Enter your bar dimensions and a blade profile to get an instant yield — blades per bar, bars required, cost per blade, and what's left over. Covers 12 knife steels, from 1084 and 5160 to 52100, AEB-L and MagnaCut, forged or stock removal.
Stock removal is the simple case: raw bar length needed is just blade length + tang length + a cleanup allowance, 1:1 — nothing moves, nothing distorts.
Forging is different. You're drawing steel out under the hammer, so the raw length is derived from volume conservation between the bar's cross-section and the blade's finished cross-section, not a fixed ratio — thinner finished stock from a thick bar means more draw, which this calculator flags when it gets heavy.
The same math the calculator above runs — worked out longhand for one blade, so you can sanity-check it against your own numbers. Stock-removal mode shown here; forged mode adds a volume-conservation step for the draw.
That 10.38″ remnant isn't scrap — it's long enough and the bar is wide/thick enough to still be classified as a usable paring-knife blank, not a drop cutoff. The calculator runs this classification on every leftover automatically, so you know before you cut whether what's left is worth keeping on the rack.
The kerf is charged once per blank cut from the bar — conservative by exactly one saw cut's width when a bar comes out with zero remnant, since real material never fully vanishes as sawdust from a single ripping pass.
Density, forgeability, and the practical minimum thickness/width ranges each steel is normally stocked in. 1084 and AEB-L run live in the calculator above for free; the rest need Maker Pro to actually quote against.
Add your full tang length on top of the blade length, then a cleanup allowance (0.25″ by default) for squaring the ends and cleaning up the plunge line, plus the saw kerf for the cut itself. For an 8″ blade with a 4.5″ tang that's 8.0 + 4.5 + 0.25 + 0.0625 ≈ 12.81″ of raw bar per blank in stock-removal mode.
Stock removal is 1:1 — the raw length you cut is the finished length, since nothing moves. Forging draws the bar's cross-section down to the blade's finished cross-section under the hammer, so the raw length comes from volume conservation, not a fixed ratio. A thin finished blade drawn from thick bar implies a bigger draw ratio — this calculator flags it as a heavy draw above roughly 2.5:1, and flags the opposite case (finished section bigger than the bar) as needing an upset instead of a draw.
Anything under 2″ long is scrap regardless of how heavy the bar was — nobody can safely grip or forge a 1″ offcut. Past that, it depends on length, width and thickness together: thin stock becomes liner or bolster material, heavy stock becomes tooling or chopper blanks, and anything long and wide enough gets classified as a full paring-knife-or-bigger blank. The calculator runs this on every bar's leftover automatically.
Yes — BladeStock is a free bar stock calculator for bladesmiths, running the same yield engine as the tool on this page. It goes deeper on the bladesmithing side: a page per alloy with heat-treat figures and stock sizes for 1084, 80CrV2, AEB-L, MagnaCut and a dozen more, pages for the common blade profiles, and a knife pricing calculator. Use this page when bar stock is one line on a wider quote; use BladeStock when the bar is the whole question.
KraftyQuote's full cost engine handles materials, machine time, labor, and margin in one quote, and Maker Pro unlocks the complete 12-alloy bladesmithing library plus saved cut plans.