Improv Rebar Knife

I thought I posted this already, I guess not. Anyway, a few weeks back I was messing around on the forge and just decided to hammer on a piece of rebar and just go with the flow. In advance, sorry for the scarcity of pictures with this one. There was an...incident with my phone.

To business!

I started by simply squaring off both sides of the rebar. This allows me to hold it better with the tongs, and gives me a better surface to grab in the event that I decided to twist it.

After both sides were squared, I went ahead and put a point on them as well. One side was a longer, drawn out point, and the other was more stocky. I took the shorter point and decided to scroll it, as a challenge. This became a loop at the butt of the knife.

Still without a plan, I threw a twist on the end as well, as pictured above, and this is when I decided to make it into a knife. I'd only done a twisted handle once before, when I tried making a railroad spike knife.

If you want to see that project, please ask in the comments.

Once I landed on 'knife' as my goal, I flattened the other end of the rebar. I then spent a lot of time truing up the blade curve, until I was left with this.

After I had the blade forged in, I tested how it felt in the hand. The twist at the end gave a cool look, but wasn't enough to keep the blade in line, and the whole knife just felt too round to leave it as is. So I twisted the base of the blade, giving more finger grooves, comfort, and a cooler look. After quenching the blade in oil, this was the result.

It was pretty rough, so I spent some time with a wire wheel and grinder to clean up the blade, and add some silver highlights to the piece.

For an improv'd rush job, it turned out decent.