26mm sever cuts 1/2 like butter all day and works on a smallish air compressor and is around $1900 if i recal the next step up is another $1000 and needs a bigger compressor i have the 45 and love it

you might want to make sure that little bit is rounded a little in the ring it looks on the sharp side and as a maker who tends to twirl knives by there ring i would hate to take a chunk of my finger off wile playing around i mean its not a butterfly knife

i have had non normalized Damascus with de-lams make it threw a nail and thats a knife i wouldn't trust to butter bread your mileage may vary you could skip the hardness testers and get a metallurgical micro scope and know even more about whats happening in the heat treat but seams like your not here for help so you do you

rockwell test machine or calibrated files are important to dial in the temper a brenell might be cheaper and can be accurate enough but makes a larger mark and uses an optical device to give you a reading so its up to a little interpretation base line is if you dont know what your getting out of quench and out of the oven you dont know if your heat treat is working the tests you have described some can be described as parlor tricks as cutting a nail is more in the technique than the heat treat some give you an idea of what the geometry can do

if your not sure of your welds you can always do what i did for a frame and the parts if sourced right the motors the most expensive single part i think i have less than $1000 in to it before the motor and its running 19 ton would be more but the cylinder maxes at 2500psi

i bought there little 12 ton version and let me tell you it had more than enough power to rip its self apart a repurposed log spliters a better idea for a budget build

and a hole in the back for a pass threw

most knife size blocks will dry in 3-4 days in an oven at 225f when stabilizing you have to have all the water removed so i dry wood like that on the norm (witch scale checks for weight) and do a lot of maple or maple like woods i can say that zercote and some other woods dont like that heat and will crack on you and if you go from wet to oven your probably going to get cracks so no fresh stuff text a small block to see how it reacts before putting all your wood in also keep the wood in baggies when cooling and storing as it will start to pick up moisture from the air the up side is that dry should suck up your treatment of choice when your done shaping and start coating it in oil or what have you

first if you buy and can work biggish pieces even if it seams expensive it might not be i got a large burl block cost me $100 but after figuring out how many blanks i could cut from it came out to $2.50 each which is cheaper than most plain wood blanks sold and never rule out para cord add a little leather or thin wood as a backer (cord needs to be built up if its going to be a real user) and epoxy coat it and a $50 spool can last forever

i know of a master bladesmith who differently hardened his test blade but doesn't make or sell a blade treated as such but hes also way obsessive about metallurgy

the softer metal under the hammer will move faster so if using wrought iron and 1080 the iron will move faster so you would want to start with thicker iron using cable it might move similar but you might want to start a bit thicker and possibly grind some off if you need to

i used the a frame 12 ton did a lot of moving for me i was getting results similar to sledgehammer work trick was making a tee handle on the relice so it would cycle quicker and it was faster than hand hammering by far right up till it shear the bolts i rebuilt it useing better bolts then it ripped the bolts from the frame .......then i just built a real press both times it broke in the same evening of forging like maybe an hour of help then boom done with that

more bed rail than saw blade

dont buy pacmascus

spent a little quality time with my little giant doing a san mi blacksmith knife from unknown damascusish steel i got in a blade from a flea market 14 years ago sold as lief spring knife kinda just wana see what happens