knives85

In my experience, when punching out the slug, the material must be at a red heat. In this operation you are actually shearing the steel slug, and need the material to be cool enough to resist deformation and shear cleanly.

from what i understand the early irons where done the old fashion elbow grease way with hammer and file, while the post industrial revolution ones where drop forgings. I personaly feel that the thicker a blade the better. the japanese use planes that are equiped with a quarter inch thick plus blade that is extremely hard, and a wooden body of secondary importance, very different from western style planes.

exellent work! it looks very impresive, and its exactly what you wanted.

Rich, there are many steels that Increase in hardness when tempered. some soley because of the transformation of retained austenite and others with carbide forming aloys, like cromium, vanadium, molybdenum, and tungsten, that yeild more carbides at higher temps. for instance M50 was developed as an aerospace/ballbearing steel that starts secondarily hardening at aprox 500 and reaches its peak 64 RC hardness at 985 degrease.

I Know several Knife makers that use a 4x4"by something piece of rectangular tool steel as an anvil, and not because there cheep. most bladesmiths I know can only forge a few inches at a time and therefore need only a small true flat and a clean sholder to forge in the ricosso sholder. The real trick is to keep that anvil from bouncing around, and thats easily done with a big wooden stump and some railroad spikes to cleat the anvil down.

Salutations to all. i have come to this site for many reasons ,but the most pressing is my curent endevor to master the box joint. I have read a post from here on the topic ,but its usefull links are down. I have personaly forged two "succesful" pairs of pliers, but they are sloppy in the joint and i cannot gurantee succes in a third, or, at this point, fiftenth atempt. What i realy need is a pictoral tutorial and measurements of the parent stock and the subsequent steps. Can anyone show me the proper way to do this? with gratitude, david