While in Progress: My first prototype folding knife

I'm really happy to announce that I'm beginning work on making my own folding pocket knives.  Until now my work has been exclusively with fixed blade knives and customized factory produced folders, but I've never built a custom folder.  Yesterday I began grinding the blades for the prototype of my first folding knife project.  This is a work in progress, so the final folders will look similar but be built with different hardware and a titanium framelock.

Day one: Grinding the Blade

I decided to break this build out into two jobs- grinding the blade and then building the handle.  For this project I decided to cannibalize a pivot from an Emerson CQC-7, so I drilled a quarter inch pivot hole and quarter inch stops into my .2 inch 440C stock in my blade.  Then I bossed the blade shape and began grinding the bevels.  For this prototype I used a spanto (spear point/tanto) chisel grind, the final versions will have spanto V grinds.  Then I redneck heat treated the blade and satin finished it.  The result is quite fetching.  Notice the protrusion on the rear of the tang- this is a handle I use for grinding the bevels and after the heat treat this is ground off.