Titanium Scalpels

Posted:

After finishing a previous project I was left with a small piece of titanium, which has since been sitting in a corner waiting for a purpose. I couldn't think of anything that really needed to be made of titanium, but I do often need to cut small things, so I decided to try making a scalpel or two.

A titanium plate cut into two long pieces. The larger piece has a wedge-shaped end. The smaller piece simply tapers to a point.
I originally only planned to make one scalpel, but after cutting it out from the plate, the offcut was coincidentally the right shape for one too.

With the metal blades cut into the right shape, I took some scrap pieces of oak and glued them to the sides with epoxy. Note that it's important to sufficiently roughen the surface of titanium when using epoxy, otherwise it won't stick very well. They're very crude-looking at this stage, which is fine because they will be shaped properly later.

The same pices of metal as before, this time with very roughly cut chunks of wood stuck to each side of the handle ends.
The visible sides of the wood are lumpy, but the sides stuck the metal are planed flat to make good contact for the glue to hold.

I then carved the handles into a more wieldy rounded shape, first with a rotary tool with a carbide burr to quickly remove the bulk of the material, and then by hand with sandpaper to smooth it off. I left the wood with a natural finish, as it feels nice.

The original two pieces of metal with smoothly rounded wooden handles. There's a ruler lying next to them, from which it can be seen that the larger scalpel is nearly 15cm long, while the smaller is 12cm.
Ruler for scale.

Lastly I ground an edge onto each scalpel, starting by using a file to get the right angle, then by using the sandpaper-on-a-mouse-mat technique to sharpen them, which is a very easy way to get a sharp, convex edge.

Close-up of the cutting end of the larger wedge-shaped scalpel.
I polished them a bit so they look nicer.
Close-up of the cutting end of the smaller pointy scalpel.
Stabby.

While titanium has a lot of good qualities, none of them are particularly useful here. It's also relatively soft, which isn't ideal for cutting implements like this. Does that mean these scalpels won't work well? I don't know yet; I'll find out once I've used them for a while.