MattBower

I'm pretty confident it'll work fine. If anything it may be faster than 4140 requires. However, I have no experience using soybean oil as a quenchant for anything.

Zigmund, when you refer to Damascus steel, do you mean pattern welded steel, or bulat? Welcome to the forum!

Bealer gives a descripton of forging an adze in The Art of Blacksmithing, as I recall. I've never made one.

Very nice, John.

Were those local swordmakers the Stagmers?

Thanks, Frank. That was very informative.

I found the details a little hard to make out on the first two, but the other two are clear as day. Wow. I'm impressed. That's beautiful stuff. I like the pic in her bio, too.

You're on the right track, but a bench grinder is not the thing for what you want to do. Familiarize yourself with draw-filing and sanding blocks. And get used to your back and shoulders being sore. (At least sanding always makes my back and shoulders sore.) A belt grinder is the professional way to do a great deal of the work you're talking about. I know of a few people who can make as-forged blades that, in my opinion, look great (although it's a different look from what most of us are used to). I am not one of those people.

Indeed. But the biggest problem of all is that they didn't know what they were doing. No one had told them to preheat the ingot mold to drive off moisture, and even the supervisor who came in at the end didn't seem to grasp the problem (although, in his defense, he hadn't had a lot of time to think about it). That's why I've posted this video several times. I think it drives home some important points. Now imagine if that were 20 pounds of bronze or cast iron instead of a pound (or whatever) of aluminum.

I've had it happen. The ash dump seems to serve as a pressure relief valve. But yeah, it gets your attention. :)

To follow up on what Phil said: (1) No need to anneal before forging. Just heat the steel to a forging temp and go to it. (2) I don't know of any advantage to annealing after forging unless you're going to do a lot of stock removal. Even then, I do quite a bit of file work on normalized steel and it generally works fine. (This will not necessarily work with deep-hardening steels, which may harden during air cooling. Even steels like O1 can do this in thin sections.) Normalized high carbon steel isn't as soft as spheroidized annealed stuff straight from the mill. But there are some potential disadvantages to annealing with some steels. I'd rather avoid those. (3) For purposes of what you're doing, normalizing means heating above critical and allowing to air cool well into the black. (It doesn't have to cool to room temperature.) One good approach is to normalize two or three times, starting at a temp a couple or three hundred degrees above non-magnetic and ending just above non-magnetic. The hotter cycle is intended to help equalize the grain size, and the subsequent cycle(s) to reduce the grain. Each normalizing step only takes me a few minutes. Slow cooling in the forge is unnecessary and is likely to have some undesirable effects.

It might help if you're more specific about what kind of sword you're asking about. Geographic region? Time period? Style?

Interesting discussion here. I'm learning a lot. I did not realize that propane is temperature-compensated when it's sold by volume in this country. I'm glad to know that. However, outside Hawaii, retail gasoline and diesel are not temperature compensated in this country. (I didn't know that, either, until I looked it up just now.)

That's cool, but I would have guessed that the Afghans already had some pretty skilled blacksmiths.

I would have guessed from the texture that they were sand castings, but I defer to you guys on this.

Are you certain they're cast steel, not cast iron?

Yeah, I suspect if the "nozzle" tube gets too long the air over the siphon tube backs up and slows way down. That'd kill the siphon effect. Any idea what volume of water you're moving with that thing per minute (or hour, or whatever)?

No, in many cases I don't think it is. That's my point, really: in many cases simple methods can produce perfectly functional tools in that context, especially when you err in the direction of toughness rather than hardness. A somewhat softer than ideal tool is going to be pretty tough (in the sense that it'll tend to bend rather than break), so it can usually be re-dressed and/or rehardened when needed. A tool that's too hard may break. So if you oil quench 1045 and end up with a tool that's far from fully hardened, then give it an imperfect temper, it's probably no big deal. It's still going to be a good bit harder than hot 1018, and it's not likely to fail in a way that can't be fixed fairly easily.

Oh, and to second Phil's question, is that just a regular tee fitting?

I'm sorry I missed this post before. Very cool idea. It has other potential applications, too! And by the way, that vise in the foreground is the most massive I have ever seen. Awesome! I don't know what I'd do with a vise that size, but I want one! :)

I personally have a theory that some blacksmith heat treats may work OK because they're not achieving full hardness to start with, and/or because they're using inherently tough steels that won't get terribly hard in the first place. 1045 isn't going to harden much in most oils, for example, and even at full hardness it'll still be pretty tough, especially in thicker sections. But it's just a theory. I don't mean to offend anyone. If your heat treat gives you the results you want, that's ultimately all that counts.

It's pretty common to use a cast iron muffin tin as an ingot mold. If you know anyone who can weld, you can also make ingot molds from pieces of channel or angle iron.

If you want to know what really good grain looks like: go buy yourself a good Nicholson or Simonds file -- or better yet, take an old, dull one that is destined to be a knife blade -- but one that HAS NOT BEEN HEATED ABOVE CRITICAL since it left the factory. Lock it in the vise with an inch or so protruding from the top. Give it a good, solid whack with a heavy wooden mallet. The tip should snap off. Look at the grain along the fracture. That is what you are aiming for. Those guys know how to heat treat their steel.

PSI alone tells you nothing except . . . PSI. If you throw in an orifice size, someone here may be able to estimate how much propane you're using in an hour. A probably more accurate way would be to weigh the tank, run the forge for a while (preferably several hours -- and you want to time it reasonably precisely), then weigh the tank again. Difference in weight divided by number of hours gives you pounds per hour. And propane is usually sold by the pound, not the gallon, because its density varies considerably depending on ambient temperature.

Nice start! If that's chrome tanned leather that you used for the sheath (it looks chrome tanned to me), be aware that it can promote rust. Not that it always will cause rust, but it can. Are you asking about the differences between solid fuel and propane, or are you asking about the differences between coal and charcoal?