ThomasPowers

Heat treating a knife is a lot more of a PITA than doing a hammer. One good suggestion, especially if you are scrounged materials is to make up 10 or so identical blades of the same stuff and experiment in heat treating them and testing them to destruction. Then when you find the processes that end up with what you like---write it down! So try both oil and water quenchants and then try drawing to different tempers and check to see how they react to your using them. One of my students, (been teaching smithing nearly 30 years), just got the bottom die from an old stamp mill to use as an anvil. It even has several nice dishing forms worn into the top of it. He'll flip it over and forge on the bottom or on the side. This was obtained from a retired fellow who just happened to have one in his garden...Might be worth a tinnie or two prospecting for the like?

Perhaps making you and her a matching set? That would be spiff as great a job as you are doing with them.

Sorry it's an impossibility. Using swords generally were around 2-4 pounds (over 1000 years of them both in Europe and in Japan!) Even Ti, (which doesn't hold a great edge) would be too heavy or so thin it would just crumple.

It is a beautiful knife; but it is not one that would have been seen in the ACW , Your reasoning is rather specious: they had been making knives out of chipped flint thousands of years longer; would you expect to see one in a civil war battle field? Matchlock Muskets had been around for centuries, you see any of them used in a ACW battle? It's based on the impossibility of proving a negative. However it's the type of reasoning that gets a lot of people sneered at in LH groups. I've been involved in LH groups for around 31 years now and a lot of ones would not allow that blade to be borne on the field. Hard to show it off if you have to leave it in the car. I'd suggest making her a smashing version of a documented blade that can be whipped out and passed around when LH groups get together making everyone who sees it jealous---perhaps for Valentines Day?

Patrick had a 50# Moloch, he's in south east WI as I recall. Patrick you reading???

Take off the motor (and mount if it has the original heavy one), take off the bottom die and the top die and holder and ship them seperately. that would bring the weight down at least 200 pounds on mine, (shoot the old original motor and cast iron mount would probably be 150#0

Bentiron1946 there comes a limit though when taking off more clothes starts to be a *bad* idea if you are smithing... Scale burns can be unpleasant. Cold is not usually as much an issue here as wind is. A place I see from my front door had 7-8 hours of sustained winds over 100 mph with one gust of 128 last week. I was quite happy to be several thousand feet lower with winds between 20 and 30 mph.

Funny how things look different depending on where you start from---I was thinking that that english wheel looked a bit light duty as most of the armourers I know have much larger ones, (one I coveted was tied into the main support beam of a massive 100 year old house in Kansas city and used a hydraulic jack to apply the pressure) It certainly looks a lot bigger than the thin sheetmetal car customization variety though!

Yup those are chisels used to cut track the old fashioned way.

Riograndeironworks; I talked with Rob Saturday and he has a fellow making up some variants of the Sandia forge; so if you want an efficient forge even at NM altitudes you may want to talk with Rob Gunter about one!

Well I'm hoping to get the purlins mounted on my shop extension; but may get to go visit relatives instead...

Alaska used to be owned by Russia and in Russia the Tree cuts you!

My Sofa Workshop built aspirated forge I generally run close to 10 psi on the gauge I have on it's regulator. HOWEVER I have not calibrated this gauge in years and so it may be +/- 50% as small cheap gauges are notorious for being in accurate.

It's truly a lovely knife and very well done; but Civil War? There were some Gold Rush knives that are not too far off but the styling on that one is definitely modern!

Yup just messing with you---we gave this some thought when we were brainstorming blacksmithing in space back in the mid '80's...

Yup they had bad tools way back when too---the 1900 Sears Catalog sold anvils that went from re-branded HB's to cast iron ASOs. However in general the low quality stuff ended up being destroyed, broken scrapped and so what has survived has a higher good quality ratio than back when it was originally sold. My favorite fleamarket back in OH was at a *working* drive in theater. Every dealer had to haul their stuff in and out every day it was open---more pressure on them to sell stuff (and to leave the heavy stuff at home where I could get a lead on it by asking and not have competition for it...)

Funny it was provided as a usable method to repair old post vise screw boxes in "Practical Blacksmithing" as I recall. Perhaps your sooting wasn't up to snuff or your screw was so worn that the change in thread shape over the length cause problems

Sorry I red the section on Champions in "Pounding out the Profits" but they didn't have a size/weight chart in it.

My wife would claim I never use more than a small part of my brain at any time! The Micro forge is great because you can use it for small items INSIDE the house. I made one out of a soft firebrick drilling a couple of say 3/4" holes lengthwise from the end---but not all the way out the other end! and joining them together and then drilling a hole in from the side that is the size of a simple plumber's propane torch head that supplies the heat---NOTE the torch head does not go into the brick! It will melt. You set it up so it's next to the brick shooting the flame into the side hole. You can work nails, jewelry, small blades, etc with this set up---I did the nails for my Mastermyre chest using one of these down in my basement with a nasty storm going on outside. I also used it a lot for hot forged silver work---taking silver "ingots" and forging them into Penannular Brooches. I've seen them done with kaowool using a tin can for the shell and the propane torch.

What temp are the bricks rated for? Also there are IR reflecting coatings that help increase the efficiency of a forge some.

I see the problem being that a lot of us *know* how to work dangerous materials safely; but the people we are talking to may not. I never want to run up against someone saying "but you said it could be used" and having totally ignored the safety comments they are now working on leaving a widow and small kids and massive medical bills behind them. So I will not advocate using BeCu, what if the next guy to own the piece decides to re-grind it? Or their grandson? I will always warn about zinc fumes; besides Paw Paw I had a 19 year old student I warned about zinc and by the next year he had put himself in the hospital with metal fume fever---with no insurance BTW. I won't stop other folks from playing with fire; but I'd like them to do it as safely as possible!

Now Now Theophilus said to pen up the goat and feed it ferns for 3 days to get the quenchant. I've used the leftovers from an indigo dye vat (5 gallons of stale urine) Works like a brine and has such an amusing odor when the hot steel hits it. Nothing like pushing authenticity for an early medieval eating knife! "Sources for the history of the science of steel" has an interesting list of Renaissance quenchants, inc radish juice and worm water... Surely such a sword should be quenched in a septic tank?

Knifemaking is NOT a starting project in smithing. If you learn to work the fire correctly and hit accurately and evenly then when you go to make knives it's a whole lot easier. When I see these kind of questions I always feel it's like someone asking the details on how to win formula 1 races and then asking how you start the car and if it needs all 4 tires, etc. For a coal/coke forge hard firebricks will work, soft ones get too chewed up too fast. Also a brake drum from a car or light truck will work. Compressors put out low amounts of high pressure air. You want moderate amounts of fairly low pressure air. Vacuum cleaners will work but put out way too much air---have a way to waste the excess! If there is a mine locally they should have some large hunks of steel that will work far better than a piece of rail for an anvil. *Mass* is important. I have friends who made a dandy anvil from a large fork lift tine or a section of large round solid shafting. Ball peen hammers are the standard smithing hammer in many countries. If you like the Swedish hammer may I suggest you forge one as an early project? (starting with a hammer head and modifying it in the forge is a lot easier for a new smith than starting with a hunk of steel...) Yes bend it first and keep bending it as you go along. Will you need a flatter? Yes if you don't have good hammer control, no if you do. I don't use one but I do use a nicely dressed hammer with a large gentle face on it for final forging on a blade. (it's one of the 1500gm swedish ones) Get a book on bladesmithing! "The Complete Bladesmith" is one such. Did you harden those earlier blades in water or in oil? Sounds like you used water for a steel alloy that requires oil---remember that knifeblades being so thin will often use a quenchant one step down from what the steel is officially rated for--- The clay is used to keep the BACK of the blade from hardening and is an advanced technique; I suggest you learn a bunch first before worrying about blades with hamon. If you heat a blade up past critical and allow to cool slowly this is annealing and makes it dead soft. Once you have hardened a blade you should immediately draw temper on it by placing in a fairly low temp oven and letting it come up to temperature and then let cool and repeat 2 more times. Really a book with several hundred pages in it will do a lot better job than a paragraph or two on the net...

I'm lucky I stocked up and moved a ton of stuff out here from OH so I can coast in between the less common finds of stuff at our *small* fleamarket in a small town. Handles: there was a nice hammer head I wanted once with a poorly mounted *new* handle that the fellow wanted too much money for---saying that the *new* handle drove up the price. Well it was so badly fitted that I grabbed the head with one hand and pulled the *new* handle out with the other hand not even straining and handed him the handle and said "How much just for the hammer head?" Every once in a while I luck out at a dump or scrap yard and find a pile of rusty chisels and hammer heads someone left in a bucket or tool chest that got flooded and just dumped.

I once owned a house that used it for insulation. Much nastier to work with than fiberglass!