Unpopular opinion: old railroad spikes make terrible knife blanks

I was at a hammer-in last weekend in Springfield and this 60 year old smith named Don told me I was wasting my time with railroad spikes. He said the steel is too inconsistent and you never know if you'll get a good edge. I argued back but then he pulled out two knives he made from spikes and one had a crack right through the blade. Idk, maybe I've been romanticizing them too much. Anyone else had spikes fail on them during heat treat?

3 comments

3 Comments

jake_torres6818d ago

Read somewhere that spikes are made from scrap steel so they're basically a gamble every time.

wendyk5618d ago

The whole romanticizing thing is real though... Don had a point about spikes being scrap steel, but think about what they actually came from. Old spikes from the 1800s were made from higher quality iron than the modern ones. If you're grabbing spikes off active tracks, those are modern junk.

cole35617d agoMost Upvoted

I had a buddy named Chris who brought three spikes to a community forge night and all three split on him during the quench. Two of them cracked right down the middle and the third had a weird flaky surface like it delaminated. He was so frustrated he just threw them in the scrap bin and went back to using coil spring steel. Ever since then I've been way more careful about what spikes I grab from the scrap pile.