Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 14 – Covering the Scabbard

So whilst I am coating the dagger handle, scratching it with 600 grit paper and giving it each day a slight buff with acetone diluted linseed oil, I can continue to work on the scabbard. It will take a few weeks for the linseed oil to harden really properly, so there is no rush. However some of the works shown here were done in parallel with works already shown.

First thing to do is to properly shape the scabbard, leaving only about 1 mm thickness. Because the poplar wood that I have used is extremely soft, I was afraid to cut it for fear of taking away too much material. The most important rule in woodwork is – you can always cut, but you cannot ad. So I did not use chisels or a rasp, just an 80 grit sandpaper on a padded sanding block. My sanding block is a piece of wood with old carpet glued on the faces, and I am spanning on it endless belts that I used for my now dead small belt grinder. A wine cork is an excellent spanning device, allowing for quick change of belts and giving me the option of slack belt as well. When sanding around the throat of the scabbard I took care for the throat always face downward, so no loose grains fall into the scabbard and ruin the blade.

Next thing that I have done was to soak the whole surface with hot hide glue, priming it so other materials can be glued on. After the hide glue has dried, I have covered the scabbard with linen, which I have again thoroughly soaked in hot hide glue. I do not know whether this was actually done for scabbards (although from some of the images that Caine has posted it seems plausible), but I know for sure that the technique was known from early medieval times through to the modern times. Covering wood in fabric soaked in hide glue is very effective way to prevent the wood from splitting and twisting. Firstly it adds fibers that are perpendicular to those of the wood, secondly hide glue shrinks significantly as it dries, effectively pressing everything tightly together. This is one area where real hide glue has an irrefutable advantage over any modern glue. After the hide glue has dried up, I have again sanded the whole thing with 180 grit sandpaper to smoothen all knots and irregularities in the fabric.

To remain true to the game, I should use plain vegetable tanned leather, but this is one of the instances where I deliberately choose to stray away from my template and do something differently. For years I have a piece of dashing red leather that I wished to use for this project from the very beginning. It was of very irregular shape, but I was able to cut a piece big enough to cover the whole wooden scabbard from tip to throat. First I have cut a rough rectangle and then I continued to cut away tiny strips here and there until I had a piece that could be wrapped tightly around the scabbard with just about 1 mm space between the edges.
Then I had to make holes for stitching. This is fairly thin leather, so I had to make the holes very close to each other for fine stitching. I have made leather sheaths before, but I have never done this, so I did not know how exactly spaced the holes should be. I reasoned that about two-three times the thickness of the leather space between the holes and from the edge should be about right in order to be able to sew the edges together tightly without the leather ripping.

I could not find my awl, it seems that I have lost it. Luckily I had this super old knife whose blade was almost completely eaten away that could be quickly modified for the task of pokey-holey. About 200 holes. Oh boy.

For sewing I was going to use thick thread that is used for sewing jeans. For thicker leather I would have used thick linen thread, but that was a bit too thick for this job. Other threads we had at home on the other hand were too thin.

Before sewing, I have soaked the leather in lukewarm water (about 37 °C) for an hour so it becomes more stretchy and pliable. And I prepared the thread with the use of the unseemly mixture you see on the picture to the right. That mixture was made by boiling pine resin and beeswax and it was used by medieval shoemakers and saddlers to coat the thread before sewing. What are the advantages of that, you ask? Well it makes the thread bugger to work with as it becomes all sticky and latches onto everything – hair, pants, fingers, itself… Oh sorry, you asked about advantages. The thread does not split or fray during work, it is firmer and sleeker, despite the stickiness. If I coated the thread in advance and let it dry for some time It would not even be tacky, but I forgot about that. And I did not know how much thread I will need – it transpired that about ten times the length of the scabbard is about right.

When the leather was all soaked, I have prepared a small batch of hide glue again and started covering the scabbard. First I have sewn together the tip and about 1 cm of the length. Then I painted that part and the whole face of the scabbard with hide glue and inserted it in the leather pocket and started sewing and adding hide glue all round for each sewn piece. I have used a two-needle technique that I have found on the internet. It has the advantage of pulling the edges together very regularly and equally on both sides, so it does not warp and zig-zag as it could had I used just one thread. I must be honest with you – my needle work leaves a lot to be desired. I was doing my best, but I was losing the holes in this very thin leather and I skipped a few here and there without wanting to. It took me two hours to sew the whole scabbard – about 100 stitches on 27 cm length. My back ached and I was happy when it was over.

Last step was to poke and wrap holes for the straps. For these I have simply cut holes with a scalpel and inserted in the wet leather three skewers. The thread wrapped around will make visible grooves when it all dries up. If I wanted to, at this point I would also stamp and press the leather to decorate it. But I did not want to bite more than I can chew, for this project plain leather will have to do. I also formed the leather around the throat a bit, although I will have to get back at it once more – when it dries, I will have to cut all excess, wet it again with hot hide glue and form it better.

The scabbard is now nearly done, but the most challenging part is yet to come – I want to make metal chape and throating. And that is something I have never done and I will have to be really, really careful to not botch that up. And also think hard about how to do it, before I go cutting, bending, banging and soldering metal pieces together.

More about that next time. In the meantime you can admire my irregular stitches.

Absolute Perfection.

An amazing gift, from Marcus & Kestrel, who collaborated on this little slice of perfection. It wouldn’t be perfection to some one else, but it is to me – absolutely gorgeous, fantastically sharp, my favourite colours in that magnificent braiding, giving a wonderful grip, and the beauty of the blade. Fits my hand perfectly, and is properly sharp and lethal. Honestly, I was speechless when I opened this up, and I still just babble about it. I will cherish this, always. I couldn’t possibly come up with enough of a thank you to you both for your work, especially such finely done and thoughtful work. Thank you, thank you, thank you.  She definitely needs to be named, but I have to spend more time with her to find what’s right.

Clickety for full size.

© C. Ford, all rights reserved.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 13 – Assembly

Let me tel you one thing upfront – this was the most nerve-wracking part of the whole job. For a moment there I thought that I have destroyed the whole thing and I will have to start all over again, which I am not completely sure I would be able to.

First setback was the guard – look on the picture, do you see it? I did not notice it when I have made it, and it escaped my notice for quite a few days, but when trying the assembly I noticed a sizable gap between the guard and the tang. It is only about 0,3 mm, but the mirroring of the blade and the guard make it visually double that size. I thought that I will use it anyway, but it pissed me off and in the end I reckoned that having a botched project on which I have already spent probably about 50 or more working hours due to a part that takes about 3 hours to make is not worth it, so on Friday I have made a new guard. The fit was still not perfect, but this time it was good enough for me to live with it.

As I said, the wooden handle was a bit shorter than intended. Original intent was to have the bowl-shaped rondel fit snugly onto the end of the handle. But since I had to make the end of the handle flat, I had to do something to prevent the rondel from collapsing. So I needed not only the knob/nut into which the tang will be peened, but also a washer between the handle and the rondel. Both of these I have made from an old window hinge. which I first have polished with angle grinder and soft abrasive pads and then cut off a piece with hack saw. I drilled a 5 mm hole in the middle (badly) and cut the piece into two parts – the washer flat on both sides, and the nut flat on one side, and rounded on the other. I have also chamfered the outer edges on the hole in the nut, for the peening to hold on to.

Then came the fitting of all the parts together. You might think that since I have burned the hole with the tang, there would be a perfect fit, but you would be wrong. It had quite a lot of radial wobble and charcoal dust kept falling out of it. So I have taken a rat-tail rasp and filed the burned wood away, which of course made the wobble even worse.

But I had a solution to that in mind. I remember that in Ivanhoe it is mentioned that tangs were fitted into handles by a mixture of glue (resin) and crushed brick. That makes sense – crushed brick is chemically stable, compression-strong material that is nevertheless porous enough to be effectively glued. Crushing brick was no brainer, just wrap it in a rag and let a 2 kg hammer fall on it a few times, letting the gravity do the job, and then sieve it to get fine dust. However since I run out of resin and have not yet managed to get to the forest to get some new, I have decided to use hide glue instead.¹ It did not work out as intended.

To be fair, I think the idea was sound, it is my execution of it that was wrong. I have used paper masking tape to protect the blade against scratches during this work, but the guard and the bolster were completely unprotected. Further I knew that this paper tape does not protect against moisture and rust, so I had to do the whole assembly in a few hours so I can remove the tape afterwards and oil everything. Had I used molten resin, that would be possible (probably – we will see next time), but hide glue needs of course time to dry, and I did not dare to let it wait for fear of rust getting on the polished surfaces.

Here you can see that I had a lot of tang before my first attempt. Until this point everything went smoothly and I did not expect any trouble. Oh was I wrong, yes I was. In addition to the glue not being hardened I have made a few bloopers.

First was that I have not secured the rondel with tape – it fits properly only one way around and could not be rotated willy-nilly without unseemly gaps appearing. The side that is supposed to point towards the cutting edge of the blade was marked, but only on the inside, not on the outside.

Second was that I have not hammered the nut sufficiently on the whole thing and it remained hanging on the tang a few tenth of a mm above the rondel without me noticing it.

Third was to not shorten the tang sufficiently.As a result the tang was too long and its end has bent during peening.

The result was a handle that wobbled and was out of center and a rondel that did not fit and was askew like drunkard’s hat. I did not take a picture of that shameful display. Nor did I make pictures of following works, because I was too stressed out to think about that.

Because his was the point where I thought that I have botched the job and that I will have to at the very least try to weld on a tang extension. I ground off most of the badly peened end and after a few minutes of work with a vice I managed to rip the nut off. Luckily it seemed there is enough tang left when I make the nut a bit thinner. So I have filed the nut about 1 mm down and tried again. The trouble was the centering of the grip. The mixture of glue and brick was just not strong enough in such a short time to get the grip center and hold it there. In the end I had to hammer and file three small (circa 0,5 mm thick) steel wedges that I have positioned around the tang before hammering the handle onto it until the bolster met the guard. I had to pull it of and monkey around with the wedges three times, filing them and hammering them thin, before I was satisfied.

For second attempt at peening I have not only made a mark on the outside of the rondel with a sharpie, I have also fixed it with tape before peening. And before peening I have put aluminium tube on the nut and hammered it down so it lies tightly on the rondel. This time peening the end of the tang with ball peen hammer went smoothly and without problems. There was a teensy bit too little tang for  the peen to completely hide during polishing, but I can live with that. Here you can see the peen before polishing.

The dagger is now nearly complete. Now I have to re-polish and re-buff the rondel, because I have scratched it, and to soak the handle with linseed oil. That will take a few days to polymerize properly, and in the meantime I will continue work on the scabbard.

1 – I could of course use epoxy and save myself a lot of trouble, but from the start I wanted to do this project using only materials and methods that are appropriate for medieval-ish dagger. I have only used modern things where that saves time, but does not have an effect on the composition and aesthetics of the result.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 12 – Rondel

For second attempt I have decided that the tools that are at my disposal are not sufficient to do what I want to do. So I have made a tool.

I took a piece of wood from my late cherry tree that had about the right diameter and I rounded one end with an axe and a rasp to desired shape – a cylinder with the outer diameter just slightly smaller than the actual dagger handle has. I have put it in a bucket of water so it does not burn too quickly and I proceeded with the forging.

First I made the same shallow bowl shape that I have done previously, but when making it deeper I did not use the ball peen hammer anymore, instead I have inserted the prepared cherry tree block and whacked it with 1 kg forging hammer (also courtesy of my late uncle).

It has worked rather well. Not as well as a metal die would of course, but reasonably well. After only a few whacks I got a shape with which I was content.

That was not the end of the usefulness of this highly sophimasticated tool. After drilling the hole for the tang and rounding the edges on belt sander I nailed the bowl on the cherry wood for polishing.

To avoid too excessive material removal I did not do it on belt sander this time, but I have used my angle grinder with lamellar soft abrasive wheels. It has worked very well and in mere minutes I had sufficiently polished surface. Some pitting remained, but I have decided against removing it completely to avoid one of the mistakes from previous day (making the steel too thin in places).

Now for the grooves. I could not forge them hot, because for that I would need a special die. I could make one of course, but that would be extremely time-consuming and my anvil cannot hold dies yet. I had to hammer them into cold steel and from previous day I knew that I need support and space for the bend at the same time.

So I took a rasp again and I filed grooves in the end of the very useful cherry log. They are intentionally asymmetrical, because that is the look I was aiming for.

On thus prepared support I have fixed the bowl, this time not with a nail, but with a fairly long and thick screw.

A lot of banging has followed, first with masonry chisel to mark the groove, then with the smith’s hammer and old file used as a flat surface, and with small cross peen hammer. The steel was a lot tougher than I thought it will be so the cherry wood collapsed a bit. The result is that some grooves are better looking than others and some are nearly symmetrical, but that is actually correct as far as the 3D model from the game goes – the grooves there are notably different and one even looks like botched. And whilst I am not aiming for exact replica, I am aiming for the general look of the thing.

The rondel has circa 50 mm in diameter and is circa 10 mm tall. Grinding that out of solid block of steel would take an inordinate amount of time, eat a lot of abrasives and definitively weigh way too much. So I think this is mission accomplished.

Next time I will be doing something like this I will most definitively do a better job at it, but I do not think this is all that bad and I will use it. Now it will be polished and buffed together with the bolster and the guard as long as it takes for all three components to have the same look to them. That will probably take a few evenings. However I will not remove all pitting from the rondel, because I fear that it might destroy it.

And then comes the assembly. I literally cannot wait…

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 11 – Rondel Fail

This was my first attempt at making the rondel on Saturday. Also my first attempt at forging something. I failed completely to achieve my goal, but I learned a few things.

The rondel is supposed to be circular with ten asymmetrical grooves. The simplest way to achieve that would be to take a piece of 4-6 mm steel and cut the grooves with angle grinder. It would also lead undoubtedly to the prettiest looking result I might add, with the crispest lines and smoothest surface.

However I do not want to do that for multiple reasons. One is that it is not historically correct – AFAIK that thick steel was rarely used. The other reason is that it would make the dagger very heavy towards the butt of the handle, and that would make it very uncomfortable to use and it might tend to overbalance in the scabbard and fall out off it.

So I wanted to go the more historically accurate way of making bowl-shaped rondel. With the equipment that I have (not to mention total lack of skill and experience) that unfortunately means I will not be able to make crisp and deep groves, but you can’t always get what you want. Maybe some other time.

I have decided that this old broken shovel is about the right thickness (about 2 mm). It is also good and strong steel that should withstand hammering and bending etc. Unfortunately it is also strongly pitted, but I have decided to use it anyway.

My anvil is a simple piece of rail screwed to a log, and I have not modified it yet for any kind of attachments. Therefore in order to be able to forge bowl-shaped object I could not use it at all and I had to improvise. I fixed a cut piece of thick-walled steel tube to my wood chopping block.

I also lack tongs, so I had to use adjustable pliers.  But at least I have proper ball peen hammer, one of the few usable things that I got from my uncles’ derelict and trash filled house (you would not believe how difficult it is to buy ball peen hammers around here, nobody is using them and therefore nobody sells them).

For fire I have not used charcoal but half rotten dried wood. Not for any practical reason, but because I have a pile that I need to get rid off and I do not want to burn it in the stove so I co not carry the rot into the house. It is possible to heat steel with wood fire quite easily, temperature is not a problem. Problem is smoke and long flames. If you ever try to do it, be aware that it is dangerous and I advise strongly against doing such a foolhardy thing.

I thought these tools will be sufficient to achieve my objective, but to be honest I was not overly optimistic. I assumed skill will be a bigger problem.

It started promisingly and I had a bowl-shaped object in a jiffy. It was after this that it all got wahoonie-shaped.

The problem was the diameter of the ball peen hammer, which was slightly too small for the task that I wanted to do. When trying to correct this, the bowl only got deeper, but its bottom did not get any wider. I ended up with a shape that was too deep, too thin-walled with too small bottom and completely wrong shape – I was aiming for a shape like a bottle cap and I ended up with a miniature dog bowl.

Nevertheless I have decided to try and finish it to see how it looks on the dagger. I cut off all the excess with angle grinder, drilled a hole in the middle and shaped the whole thing on belt sander, removing all rust and pitting in the process and preliminarily polishing the surface to 320 grit.

It did not look all that bad on the dagger, but I did not like it very much anyway. It was not the design I was aiming for at all, not even close, and despite looking kinda good it has completely changed the character of the dagger. I knew I will have to compromise on this part, but I was not willing to compromise that much.

Nevertheless I have tried to make the grooves, just as an exercise to see whether my intended way of making them will work. It worked, sort off. It also completely destroyed the part, because I have made it too thin-walled and the walls were so thin in one place that the steel crumpled like paper instead of bending nicely.

That was it. Time to rethink my process. With these lessons learned I went to sleep on Saturday, completely tired, but determined to give it another shot right next day morning.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Interlude 2 – Measuring the Hardness

I am not done with the “Behind the Iron Curtain” series, but right now my mind is way too focused on other things.

One such thing was the conundrum of measuring hardness of steel. There is no way I can spend thousands of € on measuring equipment. And the cheapest “sort of” evaluation of hardness is a set of five needle files that costs over 200,-€. I would rather spend that money on materials, but I do not mind spending a few hours of work.

So yesterday I had my first shot at this issue.

First thing I have done was to find in my scrap pile old and damaged hack saw blade. I have heated it piecemeal with handheld propane torch to orange heat and quenched it in a bucket of water. Since it is uniform thickness, the water does cause no cracking this way and quenches the steel very nicely and without flames or stink.

After quenching each segment I broke it off (it breaks really easy) and proceeded further, untill there was no unhardened steel left. After that I broke all the pieces into much smaller pieces until I had a nice little pile of extra hard steel shards.

These I have dunked straightaway in a pot with about 1 cm of sunflower seed oil and proceeded to my kitchen. There I was heating the oil very slowly to temper the steel whilst measuring the temperature with my IR thermometer. The higher the temperature, the lower the steel hardness, so I had  temperature steps predefined at which I took a few pieces of steel out of the oil bath.

For that I have found this site on the Interwebs that was kind enough to post a table of  hardness versus tempering temperature with not only the silly units the USA uses but also the sensible units the civilised world uses¹, so I could actually understand what temperature ranges we are talking about. I wrote the temperatures from the table on pieces of paper and put them into small receptacles in which I have placed the tempered shards. I did try to hold the temperatures for about 15 minutes, but for a steel this thin that is not completely necessary.

At 260°C I stopped, because after that the oil could ignite, and I made the remaining temperatures on a fireclay brick with handheld torch. For these soft rangers I do not need much precision anyways.

With all the shards tempered and hardened I have cut ten pieces of hardwood from old spokes from my crib.  They are a bit too thick, but I had no wooden dowels of the right thickness in my pile and I did not want to use wood set aside for arrows. I cut a groove in each piece and marked the pieces 1 to 10 with roman numerals (because those are easy to carve with a knife).

After that I glued one shard in each groove with fast healing epoxy. The softest one in the I and the hardest one in X. Once the epoxy has healed, all that was left was to sharpen the shards on my belt grinder and I was done.

I have tried whether the hardness progresses from I to X and it does. 10 is able to scratch everything, I scratches nothing, and each higher number seems to scratch the one below but not the one above. Here they are (one is missing in the picture, I do not know why, how typical of me to miss-lay things in a matter of seconds).

I measured the dagger on the tang where it is hardened but will not be visible later on. VIII scratched, VII almost scratched, VI did not scratch at all. The hardness should be therefore somewhere around 58 HRC. That is hard enough to keep an edge, but not so hard as to shatter or break easily or eat sharpening stones.

As a proof of concept I would call it a definitive success. I have a set of tools that allows me to estimate the hardness of steel from about 40 to 65 HRC. Not with great precision, but well enough to be useful. After I get my hands on some suitable high carbon steel (about 1% is needed) of thickness about 2-3 mm, I will make better ones, chisel-like, with not only a tip to scratch, but also an area to be scratched.

A little backyard scientist project.

1 – I hate that USA insists on using the silly units and infests half the internet with that nonsense. Finding well written articles on the internet that are not in English is difficult and when something is written in English, it is often US-centric. As if USA did not spread enough misery as it is, it has to keep poisoning sciences and engineering with this utter garbage.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 10 – A Bolster and a Guard

Whilst the blade was the most time-consuming part, in a project like this there is still a lot of metalwork to be done. Once the handle is turned, next step is to make a bolster and a guard, and fit all these four parts together. Precision is important here. Not precision as in adhering to measurements from a drawing, but precision of how the parts fit together. I have made myself a set of measurement from the game 3D model that I aim to get near to, but I will not fuss about getting them exactly.

The bolster I have made from a piece of pipe of unknown origin that has almost the exact diameter that I actually want to have. It is also completely free of rust, which has made me suspicious whether it is not stainless steel. No matter, I have simply cut off a piece and polished it.

I did not polish it on the belt grinder all the way through the finest belts, but I stopped at around Trizact A16 and I went straight tot he buffer after that. Only I did not use the felt wheel straightaway, but a coarse sisal one with coarse polishing paste, then a felt wheel with medium polishing paste, then felt with fine polishing paste and finally felt wheel with jeweler’s rouge.

In order to be able to work with the piece on the buffer safely I have hammered it on a round dowel. During the polishing I took care to turn it in different angles against the wheel in order to get slightly satin surface – buffing in one direction only makes mirror polish and I did not want that.

The bolster is not completely round, but very slightly oval. I wanted to be able to feel the edge alignment of the dagger when held in bare hand. To further help with this I have also filed a fine grid of grooves on each side of the bolster. With that done, I could affix it to the handle. For that I have coated the relevant part with hot hide glue, stuck the bolster on there and hammered a few wooden splinters between the bolster and the handle to center it properly and to hold it in place.

With that done I had to shape the tang on the belt grinder so it was continuously ever so slightly smaller than the blade and square the shoulders (those were round prior to hardening because a sharp edge could lead to the tang breaking of in quench). To protect it from scratches I have covered the whole blade with masking tape. When the tang was shaped, I have affixed the blade in the vice with additional protection of a wet rug, and I shaped the hole in the handle to fit by the previously shown burning technique. I had to be careful for the heat to not overheat the blade base, but to be hot far enough to get a fit where the bolster was mere 3 mm from it.

Next piece in this jigsaw was the guard. I wanted that to be between 3 to 3,5 mm thick, but I had no suitable piece of steel that was not pitted too much. In the end I had to cut a piece of a structural steel V profile that was way too thick. I have spent rather more time on truing it and grinding it down to desired thickness than I wished to. Unlike for the bolster, I had no good and comfortable way to hold on that small flat piece of steel safely, so I nearly ground my finger tips off. Luckily only fingernails got slightly chewed and I have learned how to do this safely later on, when I was polishing it. I have to finish the supporting table for my belt grinder in order to do these finicky things.

When ground to slightly above the desired thickness, I have punched the centre and drawn the design of the guard. I like to make my own tools, and I have indeed made my drawing needle, but I wimped out and bought the compass. The work required to make it might be fun, but it would be way too much time that would definitively be spent better elsewhere.

Next step I have just drilled a 4 mm hole in the center, 0,5 mm smaller than the maximum width of the tang at the blade base. In order to transfer the outline of the blade base onto the steel I have poked a hole with the tang into a piece of paper – Lipton tea box was the right thickness and firmness.

Cutting the hole for the tang I have done with a fret saw. In the past I broke a lot of blades whilst doing this, but it seems I have finally learned how to do it properly this time. I broke none and it was done in lickety-split. Note the aluminium covers for the vice jaws. These are important, because I need the piece to be held firmly and safely, but I do not wish the hardened jaws of the vice damage the soft steel of the worked piece.

After cutting the rough outline of the hole came of course the most difficult part – fitting and shaping the hole to fit the tang precisely. This took the better part of an hour with fine and diamond files, and another hour or so the final shaping and polishing of the piece to the same finish as the bolster.

Here you can see the face of the guard. The other side, facing the hand, has rounded edges. I was thinking about doing that, then I was thinking about doing both sides flat and in the end I had no choice because before I figured out how to polish it properly, my hand slipped and I chamfered an edge that I did not want to chamfer. I was lucky – the result is comfortable even against bare hand and it looks good. I might however take some more time for polishing this piece. A few hand courses with coarse hematite might be needed, right now it shines a bit like a bare arse among the bushes.

Here you can see the parts assembled. Of course there is a lot of masking tape covering all the bits that I do not want to get dirty or scratched, and most of the focus is on the mess that is my workbench. But you would not expect me to show you pretty pictures at this stage, would you?

Thankful.

I received another care package, full of wonderful, from Giliell. I love everything, and I am so very thankful. I have the best friends on the planet. The bookmark was put to use immediately, and shortly after that, the bag filled with all the essentials, and I can’t say how much I appreciate that one! I love the embroidery and the fabric, but it’s especially nice because it holds all the important stuff, and I don’t have to haul a purse around everywhere. I used the creme right away too, it’s lovely, and the scent is fine. Thank you so much, Giliell!

A gorgeous bookmark, a sleep mask, small bag, cream, and my very own Cookie Corn. :D

A gorgeous bookmark, a sleep mask, small bag, cream, and my very own Cookie Corn. :D

Packed with the essentials, ready to go.

Packed with the essentials, ready to go.

Sure, Macramé Your Hair, Why Not?

I got distracted. Again. Seems my brain has been having a bit of a vacation too, I’ve been quite the space case lately. Anyroad, came upon these um, attachments? Extensions? Falls? (Does anyone else remember falls?) I’d love to have some of these done with my hair, if it ever achieves thickness again. These are from 1840. Click for full size!

Making a Rondel Dagger – Interlude

The now finished blade came out really nicely, so I will not be ashamed to be associated with it. So I will definitively sign it. However I mentioned already that I do not currently have my own maker’s mark, since the one I used from 10 years age is now used as bluetooth logo. I am not sure whether continuing to use it could lead to legal trouble, but I guess it would lead to confusion. “That knife has a bluetooth? What does it do?”.

I tried to design a new logo, but all designs I came up with either do not appeal to me, or they require quite precise etching process to be made on a blade. And that would definitively not fit this blade, where I aim for as authentic medieval look as I can achieve.

An idea came to me to use my initials, but not in Latin script, but in Glagolitic. At least for this particular dagger. It has the advantage that not only is it a very simple design, it is also thematic – Glagolitic script is the official script of the Witcher 3 game from which the inspiration for the dagger originated. And I am not appropriating other people’s culture.

So today I set out to try how it looks and also to refine/remember my etching process, since I did not do it for quite a long time. For that I yesterday polished a piece of steel from my failed broken machete.

In the past I tried different materials as masking for etching and the best results I have got with material that does not look appealing in the least. But do not worry, it does not smell like what it looks like. It smells actually very nice when worked, because it has been made from equal parts of beeswax, bitumen and spruce resin, all boiled together and poured into water to solidify. I formed it in sticks and for last ten years it collected dust. But it does not spoil and it is just as usable as it was when new.

When heated with heat gun or even with hair dryer or a candle it quickly gets very sticky and adheres to the de-greased steel quite well. So I heat gently both the steel and the stick and rub them together to transfer some of the sticky material onto the blade. Then I use the air flow from the hot air gun to make an even thin layer. It is important for the layer not to be too thick, because it would be difficult to draw the design in it, but also not too thin because then it could delaminate during etching around the edges (delamination was a huge problem when I was trying to use paraffine btw.).

Next step is to draw the design. The layer remains fairly soft and plastic for long time and can be easily scratched through. For this I am using an old compass needle, but for finer design a razor blade or very sharp wood carving knife tip can also be used. It is important to keep the needle clean after every scratch, since the stuff adheres to it too. It is also necessary not only to scratch through, but more like scratch/chisel away. Minor mistakes can be repaired by pressing a piece of the mass on desired place and pressing it gently against the spot until it connects again. After just a few minutes of work under a magnifying glass I was ready to try etching.

For just a small logo I did not want to prepare whole big etching bath, so I used the masking mass to glue a bottle cap with cut-out top as a barrier for the etching fluid to remain in place. As a source of electrical current I have used a DC power supply from an external hard drive that has died on me a few years ago – it has an on/off switch which comes in handy. Anode (+) is connected on the steel and cathode (-) on a piece of graphite (a pencil core works too and I used it for very fine etchings in the past). As etching fluid I have used ordinary kitchen salt solution in the past, but today I have tried ferric chloride because I reasoned (correctly) that it will work better. It is solution for etching printed circuit boards diluted approximately 1:10.

It is important to not use too concentrated solution for two main reasons:

  1. The current that can go through the solution depends on concentration. Too high concentration can mean too high current and that can burn the DC power supply (lesson learned in the past).
  2. Too concentrated solution also etches too quickly and that is not desirable because it makes uneven “burned” looking and spotty etch.

After that I turned the switch on and waited for ten minutes. It was not complete success because towards the end the bath evaporated too much, it got warm and the masking layer delaminated around the whole logo. So I repeated the process once more with only five minutes etching time. I am satisfied with the result, the etching is clear and has nice black color that I know I would not get with table salt. Now I will play with the letters a bit in Photoshop to get the proportions right.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Bad American Blood.

Hervé Garnier poses with a bottle of wine from Beaumont. Courtesy of Hervé Garnier.

Hervé Garnier poses with a bottle of wine from Beaumont. Courtesy of Hervé Garnier.

A story of an illicit wine, one with a history of a hysterical hunt to destroy these vines with bad blood in them. This wine is still illegal, and I have to say after reading the story, that I’d love to get my hands on a bottle, it sounds delicious.

“This cuvée hails from the tiny, remote village of Beaumont, where it’s been perfected by five generations of local winemakers,” whispers Borel. For the past 84 years, the French government and, most recently, the European Union, has sought to eradicate Beaumont’s grapevines due to their American “blood.” Although the vines are French-American hybrids, they are more than 140 years old. Beaumont’s Association Mémoire de la Vigne makes just 7,000 bottles a year.

[…]

“This wine should be celebrated as others are,” says Hervé Garnier, the 66-year-old Association Mémoire de la Vigne president and founder. Garnier loves Beaumont, which is situated in Cévennes National Park along France’s highest mountain range, and is home to groves of chestnut trees, wild boar, and high rocky cliffs. Its centuries-old stone buildings have terracotta roofs and rocky terraces, and are etched into the hillsides overlooking the Beaume River. Since its founding in the 11th century, sheepherders have practiced transhumance—moving herds to summer in alpine meadows—by way of traditional paths. They are some of the last in the world to do so.

“What wine do you think they carry when they go?” fumes Garnier. “For 150 years, the Cuvée des Vignes d’Antan is the taste of this land. And yet, a ridiculous archaic law tries to destroy it!”

Indeed. If it wasn’t for Garnier and a group of unruly older winemakers, Beaumont’s wine would be lost to history.

The village of Beaumont; it’s location in a national park makes its wine a nationally protected folkway. Courtesy of Hervé Garnier.

The village of Beaumont; it’s location in a national park makes its wine a nationally protected folkway. Courtesy of Hervé Garnier.

You can see and read much more at Atlas Obscura.