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Chinobi

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Posts posted by Chinobi

  1. Thank you!

    lamentably my phone was out of memory during most of the recent work so I couldn't get any WIP photos ;_; but for the fuchi/guard I just used a piece of flat bar with a rounded edge to mimic the curve of the leather just beneath the choil and hammered over that to shape the sheet brass, lot of hammer-fit-file-bend-repeat to get it to fit correctly! For the kashira/pommel I built a stake(riveted together two pieces of flat bar I had on hand to build up the width then chopped off the corner and radiused everything on the 1x42) that roughly approximates the dimension of the tang plus the leather and used that to form the brass.  I knew trying to make a proper tight fitting joint between the two sides of the brass was going to be way too much work so I left the gap wide, which also allowed me to get some files and discs into it to clean it up, and then used a piece of flattened copper wire as a filler piece to close the gap.  Kind of a tip o the hat to Kintsugi by making the 'repair' a focal element, adds a little more interest to the piece than just a silver solder line that will eventually turn black.

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  2. Recently finished my latest project, 3 years in the making, mostly rusting in a box, but this blade is finally done! Forged the blade in late 2014 (October sounds right, predates this phone though!) at the last ABS hammer-in in Tulare under the tutelage of Jason Knight, David Mirabile, Bill Stuart, Ray Laconico, and Michael Vagnino at various times throughout the conference. Special thanks to David for recommending "The Art of Tsukamaki" by Thomas Buck, such an incredible resource for Japanese style handle wrapping techniques, and to Ray and Mike for some blade grinding pointers (sorry guys, quality is still not there, but is improving!).


    Enough flapping, specs!
    10" OAL, 5.25" blade
    Started out as 3/16 by 1-1/4 1080 carbon steel, forged to shape.
    Fuchi (collar at the top, where a guard would be) and Kashira (pommel/end cap) are brass sheet that were raised/shrunk/hammered to shape and soldered together. The Kashira had a flattened copper wire inserted into the seam to fill the gap that I filed in to allow me to clean up the joint without needlessly flexing and bending the part to get files and paper in the slot.
    The Omote (outside, as worn) side Menuki (ornament beneath wrapping) are the cartridge ends of a .50 caliber S&W 500 handgun I fired at my bachelors party, and two .308 Winchester rounds from my rifle. These were cut off their respective casings and soldered together.
    The Ura (inside, as worn) side Menuki is a cut off from a copper and brass Mokume Gane billet forged in a class taught by Jay Burnham-Kidwell at Adam's Forge LA (no relation), lightly forged to a sorta teardrop shape and rounded on the grinder.
    Wrapping material is gutted red paracord over black leather, nothing fancy there.

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    Finally got an edge on it just now, took it up to 600 grit on the wicked edge and then stropped on my green paddle, the edge looks terrible but it will draw blood as well as anything else. It shaves hair with minimal back and forth, makes spaghetti out of my grizzly catalog test paper, and pulls nice (my carving skills are the limiting factor) feathers out of mystery wood. It doesn't bite really deep in chopping because it's relatively light, but it's quite comfortable in hand and you can really flick it through the swing and get the work done without needing to swing super hard.

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    Definitely need to make a sheath for this so I can take it out for some field trials in something safer than a cardboard and duct tape taco!

    any thoughts, comments, suggestions and advice on things to improve or keep doing would be greatly appreciated, don't worry about delicate feelings either, I can't improve what I don't realize is bad.

  3. I'm reasonably certain that member projects is more applicable than the Mokume forum, if not, I'm sure you know where the move button is.

    I have admired the excellent lock work shared by Nick and others here and elsewhere so I jumped at the opportunity to get a copy of instructions and materials to make a Viking era padlock myself.  I decided to up the ante a little and make the materials a little more interesting though.

    The top and bottom plates are spare quarters mokume and the body is a sheet of copper with a design chased into it, subsequently filled with melted brass wire and melted silver solder in different places then ground smooth to give it a kind of faux-kume look because I didn't have the time to make a fresh billet that could be forged into sheet metal big enough to make the body.  The rods are 4 wires (2 copper and 2 brass) twisted together tightly, soldered solid into one bar, then forged cold to knock off the ridges and make it more of an actual circular cross section, the tops are 4mm sterling bezel cups set with lavender opals. The ward plate on the shackle is another chunk of spare mokume and the spring is nickel silver sheet metal flush riveted on with copper pins.  Both the shackle and key are forged silicon bronze.

    The lock is operated by inserting the key into the rectangular slot on the bottom, rotating it into position and sliding it up to compress the springs, which will allow the shackle to pop through the hole in the top plate.

    Thanks for looking!

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  4. Here's a pic of the schedule, my understanding is that the greyed out boxes correspond to when that demonstrator will be demonstrating.  There is a LOT of overlap, there is always a project going at the education barn, project continuation/open forge on the lower lawn, and usually 3 demonstrations happening at the same time.

    also some action shots of some of the demo's I caught in the afternoon; Jay Burnam-Kidwell using a hardie block and set hammer to forge out a tenon, and Tony Swatton showing a variety of sheet metal techniques on a scrap of aluminum.  Loads of fun and good times to be had if you can make it to the event :)

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  5. I don't think I have see a schedule for demonstrator events yet either, just the hands on and workshop stuff.  I will be heading over there shortly so I will try to remember to ask, if we are lucky they will have a paper schedule for attendees that I can snap a pic of and post.

     

    last call for the rest of you all to get your effects in order and get down to vista for the event!!

    hope to see some of you soon :)

  6. Put the money you would spend on a billet towards a Damascus making workshop IMO :) join ABS(sorry for the plug, but I've met a lot of great people through them, some tools, but many greats) and the Washington Blacksmith Association, they must have some kind of classes every once in a while.

  7. On March 9, 2017 at 10:31 AM, Anachronist58 said:

    Well, as fate would have it, the first day of the Spring Conference is the day Mrs Taylor is to have her knee replaced :wacko:. I was quite looking forward to the event, and also hoping to check out the tailgaters for a fly press. Please anyone attending, strike an anvil or two a few hundred times for me. :rolleyes:

    Robert Taylor

    Anvils shall be struck as directed, with ferocity :)

    good luck with the replacement, I hope there is little to no excitement involved, except that of successful completion!

  8. Rob Thomas and Chad Nichols are household names in the custom knife community for high quality Damascus purveyors for stock removal knifemakers.

    George Palagonia of American Metal Xchange sometimes has Damascus or Timascus/Mokuti available.

    Tru Grit Inc has a section for blade steel stock that includes a selection of Damascus products

    dont hold yourself back from buying pattern welded blade stock to start with, it's a little more expense up front and a little more heartache when something goes sideways but otherwise it's just steel.  Get the HT instructions from the supplier or tell your HT vendor what it's made of so they can do it right.

  9. Hey all!  Been fairly quiet lately but wanted to post a reminder for my California friends and neighbors that CBA Spring Conference is once again at hand, and will be in Vista (just north of San Diego) at the Antique Gas and Steam Engine Museum!  Check out the website for up to date details and registration infos.  Cheaper registration cutoff is presently April 10th, so strike while the iron is hot! (Shameless, I'm sorry >.>)

    http://calsmith.org/event-2418120

    Demonstrator list as of this posting:

    Daniel Miller
    Brett Moten
    Monica Coyne
    Tony Swatton
    Gary Brown
    Jay Burnham-Kidwell
    Helmut Hillenkamp

    There's a wide variety of projects slated for the education barn under the tutelage/lash of various guest instructors.  This is a coal forge zone, so read up a bit beforehand if you haven't had much time playing with them yet, they will show you how to do it but it makes it so much easier for you to learn if you do some homework beforehand!

    The food is great and plentiful, I suggest adding the meal plan (so much easier...).  The museum itself is really cool to check out too, they have hundreds of old steam powered machines on the grounds and a vintage lineshaft powering tools in the barn off a really old kerosene (if memory serves) engine (fingers crossed that it's still in working order! :-D ).  The power hammers are a lot of fun :)

     

    sound off if you will be attending!  I'll be flying an IFI T-shirt at least once, might figure out another insignia at some point, TBD.

    hope to see some of you there!

  10. I have had some difficulty reproducing this effect I got early on in my fiddling a with Mokume, but the sticks of twisted billet are all from copper and nickel coins. The knife clip on the left and the bar on the right are from the same billet of UK copper pence and 5(or 10 or 20, I forget) pence coins (not the more modern steel core ones) and the two in the center are straight up U.S. quarters.  The blackest one is from the quarters, and I'm pretty sure it was just from overheating the life out of it and really severely fire staining the nickel (which is like trying to excise the devil), then it got a soak in the pickle pot to clean up the copper a bit.  That particular bar is so overcooked you can see individual grains in the copper, giving it a really neat granulated appearance actually :) the picture makes it looks a bit more black than it is in person, more of a dark blue/grey really.  I'll try to remember to go fish it out and shoot a more representative picture later.

    Edited to add: you won't be able to just throw some titanium into a regular billet and cook as you normally would, the reactive metals need to be done in a controlled atmosphere because they (as the name suggests) start reacting with oxygen when they get hot and will not bond =\

     

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    Edited again with new pic:

    The three bars on the right are all from the same parent billet, with the blackened nickel one on the far right and you can kinda see the flecked texture in the copper even though the surface is quasi polished but totally flat.

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  11. I wouldn't expect hardening it would be necessary for a bolster, but you are correct that it can be work hardened. Hammer it down to a bit over your finished dimensions without annealing and then just sand/file/whatever to finished size.

  12. Thanks Buzzkill.  Gorō you would be amazed at the amount of stretch a good distal taper can generate. Forge a taper on the flat side down the length of your tang starting from roughly the choil/top of handle area and another from the same spot up to the tip of the blade.  Very economical use of material and will save you a lot of time on the grinder when you don't have to chew off and waste all that metal to get the balance right :) 

  13. Spark testing was about as sophisticated as we got.  The core was the 'student' bloom, which was primarily specular hematite. The skin layers were multiple folds of the bloom we ran under Owens guidance, which was a mix of the hematite and sidarite recovered from a nearby streambed, and the remains of a bloom that Owen had from a different smelt he attended in the states, which all I recall was being higher in phosphorus, so it reads as a lighter grey.  The edge metal is estimated to be 'medium carbon' :)

  14. Thank you, yes I had some difficulty figuring out the grind on that.  Very little practice hollow grinding, and that's the first recurve I've attempted.  I had access to a 10" contact wheel on a burr king in the class, at home I just have a partially exposed 2" wheel on the top of my grinder, so I couldn't continue to fiddle with it after the fact.  Which is probably for the better, as I would have chased that to destruction I'm sure!

  15. Update! Managed to attend the ore to knife class this past July and it was AWESOME!  Ran two smelts, forged two practice blades and a tanto from the bloomery material, gave it a walnut handle. Check it out!

    huge thank you to Owen for providing such an incredible opportunity!

    non-smithing related photos removed due to amount of bandwidth to show others your lunch

     

     

     

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  16. I'm not hugely experienced, but I did a couple of silicon bronze casts last year that I thought I executed reasonably well and I HD a similar pink coating on the end result.  My theory is that it's a layer of copper that has ended up on the surface, kind of like it was electroplated.  It oxidized and looked exactly like copper and was removed by gentle abrasion, which at the time was actually kind of disappointing because it looked really nice!

  17. Been dark for a while and I missed the forum :) have been busy in the meantime though!

    So this is the second full blade i have completed, figured id share it and see if i can get some constructive criticism. I will suspend 'if you dont have anything nice, dont say anything at all' for this purpose, im already pretty keenly aware of most of the flaws. I was more concerned with actually completing the project and the larger skill concepts, less so with spending hours and hours sanding.

    The blade was forged during a California Blacksmith Association anual class/event/sub-conference called Waynes World, which is a weekend bender of a class hosted by Wayne (surprise!) at his home shop near Riverside, this year the venerable Tony Swatton was our instructor, teaching us how to forge a wrap around tang handled knife and showed us some pretty neat techniques for wood handles. I have already made some in this pattern from mild steel, and half completed one in W1, so I as usual I wanted to do something over and above the minimum, hence the kukri. I also dont like to have a bunch of the same pattern or role of knives, so the kukri pattern was a first for me, and quite a challenge to forge!

    The starting stock was 6 inches of 1/4" by 2" new stock 5160 spring steel forged by hand to yeild a 6" blade and 10.5" overall length knife. Big shoutout to my friend Steevens for the Every Day Kukri (EDK) moniker, its big enough to handle most chopping tasks, but small enough to pack along easily. After I make a sheath for it, that is.

    Took me an hour to drill the holes in the tang, which I stupidly hardened as much as the blade. Heated the blade for HT in an electric kiln so the whole thing was up to temp and I didnt want to leave the tang out of the oil and have it smoking like the devil or possibly flare up on me so I just dunked the whole thing. Ended up submerging the blade in a bucket of water at home and torched the life out of the tang with my plumbers torch to draw the temper back as much as possible or kinda faux anneal it. Managed to punch the holes through after that with a regular bit, but my 1/4" will never be the same again, its *seen* things man! XD

    The handle scales are purple heart and the liners are a ruberized gasket material, the mosaic pins I bought from Tru-Grit at a knife show, lanyard tube is a simple brass tube.

    The bead is mostly the same construction, the endcaps are brass sheet metal with two sizes of brass tube that nest within each other with one soldered on to each plate. The center layer is brass and copper mokume, from a billet edge trimming I saved from a billet I forged in a class taught by Jay Burnham Kidwell a few years ago, had to forge it carefully on edge to spread the material wider to match the dimensions of the bead design and the wood. Went with blue paracord to tie the liners together between the handle and the bead.

    The mokume doesnt read well in the bead right now, its too freshly finished. I can't heat patina it without killing the epoxy or burning the liners or wood, and I don't have much for chemical patina except liver of sulphur, but I dont think I can safely apply that without fouling the rest up next to it. So I'm just going to let it ride naturally, which should show up fairly well by the end of the week.

    Sharpened freehand on a 220 belt on my 1x42 and stropped on my paddle, it slices magazine paper readily and chops efficiently.

    Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated, thank you :) and thanks for looking!

     

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