I got that machete 5-pack the other day. Some of them definitely look more useful than others. Which is totally OK since I was intending to buy a few different styles in order to see what worked best for my needs and that 5 pack was easily cheap enough to justify buying it even if only 2-3 turned out to be useful as machetes.
They are supposedly SAE 1070 carbon steel. From my reading 1084 or 1095 would be better for knife making, but 1070 is supposedly still a good option. Any of you ever worked with 1070? Ideally I'd just be cutting blanks and then shaping those into knives. The machetes appear to be around 3/16" thick, might be 1/8, might be 7/32, haven't taken a mic to them. They have some decent spring to them, and are fairly flexible.
What I'd like to make would be a flexible long fillet blade (suitable for halibut, tuna, salmon, etc. - probably would need to thin this one down somehow), a semi-flexible boning blade, a nice short paring blade, and if I have enough left a general purpose cooking/kitchen blade.
For those with experience, would these machetes be useful for this, or will it just be a total waste of time? Would I need to do some heat treating to get good performance? What about doing some work hardening (not sure if 1070 is even work hardenable, and if so is it cold work or hot work that is needed)?