Metal working stuff
Things made, fingers only burned a little
Memorial Day weekend saw pretty high temperatures here in PA, and you know what really takes the edge off of 95 degree days? Standing in front of a 2000 degree forge! So that’s what I did Saturday and Monday, and some nice things happened, and I learned some good lessons, all without a trip to the hospital.
Project 1: Make a decent knife.
My dad donated an old lawnmower blade, and that seemed like a good place to start. Sure, it has some bolt holes and a star shaped mounting slot right in the middle, but I have an angle grinder, so quartering the thing was easy. So I had an 8” x 1.5” x 1/8” or so steel stick, with a very dull bevel on one side. Into the fires with it!
After a little shaping up and putting a better bevel in, we have this…
After a fair bit of beating and shaping and reshaping, eventually I got to here:
Interesting problem: originally I had been aiming for a seax, with a strait edge tapered from a straight back. That tip should be sloping towards the edge, not aligned with the dull spine, but as I was putting in the bevel for the edge it kept curling back on itself. Which makes sense, seeing as how I was making one side thinner and wider and the material needs space. At this point I could grind it or cut it into the right shape, but I didn’t really want to waste material and honestly, I kind of don’t care too much. I can claim “I wanted to discover what the knife wanted to be.” That seems to be the usual refrain for “I don’t know how to fix this and make it do what I want it to.”
Then grinding. So much grinding. Partially to get a better bevel than I can hammer in, and partially to remove a lot of the hammer marks. There are many that a bit too deep for me to get out as will be seen later. Lesson learned: be more careful about keeping strikes flatter if you don’t want to have to grind a ton of material off. 3 hours of grinding later it looked a bit like a knife I might use to eat, provided I had given it a good scrubbing.
Big lessons learned from Saturday:
If you have to ask “Is that still hot?” the answer is yes. It is always yes.
When you have been grinding a piece of steel on the belt grinder, don’t touch the metal to see if the uneven spot has been fixed. It will also be hot.
Everything is really hot. Be careful what you put your gloves on.
After a day with the family, Monday was time for the dreaded “heat, treat and pray” portion. I had to take the little blade I had put so much time into into the forge, get it stupid hot, then dip it into a 50 cal. ammo can filled with vegetable oil for about 10 seconds, then pull it out, fix any warps in the metal really fast and hope it doesn’t crack or do something else horrible. Then I have to heat treat it, bringing the color to the light blue/straw gold color from back to edge to bring it down from glass hard brittle steel to slightly flexible but still hard. So much to screw up here.
Really I probably should have done this somewhere after the first hour of grinding so that if the blade cracks or otherwise gets wrecked I wouldn’t have wasted all the extra grinding and purtyin’ it up I had done, but there was no way I was going to throw the thing away no matter what happened in the heat treat phase. Even if the knife had split in half I would have finished it.
But man… I really hope it doesn’t split in half.
There it is in the fires, getting plenty hot. You will notice there are two particularly hot points, one under each burner in the middle and tip of the knife. That turned out to be a mistake, as some metal… I don’t know what it did. It sort of boiled back, leaving a curl of blackened stuff that ground off well enough and didn’t leave any obvious marks, but what the hell? Next time I am going to put the tempered object on the opposite side of the forge away from the burners, and maybe add a little angle iron or something to avoid having the flame blowing directly on it, just in case.
I take it out, dip it in oil for probably too long, then put it between two 2x4’s to finish cooling while I have some weight on top to try and keep it straight. And… it lived!
No cracks, and only a very slight warp towards the end. Hooray! Also, now my drive way reeked of french fries, but still, it’s a knife!
For heat treating I should have put it in the toaster oven for 1.5-2 hours at 400 degrees. What I did instead was put it inside the cooling forge with its spine on the hot brick and let the heat creep back up. That… actually kind of worked, but I got it a little too hot, a light blue color all the way through with some straw only on the very edge. Ahh well, lesson learned. Might have worked with better light, but better to have been more patient. But I wanted a knife now!
And after another few hours with the belt sander, it is a fairly pretty one.
I did manage to get most of the hammer marks out of the blade, as well as those boily bits, but the edge is still a bit wavier than I want. Part of that is the platen on the belt sander is only 1” wide and a bit springy, so it is hard to grind a nice straight edge. Particularly for a newb like me.
Another thing I feel compelled to explain is the geometry of the last 25% or so of the blade. You can see the big divot there: that’s one half of those bolt holes I mentioned. I filed it down a little to make a small rope cutting section. The little crack/chip looking thing along the false edge is actually the remnant of that star shaped mounting hole I mentioned before. I got most of it squished back into the metal, but that’s what’s left. I since ground down the false edge more and it is pretty much invisible.
Then there’s the tip. Or where a tip would be if I didn’t drop every knife I own tip first onto a concrete or tile floor and break the tip off. That of course is what happened here, because of course it did. As it stand, I am going to accept a small chisel tip on the knife because in reality that’s all that will survive anyway.
And that’s how I spent my free time this past weekend. All that’s left is a handle and a little bit of a hilt to keep my fingers sliding up. I made a little steel hilt this week, made difficult by having left the tang the same thickness of the blade so there wasn’t a shoulder to rest the hilt on, and my dad has some walnut for a handle. So another few days and I will have a proper first knife, if your bar for proper is low enough. Hooray!
Also, I was multitasking a bit while the heating and cooling was going on, and started on Project 2: convert a ~16 oz ball peen hammer head to a tomahawk. Seems like a fairly easy project, and my brother in law wants to make a throwing ax range for their bed and breakfast1, and so this will be a birthday present for him.
After what felt like three hours of pounding, I had this:
That, and probably another three hours of shaping it ahead of me, because holy crap that is a lot of metal to move around, even when incandescently hot. I might have taken more pictures, but my hands were cramping and shaking pretty badly at this point, so it was time to drink a lot of electrolytes and use the belt sander instead. It’s getting there, but goddamn, next time I am going to start with a smaller hammer. I see much more clearly now why everyone who does blacksmith work even semi-professionally has a power hammer, or at least a hydraulic press to squish stuff into shape.
Big lessons learned from Monday:
Wearing a leather glove on my left hand is a good idea. At least once I bobbled the round, and thus hard to hold still, hammer head and touched it with my fingers to get it into better position. The leather glove smoking instantly was a good reminder to “DON’T EVER FUCKING DO THAT!”
Sometimes a smaller hammer I can swing faster is more effective than a larger one, especially towards the end of the day.
There’s a reason blacksmiths had apprentices, or now have power tools. Time to teach the girls how to swing a sledge hammer accurately.
So that’s how I spent my long weekend. Surprisingly, I only had a few tender spots from burns and blisters, all which healed by the next day, although if I am not wrapping my hands in lotion soaked bandages after getting that ax blade shaped it will only because my skin can hold out longer than my muscles. Good fun!
I am not making that up… if you are looking for a nice bed and breakfast to say at in upper Berks County, PA, where you can shoot archery and throw axes among other things, drop me a line and I will share a link.
Broke: beating your swords into plowshares
Bespoke: beating your lawnmowers into seaxes
This has been a fun thing to read, while cementing my view that I must never attempt anything similar.