Once upon a time, there were two demons talking. One of them looked at the other and said, “whoah, you’ve got the ‘made the damned suffer’ award, how did you earn that?” The other demon replied, “I made the integral bolster knife popular, and the overall suffering in the knife-maker community went off the charts.”
This weekend I’ve got a guest coming to the forge; we’re going to try to make him a seax. It’s going to be a lot of fun watching someone else work while I take pictures and drone advice at him.
Usually when I harden a blade, I let it get its tempering-cycles while I grind it. That can result in disasters, like a work-piece falling on the floor and shattering.
This is an idea I stole from michaelcthulu on youtube. He’s the guy who makes gigantic swords from anime shows [youtube] and he’s quite a character.
“The great thing about having potential is: if you never live up to it, you’ll always have it.”
Sometimes, you start working on a project, and it just gets away from you. When that happens, it goes on the Shelf of Shame and Glory, or you otherwise get it out of your sight.
I’ve spent a bit of time in search for steel wire rope to weld into sharp, pointy things. It’s been a fun quest. I assumed for a long time that the stuff would be all over the place, up here, because of strip-mining and logging.
I’ve been slowly noodling my way through a project, in which I am trying to make some large ornaments, using the water-jet CNC machine at the fabricators’ in Clearfield. It came to me when I was watching Michaelcthulhu make giant swords, and thought, “No, but a giant sword-guard would be kind of neat!”
As I mentioned [stderr] my first attempt at feather damascus was a bust, and left me with a half-split half-welded block of many-layered metal. Some gears in my subconscious clicked and I realized there was some symbolism there in the metal.
There are a variety of patterns in damascus steel-making, each of which represents a different way of laying up the bars, and manipulating them afterward. Each step brings with it a unique opportunity to fail: if you work too slowly, things may oxidize and not weld cleanly anymore. If you work too fast, you may wind up with inclusions or a mis-aligned weld. Two bars the have been forge-welded together are now one bar; you can’t re-position things.