I dragged myself through my door around 4:00pm yesterday. My connection from Minneapolis to Washington Dulles had mysteriously cancelled so Delta put me on a plane to Washington Reagan and generously suggested I take a taxi 30 miles between the airports. Naturally I was compensated with a $100 voucher to be spent on any future Delta flight I could not avoid having to be on.
Some important things:
The sword-making process consumes grind-stones at a fairly amazing rate. Yesterday, I spent most of the day going back and forth on a coarse water stone, and ended up with a much smaller water stone.
Other than “drive over night and get to the airport at 3:00am” the flight out to Portland was uneventful.
(Learn From My Fail)
I’m going back out to Dragonfly Forge at the end of this month, and I plan to do like last time – I’ll post notes as I go along, stream-of-consciousness style.
My skills at drawing are so bad that when I draw a stick figure, people think it’s a doodle. So I use prosthetics to sketch designs and see what I like and what I don’t. This is intended to be a bread-scoring knife for commentariat(tm) member jazzlet.
Electrochemical engraving seems to be pretty easy: you order micro-screen masks from tustech [tus] and they appear remarkably quickly. I sent them a large PDF of the badger logo Ieva did for me and they had the masks in my mailbox 5 days later.
I had the idea of using a small stainless steel hatchet as a cut-off tool for forging. It seemed like a good idea – stainless is not very sticky and it’s pretty tough stuff.
Some closeups of metal using a Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens. The depth of field of the lens is very shallow, and it’s a pain to hand-hold.