Last week, we made knives.
This is what I started with:
This is what my girlfriend started with:
And these are our respective results:
We spent a full day at a blacksmith's workshop somewhere in France, close to the Luxembourgish border. I cut my knife (a Santoku) out of a sheet of metal, and my girlfriend forged hers (a "pocket" knife) from a van spring.
We did all the steps, from shaping the knives to preparing the handle to heating and cooling down the metal (though for some tasks, the risk of breaking the knife was high, so the blacksmith stepped in and helped).
Making a knife was probably one of the coolest things I've done so far. To shape something out of raw metal into a physical object you can hold is a fantastic experience.
I also realized I needed more analogue time. Work with your head and rest with your hands and all that. I think I'll make a whole knife set. (Though first I’ll help the blacksmith launch a website.)