Doing flat-grinds on a belt sander is an eye/hand skill you never completely forget. But you can get rusty. So, I’ve been working the stiffness out of my muscle memory, while experimenting with my whole tool-chain to see what works best, where. My tool-chain has gotten vastly more powerful and complicated since I was in high school, making “prison shiv” style knives with just a file and a bench grinder.
Something seems to have clicked and I’m getting good results forming welded bar-stock, now. I’ve started to consistently and easily (it’s still work, it’s becoming predictable work) get forge-welds and I’m producing bars that harden nicely, don’t warp or blow apart, and seem to be very tough with good edge-holding properties.
I’ve been continuing to experiment with welding, and have tried to actually make a few things out of some of the steels I’ve been assembling.
One of the things I love about science is that it proceeds not just by learning what is true, or what works – but by learning what is not true or what does not work. Naturally, we’d all rather make great leaps of understanding, but sometimes we can learn a bit, and push things in a good direction if we can handle a bit of failure.
Today, I advanced the art of blade-smithing a tiny bit by discovering another thing that does not quite work.
This is not a weapon (the weapons of war are unfortunate instruments) – it’s a Japanese-style box cutter, a “kiridashi.”
So far, everything I have tried to do, today, has failed. Everything. I’m afraid to even try to boil an egg for lunch.
Today when I went over to the shop there were signs of ninjas in the sand-tray.
This is what I have on my workbench right now. I’m pretty pleased with how they came out because they’re all my metallurgy. There’s still plenty of time to ruin them, though.
Last Wednesday, knowing the milling machine move was coming up, I assembled a load of stuff-moving gear in the back of my truck: engine crane, crank cargo straps, tow straps, chains, variety of wrenches, 2×4 pieces, pipe pieces, and a first aid kit.
We humans can move very heavy things, using just our brains and simple tools. Or hydraulics. For everything else, there are hydraulics.