I am in the proess of gringing some steel to resemble a strider knife. It's jsut going to be a conversation piece and probably not used for much more than cutting open a letter hear and there, mabye cutting some rope, and at an extreme most, whittling.

Now, my question is, as I am new to this knife thing, is there a way to harden steel?  I want the knife not to flex so much, THanks.

The Process of heat treating a knife to a desired Rockwell hardness is not as easy as grinding or filing out a blank into a knife. The best thing to do other than ask Fox or Professor Evil (both members here and knife makers) on how to set up an oven is to send the knife out to be heat treated by a professional, some one like Paul Boss, who incidental does heat treating for Strider and others.

Wipeout, the process is reasonably easy if you are using a high carbon or alloy steel for the blade, e.g. -- 1084, 1095, 5160 or O1.  If you are using stainless then you will need to have a commercial heat treater do the hardening for you.  Stainless requires a high degree of precision for heating and cooling to maximize the qualities of the steel, and it is an air hardening steel, not oil quenched.  Paul Bos would be my recommendation as well.  He is among the very best in the world for all types of air hardening steels, including the newer stuff from Crucible like S30V.  If you are using carbon steel I can help you through the process.  A lot of it is in my tutorial post, and I gave a more detailed explanation for someone using O1 a few months ago.  Do a search for my posts in this forum.