You can make a graver out of any steel that is harder than the material that you are cutting. The trick is knowing how to sharpen the graver to make the cut that you want to make. So you need to ask the question, what cut do you want to make with the graver? Most of the simple engraved American rifles were engraved with a "90 degree V graver", sounds simple enough to make, doesn't it. When you look into how to sharpen a traditional 90 deg gaver most likely the info will say to sharpen with a 45 deg face and 15 de heels. This is where the wheels begin to come off for a lot of starting engravers. How do you go about setting these angles? Unless you have the basic knowledge of how to properly sharpen a graver you get lost very easily, I speak this from experiance.
People say, well Wallace and Hershel just broke off a 3 corner file and went to engraving so it shouldn't be that hard. No, they knew how to break the file and they knew how to touch it up on a stone to make a graver out of the file that would cut the line they wanted to cut.
You can't cut a good line until you grasp the knowledge of how to sharpen. Figure that out and you can make a graver out of just about anything.
