MattBower

You don't need the ash. Really. If you want to add insulating value, a little perlite or vermiculite from the garden store will do fine, and even that is optional. I am pretty sure Tim would tell you the same. (I only know Tim via the Net, but he got me started in smithing and he's a long-time visitor to a forum I help moderate.) If you are desperate to include wood ash, find someone with a wood stove or fireplace.

It will help, yes. It usually isn't a perfect solution. It is worthwhile if you will be soaking the blade at high temps for extended times, which is common in heat treating stainless and high alloy tool steels.

Great caution is definitely appropriate when cutting propane bottles, but this exaggerates the danger. I don't know where you get the idea that it is *impossible* to make them safe to cut. Expansion joints in your forge are probably a good idea, but I have not built one as you describe.

If a 200-400+ pound animal doing 15 or 20 mph hits you around the knees, you're going down. And once you're down on piggy's level you're in Very Big Trouble. 70-80 lb. dogs kill people sometimes. A boar several times that size can certainly manage it without too much trouble.

Huntsman succeeded, to be sure, but I wonder how long it took him to get decent control over the end product.

Well, they were making swords long before Y1K. :)

I make charcoal in a 55 gallon steel drum with a few holes poked in the sides at the bottom of the drum. (Again, though, the holes aren't in the bottom of the drum -- they're in the sides of the drum at the bottom.) I use scrap pallets as feedstock, cut up so that they'll pack nicely. Fill the drum with wood (with a little room for air and heat to circulate among the pieces), light a fire on top of the wood, let it burn down toward the bottom of the drum, and add more wood as the contents settle. When the air holes at the bottom of the drum start to glow orange -- meaning the fire has gotten near the bottom of the drum -- top off the drum with fresh wood, put the lid on, weigh it down with a couple firebricks, and plug the air holes with mud/clay. Wait 24 hours or so. Remove charcoal. Some experimentation is required. Note: when I say "a few holes" around the bottom of the drum, I mean a few decent sized holes -- 1" or so in diameter. They have to admit enough air to feed a decent sized fire.

Maybe it's just me, but after I forge weld I always have to do a lot of clean-up to get the steel looking good. It would be difficult to finish both the blade and the guard if the guard were permanently attached to the blade. I also don't see the practical advantage of having blade and guard a single piece.

I exchanged a couple PMs with Dave, but for the benefit of others who may not be familiar with them, I'll expand a little on my earlier comment about frame handles. A frame handle give the appearance of a full tang with pinned-on scales, but allows you to use the same style guard you'd use on a through tang design. Here's a series of photos that show how it's done. http://www.customknifecollectorsassociation.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=1102 You could of course make the tang considerably beefier than the one shown in those photos.

We know where Lituania is. Well, many of us do, anyway. I'm related to some Lithuanians by marriage. I suggest that you convert your wood to charcoal first, and use a proven bloomery design. (There are several on the Rockbridge Bloomery site that I linked to.) The time to start experimenting with unusual methods and untested designs is not when you are an absolute beginner. And find yourself some friends who share your interest in iron smelting, even if they do not have any experience. Running even a small iron smelt is not usually considered a job for one man.

Here's something that would've been used in at least part of Europe about the time you're interested in: http://warehamforgeblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/viking-age-blacksmiths-bellows.html

The charcoal at the bottom of the fire pit will tend to burn up if it's exposed to oxygen, but if it's covered by a layer of ash that can cut off the O2 and preserve some of it. One way to make your campfires much more productive, charcoal-wise, is to get a good bed of coals, then smother it with water or dirt. Of course then you need to dry and/or clean your charcoal. I tried this method when I started out. Didn't like it much. It was a lot of extra hassle. Dry charcoal lights pretty easily. A few sheets of newspaper and a charcoal starter chimney, like they sell for charcoal grills, is a great solution. Of course you can make your own chimney out of a couple metal coffee cans (if anyone is still packing coffee in metal cans).

Depends how thick you want the case to be. The modern products like Cherry Red and Kasenit have catalysts to make the carbon migration happen faster, so you can get a very thin skin -- we're talking thousandths of an inch, here -- quite quickly. But that thin skin isn't good for much besides abrasion resistance, which I doubt is a major concern in your application. If you want to make the entire wrench stronger, you'll need much deeper carbon penetration, and that'll require pack carburizing at high heat for a good while. It's much simpler to just use the proper steel from the get-go. I wouldn't bother with hooves, leather or the like for pack carburizing. Finely ground charcoal is a purer source of carbon. When I've done it, I've used charcoal, with a little washing soda (sodium carbonate) to hopefully speed up carbon penetration. The commercial pack carburizing compounds commonly use a mix of "energizers"/catalysts including washing soda, and much larger proportions of some other, more exotic compounds like barium carbonate, which aren't as easy to get ahold of (and probably aren't as safe to use or dispose of) as sodium carbonate.

Well, that's one way to make charcoal. Probably the simplest if you don't mind the smoke, the extra heat, the extra work of tending a second fire, etc. Charcoal breaks up pretty easily (and tends to fall apart on its own as it burns, thus the bed of coals at the bottom of a good campfire), so I wouldn't worry about making the wood chunks too small ahead of time. Of course smaller cross-sections burn/char faster, and you need to be able to char wood fast enough to keep your forge supplied with fresh charcoal. Charcoal burns pretty fast. But I'm afraid I can't offer you a good rule of thumb on starting size. Thomas probably can. By the same token, if the wood is dry enough to burn, that's all you absolutely need. But the wetter it is the more time and heat you'll have to waste getting it ready to go into the forge. So well seasoned wood would certainly be more efficient. The pine pitch will burn off during the charring process, so it shouldn't pose any problem in the forge (although the smoke from your feeder fire might be a different matter). Pine does tend to be less dense than hardwood, so it'll provide fewer BTUs per unit of volume of charcoal, compared to oak. But it'll work. I believe the Japanese traditionally use pine charcoal for swordsmithing.

Whew. Does your brother clank when he walks?

True enough -- but at least on a horse you can run away good 'n' fast. KNIGHTS: Aaaaugh! Aaaugh! etc. KNIGHTS: Run away! Run away! TIM: Haw haw haw. Haw haw haw. Haw haw. ARTHUR: Right. How many did we lose? KNIGHT: Gawain. KNIGHT: Hector. ARTHUR: And Boris. That's five. GALAHAD: Three, sir. ARTHUR: Three. Three.

Yeah. That. As far as I know (and I don't know everything, certainly), hog hunts with blades always involve dogs (or maybe horses).

Thomas, I figured wood might work as fuel with a taller stack, so the wood was completely converted to charcoal well before it got down to the reduction zone. The top of the stack would be cooler, but that's why you'd make it taller. I dunno. Seemed like it might be possible. It doesn't sound very appealing, though.

Making your own steel -- even starting with scrap steel -- is far more expensive than buying it. Unless you want to make something exotic like wootz that can't be bought on the market, or you want the satisfaction of making a work of true sole authorship, I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree.

You're right that he does talk about forging some of those alloys, I didn't read far enough. Pehaps it does have some kind of benefit, even in wrought iron or steel -- but my guess is that there's a reason you don't see gold-iron alloys used for their mechanical properties in modern metallurgy. If gold does impart an improvement in one or more properties, I suspect they've found much cheaper ways to achieve the effect.

Yes, there's lots of information out there on this, although I have never seen anyone use wood as the fuel; only charcoal. The term you are looking for is "bloomery." That is the word you want to be googling -- not "furnace." Check out the Bloomers & Buttons forum at Don Fogg's website. http://forums.dfoggknives.com/index.php?showforum=25 Also check out the Rockbridge Bloomery website by Lee Sauder and Skip Williams.http://iron.wlu.edu/ There's also the Wareham Forge website: http://www.warehamforge.ca/ironsmelting/smeltlinks.html I know he smelts iron; I don't know how much how-to content he actually has on the web. And there's a Yahoo group called the Early Iron Group, where a number of very experienced (and not so experienced) smelters get together to compare notes and trade ideas. Using wood as fuel -- as opposed to charcoal -- will probably require a bloomery of different dimensions. How much different? Your guess is as good as mine. As I said, all the iron smelters I'm familiar with use charcoal. (Many of them make it themselves. From wood. Hint, hint.)

The slickest way, IMHO, is a frame handle. :)

Some folks say Plistix 900F does the same thing as ITC-100 for much less. I have no personal knowledge of it. Wayne Coe sells it. Google him.

Please don't take this as an insult, but your writing is hard to understand. That's part of the problem here. I am a little late to this thread, but please clarify. Do you want to: (1) FORGE metal. Forge means, roughly speaking, to shape metal by hammering and bending in its solid state, frequently with the use of heat to make it softer and more plastic. The structure in which metal is heated for forging is also called a forge.. (2) MELT metal into a liquid state for casting into finished objects. (3) SMELT iron ore. Smelting means heating an ore (such as iron ore) in the correct environment in order to separate out its metallic component. So which one is it that you want to do? Forging requires a forge. Melting requires a casting furnace. Smelting requires some variant of a structure called a bloomery.* And once you've answered the first question, the next question is "how much?" In other words, what sizes of steel do you want to forge, or how much (and what kind of) metal do you want to be able to melt in one go. Finally, as others have said, although wood can be used as fuel for forging, certainly, and probably for smelting iron and casting many types of metal, it works better in many respects if it is first reduced to charcoal. *Some forges can do double duty as casting furnaces, and some casting furnaces can do double duty as makeshift forges. A bloomery isn't likely to work well for any other purpose than the one for which it was designed.

If you go to the TOC for the book, it's clear that he's talking about cast iron, which is a very different material from steel. Even so, I'm very suspicious of that info.