Don’t worry, if you are inclined to.

To be completely frank, I have been depressed into near immobility by the utter failure of the US Justice System, which has demonstrated fairly conclusively that it is designed to protect wealthy white people, while tossing poor people or people of color into an oubliette. As I watch Donald Turnip run through his endless obviously stupid appeals, of which he has an infinite supply, I am minded of Leonard Peltier who somehow has been imprisoned since 1975 in spite of the fact that his crimes were wimpy compared to some of the Jan 6 defendants [wik] If he had Donald Trump’s lawyers, he’d probably still not be imprisoned because of some appeal or other. Note: I am not trying to imply that Trump’s lawyers are good, but rather am implying that the Justice System is bad. Or, as per the internet legend, has hit rock bottom and started to dig. [penn]

My sister is an attorney (our fencing coach once said, “she has always been an attorney”) and we used to spar over the question of whether lawyers bear any responsibility for defending people they know are corrupt, or cannibals, or whatever. They are not, I was assured, simply in it for the money – it is their duty to serve as a necessary component so that Justice may happen. Now, we all can see plainly that is bullshit – the lawyers who are defending Trump’s literally indefensible actions have been reduced to conspiring with activist judges on the supreme court to make sure that Justice never happens. Travesties are offended by the comparison.

My work often reflects my mood, so I was not surprised when I took a pair of bars of low layer twist and sandwiched some W-2 between them, and it started getting longer, and longer, and narrower and meaner. Basically, an Edo period version of a rondel dagger, so I called it the “Tokyo Toothpick” in honor of the state of Arkansas, which offends Tokyo by comparison.

I usually don’t shoot “in progress” pictures because it means taking one of my furnace gloves off and shooting one-handed, risking dropping my phone or a 1200F piece of metal on my foot or the floor. Anyhow, this is a somewhat interesting picture to the extent that I am now forging my blades almost to final form on the anvil and press. I came up with a trick last fall, which is to put an allen wrench or whatever under one of my press dies so the whole die now presses at an angle. I am able to make the taper to the blade’s edge almost on the press.

Usually, there is a fair amount of work to be done in blade profiling but this went from forge (to cool down) to angle grinder, mill file, and ready to quench in less than an hour. So the total time I had getting the blade to this stage was about three hours including assembling the block of steel it was made from. Not bad.

Then, I did some fancy stuff with clay so it would make a beautiful temper line, quenched it, dropped it, and it broke in half. Oh, well. It was an experiment. Next time I try one of these I will be armed for bear. Usually, differentially tempered blades take on a curvature (Sori) from the expansion of the martensite on the edge versus the pearlite on the back. This one did not do that, which made me wonder if maybe the whole thing hardened. The fact that it broke in half also supports that. So I think my problem was not in the forging but in the post-forging quench process.

Then we had a windy thunderstorm and an oak tree came down across the road about a mile from my house. The road crew sawed it up and dragged the big pieces to the side of the road. Then, people who wanted big pieces of oak log came and took them, leaving the “little” 6 inch branches. I let them sit a few days to dry a little bit then tossed 4 of them into the truck, wired them into a pyramid on the edge of my yard, and innoculated them with shiitake mushroom plugs. (not shown). I painted the holes over with molten wax (bucket, brush, beeswax, blowtorch) to keep them from drying out and I guess I’ll see if anything comes along next summer. Given that I have tons of space, this seemed like a pretty fair gamble.

Other than the Tokyo Toothpick I also got stuck into making a rondel dagger. My version is probably not anything a medieval knight would recognize, though, since theirs weren’t made of flashy twist damascus with evil edges of tool steel sticking out. I mean the basic point (badum-tschh!) is clear. So I now have this huge evil thing (a term I do not use lightly) that is a bit sharper than a needle and a whole lot bigger, with a single cutting edge of the aforementioned tool steel – and then I needed, you know, rondels. I wanted flashy, so I made a short stack, drew it out, cut it up, cleaned it, rotated it around a center, tack welded it, and forge welded it into a mass, sawed off some chunks, flattened them out, and dished them in a dapping block. From there it was basic steel grinding and polishing:

Here’s a problem: now the blade is flashy, the guards are flashy, what do I do with the handle? My plans (in progress) are a Holbein-style handle made of synthetic ivory and ebony. I think I have come up with a build process for that, I just need to wait for my fine kerf 1/8″ bandsaw blades to show up. If it works, I’ll probably do a post on it but if it doesn’t, we’ll forget all about this comment.

An ongoing project has been building the heating system and body for a steel smelter. Smelters are no problem at all, so long as you are melting stuff that has a lower melting temperature than steel. When you start getting to steel temperatures you have the problem that your cheapest and easiest materials are the same stuff you are trying to melt. That can get awkward. I know a guy who solved all this by buying a pure platinum crucible, which can survive basically anything short of a solar corona, an oxy/acetylene torch, or nuclear weapons. At $3500 for a 50ml crucible, I’m going to have to go with low-survivability fireclay and graphite and stuff like that. There’s also the problem that your burner, which has to generate 3000F or so, should have a melting temperature that is higher than that. Or, is otherwise cooled, e.g.: like rocket scientists do, with liquid oxygen running through critical parts to keep them from melting under the heat they generate.* I’m using some of those tricks, using cold propane to atomize diesel fuel and cool the combustion chamber; the oxygen drip is on the downside of the combustion chamber, which is directed into the smelter with a tube of inconel. I am in love with inconel. It is some insanely tough stuff. It is, also, why the X-15 and SR-71 were expensive. Actually, everything on the SR-71 was expensive, but you get the idea. My hope is to fire the burner and smelter system sometime in November.

Also: November. In case you give a shit, my birthday is November 5th. It was not my idea to have the great big performance election on my birthday, but since they will, perhaps you can all spare a thought for me getting my birthday wish, which is for MAGA to be conclusively crushed. One final note on that, I have a theory which is that the Supreme Court and in fact most of the right wing, have decided to take a “wait and see” attitude toward Trump. If he wins, they will use him as a puppet for a while and put in someone they like better. (Perhaps JD Vance, who has been said “is as Appalachian as olive garden is Italian) It is impossible for Trump’s disability not to be obvious, and less than Reagan’s was. But it can be hidden if he turns out to be a useful idiot. The reason the Supreme Court came up with the novel immunity theory they did was to muddy the waters until after the election. If he wins, I won’t matter. If he loses, they’ll throw him to the wolves. The entire right wing with throw him to the wolves. It’ll be like Lavrenti Beria when Stalin died, all over again. Beria, who?

* Unrelated: if you are inclined, SpaceX has done some big “reveals” on the Raptor-3 engine. To say that it is a masterpiece of engineering may be an understatement. The crucial aspect of it is that the SpaceX engineers took free rein to attempt certifiably crazy shit(tm). For example, the housing of the engine is 3D printed, so it can contain tiny routing tubes that carry small amounts of liquid methane around parts that need to be cool. Some sub-assemblies are 3D printed directly into the housing. The way the engine is maintained is to cut it apart with a CNC machine then examine it and weld it back together with a CNC welder. We’ll see if it works but a comparison between the Raptor-1 and Raptor-3, or even the Rocketdyne F-1, will make your head hurt. Go search and be amazed.