Well, I remembered to bring the D70 for morning 2, but left the memory card at home-HA We spent the morning watching a demo and then I started another smaller blade with the leftover piece of steel from the handle of this one.
I removed all the scale off the blade with the belt sander and a 36 grit belt. Next comes the handle. We had some cherry wood left over from our mantle, so I'm using that. Eric cut me some nice little handle sized pieces.

After drilling holes for rivets(I'm using silver), I traced around the blade handle, then cut out the shape using a hack saw and band saw. Not the way you might think, going around the traced edge, but we had to cut little "rays" in from the edge all the way around the shape, then go back and trim them off. The wood is too thick to just cut like a jig saw, the saw blade would have broken.

After that, I went back to the belt sander, and cleaned up the edges. Now the handle is off the knife so we can temper the blades. The above photo shows the knife after I cut the handles, but before sanding them.

A coke fire is much better for tempering than gas, so Ray built a fire and did a demo. First the blade must be made hard by bringing it up to a non magnetic state and slowly quenching in oil. This is the quick qay to do it. A better way would be to bring it up to heat, then let it cool slowly, over night in a bucket of vermiculite.

Now the steel is very hard , but too brittle for a knife, it would just snap when you used it. So the blade now has to be tempered by brining it up to the desired heat for the hardness you want. This is done by watching the colors of the metal. I will be going for a blue/purple, which I might just leave on the steel. I think it would look cool with the cherry wood and silver rivets. I will probably sharpen the blade before tempering, so I have that option.