A look at one of my first forged knife

This knife I decided to make is a Tanto knife, I tried to keep a pretty standard shape, went with the appropriate Japanese tanto tip. I also wanted to practice making a convex bevel so I went with that.
The bar I am holding is what I started from, 6" by 1.5" by 1/8 1095 High carbon steel.
I had to hit the bar to thicken it and get it down to about .8" wide. This was annoying as I didn't have the proper tongs

After the initial forging, I let the steel cool down in the forge to normalize it, then proceed to grind off the scales and start to roughly shape the bevel

This is after the heat treatment, more grinding (In which I messed up the tang) and I am getting ready to drill the hole for the handle, and some sanding, lots of sanding.

As you can see, I'm need some practice at making handles, but oh well, doesn't look great but it feels good in the hands, the knife is surprisingly well balanced. But ya, we got the pins in the holes, epoxy for extra strength, and at this point I just need to sharpen it and buff it to make it shine!

And here is a close-up after some polishing to show the final result.

Hope you guys enjoyed!
This was one of my early project I did last year, I have a few upcoming project that are going to be pretty exiting, one of them is going to be a full wushu spear with a custom and bad ass spearhead!
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