RainsFire

it'll turn me into a flaming redhead?
lol..
good idea, some speakers have fairly strong magnets in them also.. good find.

What do you guy's listen to when your tinkering around the shop?

I personally listen to music I don't really get way into, so I can focus on what I'm doing.. but it is pretty nice to have some good background sound..

umm, bluegrass is cool, radio.., alt rock, german rock college stations play some wicked stuff..

beautiful, I was hammering away newyears also.. didn't get my project finished saddly.
beautiful blade, do I see a faint temperline towards the tip in the second pic?

ask hofi, its his design..
I was looking at it to, and in all but the handle shape and im sure quality it is Identical. I wonder if it really has anything to do with the czech..

check it out..


Czech hammer

Its clean and uniform, not to mention easy.. compared to tig or arc welding it is a really basic and simple proccess.. no clean up (necessary) and strong uniform welds.
good stuffs, wish I had one..

I was cruising youtube, and saw quite a few video's where a person would insert an item, which would be brought to yellow heat in a few seconds.. Is there a down side to using something like this for blacksmithing purposes? would the enviorment be oxidizing? carburizing? are there any dangers surrounding it, and how hard would it be to craft up a small one? I dont really understand it fully, but it sounds like they are just running a current through copper tubing, which creates a magnetic feild thus heating the metal somehow..

so ya, any possibilities?

its not newyears here yet
or at least I dont think so, I loose track of time sometimes..
I plan to be hitting iron when the year turns over.. midnight tonight.

I've seen this happen in my first propane forge design before the refractory gets up to heat, the jet will heat up the bar, with the acception of directly under neath it..
I always just assumed that this was because the fast speed of some of the gas was cooling it, but this makes more sense.
weird stuff..

what color would 900' be? black?
that is interesting..

wow, that looks great!
if you dont mind me asking, where did you purchase your stones?
great work on the polish too, cant wait to see it finished again!

cool, what should I sand it to first? is 400 grit enough?

Ya, I know.. no such thing as perfect blade, I just said that to get a few more people checking out this thread and posting their info concerning my q's..

Any way, what do you guy's think goes into play for a cutting blade? I want to make one, but am having a tough time designing it. I want it fairly light, (cutting with a heavy machette is not what im going for here) with a resiliant spine, and a hard cutting edge. I cant get around thinking of a katana, but I think the Japanese were held back slightly by their culture+ beliefs surrounding the blade, and could have improved it if pushed to it.. (not saying it isn't a magnificent creation)

but ya, what are you guy's opinion on length, balance, geometry, grind (flat, beveled double edged..) thickness, steel, tempering proccess ect..

I have a good amount of 5160 bar stock, which I plan on using if possible..
yep, thanks guys!

cool, thats basically a blueprint right there!
definatly beats a spring fuller. looks sturdy as heck too.

cool, were kind of in the sticks too.. corvallis/Philomath oregon..
nice meetin ya!

Hello!

where abouts oregon are you from?

finally I can post a thread saying I've had my first bit of success at achieving a hamon/temper line..

thanks to a certain Iforgeiron member (Sandpile) and his generosity, I had some good 1084 steel to experiment with. around my 5th try and 3rd knife attempt (about 3-4 tries each knife) my fathers farrier friend came over and we talked about heats of steel.. He casually mentioned that he doesn't see cherry red, and neither do I!!

that got me to thinking, I might just be heating the blade to to cool because "cherry red" looks almost candy corn oarnge to me... so after hearing oarnge is to hot to heat a blade, I always avoided going that hot.. I had been bringing it just up to past magnetic.. but aparently I was moving to slow to the quench tank after coming from the magnet.. so ya, I compensated and got my first success on a cool little shipwright knife I'm making for another of our friends..

I'll post some pictures once I find some finer grit sand paper, and figure out how to capture such a faint little detail on film..

thanks to ya'll for your help!

same happens to me for beeswax.. I actually like it though so no biggy..

very cool, Those would be great for school shops where ignorant children strip out the set screws or steal the whole thing.
very nice!

yes well, theres the dillema.. even your design will have a hot spot near the rear of the furnace.. that fire brick will absorb alot of the heat, and the entry (front) will be a considerable ammount cooler. really, you need more than one burner to disperse the heat more evenly. As you've said, you do not want to heat with the flame, but it is nearly un-avoidable with this sort of system. If you had a seperate air heating furnace that circulated the heat through the box at high temps, thats different.. but highly un-efficient, and you could just as easily be using salts..

seriously check out Don foggs.. I'll root around for the picture.

Whats the danger behind polishing? I find that there is never a reason to go directly against an edge, which is ultimately the only thing that can catch on a blade and send it into your boot or through your hand. If you are always polishing with the bevel or any abrupt edge facing away from the wheel, what can go wrong?

I need to get a good polishing setup.. doing it by hand is...enlightening and all, but a quick buff for a christmass blade would be nice.

what for? kaolwool has always worked wonders, and most of my gass furnaces are lined in it.
cut it extra long, and pack it in tight.. If you plan on using it in a welding furnace, coat it in a masonary refractory to avoid melting it from the flux and molten steel.

merry christmas!

exactly what I was thinking^^

I have a feeling he would just lay the kaowool in place to be held down by the refractory(which you might want to do without if possible). Refractories are usually more just as a protection from flux, and I have found kaolwool to distribute and achieve heat faster than firebrick and satanite refractory.

cool stuff man.
you might also want multiple burners too..I dont know how you would engineer that, but ya.. more heat disperesed.

cool, guess someone else was thinking along the same lines.
yep, for material removal I just used whatever I had on hand.. we are also into working with ceramic clay's so we have all those tools, including an elongated razorblade type thing I used for acchieving flat "grinds"
I have a picture of the little pattern'd clay blade I made that I'll post up if I ever find the sneaky cord..

I just realized you can do exact calculations for making a blade down to the very fraction of an inch for calculating waste, expansion, end deminsions of said blade style per ammount of clay.. ect. and ya I've been messing with it for a while longer.

It'd be cool to be able to show somone a baked finished billet of said pattern so they could see either for reference or some other purpose how the blade would look when completed.

you could set up several example peices with different patterns purely for your own reference as well.
the possibilities are really fairly endless.
cool stuff..
-Merry christmas eve yall!

like what?

heh fellas, I was just looking through the new blueprints and noticed the clay one..and remembered something my mother does for fun. Using polymer clay she would make "mosaic" patterns, following me? There are dozens of tutorials and sites with step by step instructions on how to get these delicate patterns, and the clay because it is wax or poloymer based never dries up.
last night I was experimenting with two different shades of grey (alloy's of steel) and got a nice latter pattern, and experimented with some various other basic patterns.

what I'm getting at is this is a great way to model damascus steels without filling up a scrap bin.. to the point of if you end up with a crappy pattern, you can knead it together until it becomes "homogenous" (all the same color) and use it with another different shade.

so ya, good times.. have fun, and maybe someone wants to make this a blueprint some time.