Well with a bunch of old files that myself and a friend collected we went to work and started playing around with them. I started playing around with the smallest yet chuckiest file with a small blade in mind, only to find after spending a good time on it I find that my friend intended it to be his tool of use! So I was back to the drawing board, lol.

Anyway, the steel I first started on was a lovely little file, the smallest of all our files and apprently 70 years old, it was filthy and black from the fire (to soften the steel) but after I took off the crap with the angle grinder I found a stamp saying it was shefield steel.

For the first time I worked with the angle-grinder on this file and came out with some results:

But as I said I then found out my friend intented to use this steel, so I dropped it off at his place.

So then I was back to the drawing board, decided to pickup another file, this time a lot larger and decided to follow GreenPete's template I found it to be a little too large even to use with the largest of the files we had got our hands on. So I thought I would down scale the measurements a little to fit the steel I had to work with. You can see the measurements here:

I started off by cutting out the desired template using a thing off cut of light pine, which you can see on the right of the photo. On the left is the largest file in our collection, I think about 38cm long and 3cm wide, with 5mm thickness.

As you can see I had already been to work cutting off the excess near the top.

Here you can see the pine template I created, I think it works in helping you mark the steel and visualise what you're aiming to create.

A little help from a G-Clamp and the steel was easily marked out:

As you can see the knife started to take shape:

Once I got to work on the angle-grinder it didnt take long to do the basic shapping shown above. I probably spent longer on the wooden template! I only had about 20-30mins of angle-grinding then I had to get off to work.

The rain has kept me in the past couple of days, seeing as I dont have a workshop or shed I wait until the sun is out and then im out on my balcony! I will be back to work on it soon and will keep my blog updated!