MattBower

That is very cool. I know a guy who's made some that way. It's a lot of work.

Looks good to me! Glad to help.

You're right, Thomas, burning out the pith with a piece of hot wire was the traditional method. Frankly, period hawks were much smaller and in many cases much cruder than most of the hawks you see today. Many of them didn't even use the friction fit, tapered eye that's pretty much a defining characteristic of hawks today. Some of the heads were just glued on. American Indian Tomahawks by Peterson is very enlightening. I second the nomination for Dunlap Woodcrafts, unless you really want to drill the handles yourself. Dunlap is only about five miles from where I sit as I type this. It's great fun to walk in and pick through box after box of handles. Nice guy. Lots of beautiful wood.

Well, it may be too late now, but some guys like to use a sort of drip pan to catch the flux when they're welding, so the floor stays nice and clean.

P.S.: Sounds like a neat lathe! Enjoy!

I don't have an answer for you, but I will repeat (yet again) the oft-repeated refrain heard 'round these parts: tell us where you are! A recommendation for a foundry that's 3,000 miles from you probably isn't going to do you much good.

I am far from any sort of expert on this topic, but it seems to me that this question is incomplete: "But I think the real question is, that if 2 specialists dueled, unarmored, with equal skill in their respective weapons, which would be better." I think there must be at least one more variable, and that's what rules are in play. The rules of combat -- to my understanding, individual combat with swords was often pretty highly formalized, and not just in Japanese culture -- have a lot to do with the form of the weapon. Of course if you pick one set of rules and impose it on a man from a different culture, employing a weapon not developed for those rules, he's liable to be at a disadvantage. So I really wonder if this isn't such an apples-to-orange comparison that there's no meaningful answer. European and Japanese weapons evolved within the contexts of the societies that created them, and the styles of combat that those societies practiced (including factors such as use and construction of armor), and I imagine they were all very well adapted for those particular conditions. I doubt any of them would necessarily fare well if picked up and dropped into another society with a different set of rules and other external variables -- even in the hands of a highly skilled master of that particular weapon. (To the extent that we want to ignore variables like armor, we're ignoring one of the factors that dictated the design of the weapon in the first place. So I'm not sure that gives us a fair comparison of the two weapons, or of the styles of combat that helped dictate their forms.) So whose dad can beat up whose dad? I think it may depend whether it's a street fight, modern boxing, Marquis of Queensbury rules, Greco-Roman wrestling, or something else entirely.

That's cool. A rolling mill is on the list of tools I'd love to have, but probably never will. <_<

Did you do the carving?

I am not a guru by any means, but I'm pretty sure #8 only works with two bars of opposite twist. At first glance it seems like bending a twisted bar back on itself (or cutting it in half and doing the same) should work, but if you really think about it, it won't. Some of the swordsmiths who like to do Norse stuff might chime in on that.

I don't know if I'm allergic to nickel, but I guess we'll find out. :) Probably not. My wife is allergic to practically everything, it seems, but I lean toward the opposite end of the spectrum -- so far, anyway.

Good luck with it. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. I will warn you that you can spend an awful lot of time doing oil burner R&D that could've been spent smithing. :) I hope it works well for you.

What sort of polish does Monel take?

Sorry if I'm thread hijacking, but I have a roughly 1" round x 5"-6" long piece of what I was told is Monel, which was given to me by my father-in-law. He said his father used to make rings out of it. It's probably 70 years old, and it has a black coating that resembles scale. First, does this sound like Monel? Does it oxidize black over time, or with heat? Second, I'm not sure what to do with it. I was thinking of making knife hardware with it, something like that, although it seems like rather expensive material to make hardware from. Anyone have any suggestions? I've never worked with the stuff.

The smaller the grain size, the lower the hardenability of the steel. If it's done correctly, normalizing can lower grain size. (There is some finite limit on how far you can go with this.) I know bladesmiths -- who I trust to know what they're doing -- who have normalized a particular blade so many times that it wouldn't harden properly, presumably because the grain had gotten too fine. They were able to fix the problem by deliberately growing the grain a little.

I recommend finding some reasonably local smiths and talking to them about what's available in your area. There's coal in Utah, but I don't know the quality, or how easy it is to get. A good quality bituminous coal is what you want, ideally, but I've forged just fine with some pretty bad coal.

Where do you live, and how much does coal cost there? Coal forges are much simpler and cheaper to build than gas forges, but that doesn't do you much good if you can't get coal at a reasonable price. A 5-burner is much more than you need for knives. Most bladesmiths I know do just fine with one or two burners. And I'm not a swordsmith, but I suspect some of them are going to say that a 5-burner is more than you need for that, too. There's only a certain length of blade that you can forge in one heat. Something that size might be useful for heat treating or a few other occasional tasks, but right now there are probably better uses of your money. And anyway, you should probably spend time on knives for a while before trying to progress to swords. By the time you're ready, you'll probably have a better feeling for what you may need. If you tell us where you are, you may discover that there's an old hand nearby who can shorten your learning curve a great deal. Welcome to IFI!

The burner I built was Colin's (I bought his book), which is essentially a slighly more complex version of the "Brute" burner that Lionel Oliver has on his page. I have not tried an atomizer burner like he's thinking of building. I have watched lots of folks at BYMC/Alloy Ave. try them. They can work well -- obivously it' s a proven technology, since it's what most commercial oil burners seem to use -- but the only ones I've seen that seemed like they might burn well without a blower were the siphon designs. I'm a little skeptical that a pressurized oil system is going to work in a naturally aspirated burner design (like a Reil burner, but using oil instead of propane). I don't know for sure, though, which is why I didn't try to talk him out of it. :)

I'm not at all sure that's going to work without some extra air from a blower, but good luck with it.

That's a nice piece, Sam. I'm not sure what you mean by "sourced" (in quotes, no less) in this context, but it's a nice piece.

As someone else pointed out in another thread, I probably shouldn't say it's all here. There's a tremendous amount of information here. However, it does tend to be a little scattered. You might learn faster if you picked up a book or two that present the basics in an organized, comprehensive fashion. One of my favorites is The Complete Modern Blacksmith, by Alexander Weygers. Weygers assumes his readers really don't know anything, and also that they don't want to spend a lot of money to get started. That makes it a wonderful book for beginners, in my view.

I notice that you have posted these "the basics" posts in something like a half-dozen (OK, maybe not a half-dozen, but at least three) different forums here. There's nothing wrong with asking questions; that's what this website is about. But your approach seems to be to sit back and expect everyone to spoon feed you, without having to do any work on your end. That's . . . a little misguided. John's advice is very good. Start reading up on topics that you want to learn about. It's all here already. There's a search function, and the sticky posts at the top of each forum are a good place to start. Once you have specific questions about things you don't understand, by all means ask. But you have to be willing to pull at least a little bit of your own weight. People will be more willing to help you if they see that you're making a good faith, active effort to go out and find what you want to know.

Yeah, those are designed for furnace oil burners. If you got a used burner, you would find one of those on it. There are two main ways to atomise oil for burners. Pressurize the oil and force it through a tiny nozzle, oe pressurize air and use that to draw oil through a tiny nozzle by the venturi effect.

Thomas, the one good thing I can say about Alex is that he had great taste in music. :)

Aww, c'mon, Thomas. It doesn't necessarily have to take years to do a simple PW piece, particularly if he gets some help! :rolleyes: