basher

There is no problem building a round forge, its easier when using K wool. However I find square forges and fibre board easier to use. I have seen no benefit in the swirl when building forges, none at all. I've build forges with swirl and without, I discarded it long ago.. There is a benefit when building a crucible furnace with a large crucible taking up 80% of the furnace space I don't know if that is where the swirl myth is still coming from.......

I can make an educated guess that the pointy end weight is less than the not so pointy end. Its not the falling down but the getting back up thats important. good job on getting back up and getting it done. A deep Bow to Sam for pulling this class off, I have been impressed with his classes. The real trick to making swords is........making swords. congratulations on the birth of your first sword.

Its up to you.........call it what you want. its easier to just double so I do that.

I have very light crowning on my main 50kg hammer (4mm rad) and recently went back to using my goliath spring hammer which is feathered over an inch of the tooling to give a very gradual taper into the block. for my work on knives I can thin forge a blade with no visible tooling marks. great fro free forging, no use for tooling.

grinding is tricky at least compared to forging , however some people do get it immediately and I think it has as much to do with being able to imagine your finished piece as the hand skills to obtain that. Observation as to whether you are doing it rite depends a lot upon having a firm idea about what you want. I have always ground freehand at least until this year, I have just finished construction of a variable angled jig, with a linear actuator to change the angle of the grind , works a drream. I still do the fine fettling freehand but hog in a jig.....

​I think it would be nice if sometimes you all answered the questions without being condescending and ripping into people, and then whooping it up about how big and clever you all are. Thats how I read it again and again. Seem to have missed your 'helpful' answer to the OP

In answer to the original question:- The easiest way to prevent sabering in a straight sword id to harden and temper it before you grind the bevel into it. I do this a lot on my pattern welded Viking swords that are double edged straight blades. You may still get a little sabering as material removal will change the tensions in the blade, however leaving the blade a few mm wider than you want it will allow you to grind the blade true after you have ground the bevels in. The other way to try and minimalise warpage would be martempering, however an uneven section will always want to warp in the heat up and cool down associated with any heat treating. Material wise I would aim for a deep hardening spring steel In the UK I would recommend EN45 , and in the USA I guess 5160.

I have seen and done quite a few versions of these ........that is the most loverly of them all.

I have great memories from 95 or 96 of watching and listening to the percussionist Evelyn Glennie (now Dame evelyn Glennie) Play a whole BABA exhibition. she walked around and played everybody's sculptures and iron work.... It was very cool. Evelyn Glennie is profoundly deaf , but is hasn't stopped her becoming the Uk's best known percussionist and she rocked that gig. As an aside I have made symbols in steel (probably gongs) and tubular bells both of which are easy to make and tune. I have a long neglected but tenacious idea to make a Aeolian harp that would play storms , my brother was just yesterday mentioning a marine version of same a metal sound instillation to play the tide.... a sea harp.

The crew were here for 4 days. I really enjoyed the process, I am well used to camera crews and directors as this is the 18th tv show I have worked on. I am used to doing and redoing seemingly pointless stuff. I try and lead a director into understanding the process and values of the work , however it is their show, they ARE the boss so to speak. I learned early on that the director is always rite .......keeps things flowing once you get that into your head The camera man and particularly the sound man were getting their kicks and I was hearing great noises from them when they captured one arty shot or another, the sound in particular opened up a lot things I had never noticed before as we isolated specific sounds. To make a twisted damascus knife from start to finish BY HAND ( without using a power hammer) takes about as long as is mentioned in the filming, roughly 2 days work. However I never work one thing at a time and use a power hammer whenever possible. I have worked hard at my process to attain a blacksmiths rate for my bladesmithing work (which is very unusual).

Scribing with the square and poring the oil were explanatory to "explain" what was going on.......... good catch...

790lb!

This should work state side , not HD (i don't think, but available!!) https://www.youtube....h?v=kPpmj8RoAyY cheers

I have a 550lb that looks identical to that, no peter wright logo but otherwise fairly certain its the same.

I,m with Alan on this one I always crown my punches and chistles. and happily use any of my workshop hammers with a nice wide face. I make chisels with normalised striking ends and dress them regularly and sub critically anneal them on a regular basis as well to insure they are soft and kind to the hammers and me. struck tools are consumable in practice.

little linkie http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tpw1j

I finally managed to see this, very very cool. I love it!! I like the characters and especially Irish Mike, It has all the same false jeopardy as all the other "reality shows" of this ilk , in this case I can live with it..... I like it , I'm on my day off and its going really well with a glass of beer,

I have just "won" another biggie.....but how big? 41" by 18 high by 7" wide (on the face) what do you recon? ebay link removed per site guidelines

The BBC4 tv show HandMade will be showing next Monday the 4th of may. At 9 .00 there will be Handmade " glass" and at 9.30 Handmade "metal" . The Metal,show is half a hour of myself forging a knife. Three is also Handmade "wood" the day after . The show is part of a slow TV movement and is a honest portrayal of a craftsman working. I'll post a link to the BBC 4 website as there should be interviews etc up there soon. 9.30 May 4 th.......Handmade : Metal

Here is my latest stash from ebay, collected from a modern saw doctor . lots of dogs head , double diagonal pein, straight /cross pein hammers range from 2.5lb and up. marked sheffield ,handforged from cast steel, 1911. and other marks quite a haul... I have given them a clean and will re handle most of them.

I run a lot of gas forges (7 currently) and certainly some of them require a 60 psi bar regulator as half of them take more than 30 psi to get to welding heat. I think this has more to do with jet size than anything else. I would always have a needle valve at the forge so that you are adjusting your gas flow at the forge rather than the bottle. I keep most of my bottles outside the forge building. obviously there are different ways to go about this.

​If you friend restored this one he did a great Job .

Ah yes "clapper dies", at least thats what I called them when picking some second hand ones from a notable smith.....Hi did get what I was on about but defiantly amused by a whipper snappers bad use of words. The most of us work alone and the language or lack thereof that we have for our tools can not easily translate between loners... I helped a friend to design a working system for dishing large copper sculptures lots of new made up tools ..."Tommy" tools. Tommy Bar , Tommy Tool , Tommy hammer etc Tommy hammer had "Tommy" welded on it. Now "real" coppersmiths may well have had names for these types of tools and they may well have never seen a "tommy" ( A kind of belly mounted push bar for holding copper seams shut whilst you braise weld them) in which case I guess a Tommy could really be a Tommy.

I was lucky enough to visit Petr Florianek just out side of Prague . he has a loverly little Guided helve hammer of a type I have not seen before in the flesh. Although there are many of them (similar) on a lot of the German you tube videos of industrial tool making. The hammer is a 40KG Prako a real compact hulk of a hammer around 4 foot tall. I was quite smitten. The hammer has been completely reconditioned and has the lightest blows I have experienced (up there with the nazel) and packs a punch at 300bpm..... The helve spring arrangement means that you can feather the blows and the ram comes down progressively . A matchbox shutting mechanical hammer. clutch is motor with ruberised (some synthetic) wheel to flywheel and a brake, basically tire hammer tech in reverse. The machine is around a tonne , compact and sturdy. Anyhow I was impressed, I am thinking of getting one , the directly linear control would go down well with damascus students. here is a little vid to show the action.

That anvil is a beauty, set it on a stand and have at it.