Steve Sells

More of us from Indiana joining I see, Welcome to IFI.

Welcome to I Forge Iron, there is a lot to see and do here, have a look around and I Hope to see ya in the chat room sometime.

the trouble with the 5 min epoxy's are they have a usable life of 5 years or so, then they start to let go. nothing worse than have most your blade return tor repairs 5 years after the sale.

A day in the life of a bladesmith:

I spent a while in the forge, and welded up 200 layers of nickel and wrought iron for a pattern welded sword guard. I have a nice, tight, 5.5 x 1.5 x 0.75 billet, Wonderful even welds. I use the bandsaw to make the cuts to give me the start of the "TEE" shape for the desired form, allowing a section to "crawl" from the cross piece down the center line of the leaf blade.

Placed in the forge, it gets nice and hot in a reasonable amount of time, I take it to the anvil to finish shaping, and using a 2 pound hammer it breaks off at the cut, looks like I found a stress fracture...

Maybe Mono steel furniture for this would be better?

Rthibeau makes wonderful hammers, try him here at this forum or in the chat evenings.

I make the beginners use the Old cracked anvil, till I See they have control before EVER hitting anything on my good ones. Normaly I use that for hardie tools.

Welcome to I Forge Iron, We do have a knife chat on Friday nights 10pm to 11 pm Eastern time. Quite a few of us bladesmiths here, you may see some makers you know.

Welcome to I Forge Iron.

may your family find peace, now you are at the end of this ordeal.

"A" series is hard to heat treat and "S" series is just as hard to work, both types can fall apart at those RPM's if the metal isn't done correctly. You can have catastrophic failure, resulting in a very big mess. at least.:o

Granted, water will cause cracking (or worse) to 5160 spring steel 90% of the time, so that was a bad initial suggestion on my part. My point was to Quench it rapidly (Normalize) as opposed to slow-cooling it in vermiculite. Then, you could re-heat/anneal and continue processing.

IF it IS 5160 (or some similar grade of spring-steel from an old truck spring,) it should be forged, then Normalized (heated to Critical-Temperature then cooled in still air or oil-quenchant,) followed by annealing, grinding, hardening, tempering and final-grinding.

I have no clue what derek is talking about Water will make 5160 explode in most cases.

when you hammer the steel to get it straight, it natural gets stress in the steel from the hammering, cycle the blade to relax this, and to "reset" the steel this process is called normalizing. After you heat, air cool, and heat heat again, it will remain straight . you may have to straighten a few minor times but after a few cycles it should be better

but ya gotta know that Jerry is a member of the >5000F club

I agree that was a most cowardly way to announce a termination. Knee mail sent.

the official IFI knife chat is Friday evening, 10:00 pm Eastern time. at present it is in Blue Print form, just the Tuesday, except we show one set of BP's then the remaining hour is question and answer abiot all things involving blades, not only the BP shown.

buit as always feel free to post question in the forum OR join IFI's regular chat room, open 24/7,and the link is in the upper right corner of the forum pages.

what is really odd about this is not the size, but the fact he used Walnut !

Looks great Rich, and as always you set High standards for the rest of us. :)

As for the TOPIC of this thread, I am in Ft Wayne Indiana, but I have no clue how far the person asking for help is away from me. If he cant tell us where he is, Why should I make an offer that may entail me driving 6 hours ?

As for the other part..
Most eveyone here knows the mods are here to fill in for Glenn, if they are a problem, tell Glenn, he will sort it out. Maybe we should remember that Glenn has final say to everything here. not a Mod.

At the same time the mod was letting him know if he states location he may get offers of help. WHY does the person pointing that out have to have a full name and location what did that have to so with the comment? It DID get away totally from the topic, I believe that called thread hijacking. why attack the mods in the first place?

The first we know as Anhydrous Borax.

The second one, we get when we buy 20 Mule team. notice the 10 units of water, this is why some cook 20 mule team to get anhydrous, to remove the water

you are not alone, Neither is Jesus.

we had a LONG talk in the chat about this individual. When not preaching his insane drivel, he is attacking almost every other maker of blades he comes accross. He has NO clue about safety or heat treating, he admits he don't need it. Read it for fun and entertainment, but remember to check Qualified sources, before you believe anything he says.:cool: IF you want more entertainment, look at Anvilfire forum, in the Guru chat section, he started his attack there in his post on Dec 02, 2008

pour in place ?

starting out you will ruin a few, so junkyard does keep the cost down during your learning curve, but junkyard is a crap shoot as to what you get, even when we think an item is one kind of a steel, we are often surprised.

As for blade size, as large as you can hold, as I only hammer a small section at a time. Its the heat treating after ward that needs a larger heat source. I have been able to harden up to18 inch blades in a fire pot before I have to use the 36 inch long gasser.

Since no one mentioned this... Do NOT try for too high of a layer count as the nickel will defuse into the steel at high ( 600 or more ) layers in the typical thickness of a knife blade.

not at all. the mild is harder to weld, and needs more heat, basically after you understand mild, the Higher carbon will seem easy I start my apprentices on mild. its a good way to begin.