We’re making the sword-blades out of wire rope, with a twist.
We’re making the sword-blades out of wire rope, with a twist.
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.
A bit of a view of Dragonfly Forge. In the mornings, it seems to like to be misty.
Some important things:
Other than “drive over night and get to the airport at 3:00am” the flight out to Portland was uneventful.
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.
The most dramatic moment in making a Japanese sword is the quenching. In part, that’s because if you have failures in your welds, the blade may suddenly delaminate, turn into a pretzel, or crack.
I don’t have a lot of pictures to show for today because today was more refining and shaping. There’s a lot of that.
Why do steel sparks do this thing: they fly straight and seem to explode at the end of their trajectory. [Read more…]
There really isn’t any part of the forging process that is more important than any other; you don’t end up with a finished sword without executing the other steps correctly, too.