Weekend Roundup

Things are happening, Reg!

A bit quiet here this weekend, newsletter wise. I did some work on the outside writing project, which will probably be ready to be revealed (and reviled?) in another week or two. I also decided it was time for a little more physical work, and that the forge would be fine in a light drizzle. End result? A pretty nice ax!

Post quench rough clean up:

And all pretty and polished:

It came out pretty well, although it’s blade is rotated very slightly, like 3-5 degrees. I couldn’t see it when I was forging it or right after I quenched it, but now that it is too late to fix it is all I see. Makes me nuts… I am glad I am giving it to my brother in law, otherwise I would break down and try and crank it perfect in the vice. I am pretty sure that would end badly.

I also pissed around with another chunk of lawnmower blade. I made a nice tang on the blade, but I am not happy with the blade itself. I am going to see what I can do with grinding, but otherwise this one might be consigned to the “to be used when I mess around with Damascus” pile.

Things I learned:

• A one pound ball peen hammer head has a lot of steel to move around.

• Holding a vaguely round hammer head in my crappy home made tongs is miserable, and probably dangerous if I didn’t have quick footwork. I need to break down and just buy some good tongs before I need to buy a new pair of boots and skin grafts for my feet.

• I wasn’t getting my forge nearly hot enough before. After just letting ‘er rip and getting it well into the white-yellow color range shaping was a lot less miserable. Gotta remember that when working on big chunks of metal.

• I am now nearly 12 hours of forge time into the standard gas grill propane tank I am using, and it doesn’t show signs of running out yet. Mr. Volcano is not so much of a gas hog as I had feared!

• The little wavy flakes I was getting on the first knife that I had to grind out are from hammering the thin sides in on themselves as I shape the metal. I didn’t notice I was doing that before as I would try to hammer the metal thicker, but it is clear that is what happened as I was shaping the tang on this last knife. I gotta remember, you can’t make it thicker! (Although I am wondering now if I couldn’t forge weld it into itself if I was careful with cleaning, adding Borax and folding it.)

• I need to make/buy/steal a larger eye hole drift. The one I am using is just barely big enough to make the hole another ~1/8” larger than the handle it came with. I was really hoping for 1/4” or more, and I don’t have the oval shape I would like.

• The concave bevel between the blade and the haft head is REALLY difficult to polish smooth with my belt sander. I ended up going back after that last picture with some 320 grit sandpaper on a 2x4 block and smoothing it out more. I might have to get some sanding cylinders I can put on my drill or something.

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Now, I was quiet this weekend, but others were hard at it! I want to toss out two links to John Carter and J. Rollins.

John wrote a great essay on how one handles “sources” in the modern era, which is very similar to how we should have been doing so all along when you get down to it.

J. Rollins wrote a really interesting essay on autism and how it might manifest in women, such that we either have a really hard time detecting it or there really are only 25% as many autistic women as men.

I also want to put out a third link to Parrhesia’s newsletter, where he wrote a really good piece on moral expertise. So good, I plan on writing up a response this week elaborating on the comment I left. Yes, I know I have a lot of things on the back burner that are currently starting to emit black smoke, but consider I wrote the reply to P-man using only my phone. I HATE writing things on my phone. That’s how motivated I was.

I hope you all had a great weekend, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with this week!