jwillhite

now the bad,.. you over heated it.

Pretty knew to this, I understand you can "burn" steel by getting it too hot wasn't aware it was possible to cause cracking that way though. I've been getting it between glowing red and yellow hot... guess it should be more red then yellow?

Thanks!

Forged from a section of RR spike, everything seemed to be going great until I was adjusting the angle on the tang and a crack appeared. I'm assuming I let it cool too much.

that is pretty good. if you like it stick with it and you could learn alot

Practice makes perfect right, I imagine I'll maintain interest. Wanted to try it out at first due to the high cost of good woodworking tools... now it seems like it may be pretty enjoyable all by itself.

jwillhite, carbon content does *not* affect how sharp you can get it---A.G.Russell once flattened and sharpened an aluminum beer can till he could shave with it!

What the carbon content affects is how *long* that edge will hold with higher carbon increasing wear life.

Ha shaving with aluminum doesn't sound like it would be fun for very long... I should have been more explicit, after using the adze to carve out wood(soft) for ~30min. I wasn't able to see much change in how sharp the edge was. This surprised me since RR spikes aren't supposed to be very hardenable.

As you get more experience you could always go back and forge weld on a higher carbon pad to make the edge---forge it onto the backside so that the edge will always be the higher carbon stuff till you sharpen it totally away---then repeat.

Yepp this is my plan, need to build a better forge first, don't think I can get a high enough temperature with my current setup(see picture below). Maybe if I try MAP gas or something else it would be possible.

Made it from a railroad spike marked "HC". After reading about how the carbon content on spikes is so low I'm really surprised and happy with how sharp the edge is. Making it I figured it would just be a practice piece.

Curious if anyone would have suggestions/analysis regarding the cracking around the hole... not sure if this is due to pounding on it after it was too cool to work, or maybe I got it too hot? Also is there a sure fire way to center the punch up when starting a thru hole? I guess I should have marked it somehow when it was cool..

Looking through the posts here inspired me to actually try and pound on some metal so thanks!