MattBower

Nice work, by the way!

How do you know what material the originals were made of? I've searched in vain (so far) for any definitive statements about whether Roman spearheads would've been steel or iron. (Someone on another board suggested that they might've been phosphorus iron, which apparently work hardens to a fairly high degree.)

Thanks for that, Thomas. Very interesting. I'll have to try etching with some of my walnut husk liquor!

I know, but I'm an old school sorta guy. (And veg tanning is how tooling leather is done.) The only thing preventing me from trying some bark tanning in my back yard is the smell. Er, well, more precisely my wife's and neighbors' reactions to the smell.

Yep. The leather is tanned using, er....tannins! Same stuff that's in tea, walnut husks, hemlock bark, etc. The reaction is the same in both cases.

Neat. Now I need to go find the other fork-making thread. Vinegar does indeed do a nice job of scale/rust removal. Pretty far OT here, but you can also save the rusty vinegar to create a gray/black stain on woods that are high in tannins, such as oak. (If your wood isn't high in tannins, soak it in strong tea for a while. Or make a tea from walnut husks, or hemlock bark, or...well, lots of possibilities.) It works really well with a little experimentation, and operates on the same principle as old-fashioned iron gall ink. I've heard that the acid may damage the wood in the long term (just as iron gall ink corrodes the underlying paper over a very long period), but I think we're talking hundreds of years. Staining and Ebonizing - | ISWOnline /OT rambling

The main active ingredient of Kasenit appears to be sodium ferrocyanide. Interesting stuff. It's not as scary as it sounds; it's actually a food additive! But it does evolve hydrogen cyanide gas when it decomposes (which happens at about 800 degrees F).

So go ahead and quench the eye? For what it's worth, I called Blacksmith Depot and discovered that the steel used in these hammers is 4140.

I have a commercially bought cross pein hammer (Czech type from Kayne & Son) that I just recently started using. The face is a tad soft for my liking. (And yeah, I realize it wouldn't be an issue if my hammer control were better.) I wasn't going to worry about re-HT'ing immediately, but last weekend as I was making a forge weld the head flew right off the handle! I'm kind of underwhelmed about that, but, err, well....as long as the handle's off, I suppose there's no time like the present. I've never heat treated a hammer head before. I've read about it, but I've never done it. So if any of you folks with experience in this area would like to offer any tips, I'd be happy to hear them. Water, brine or oil for quench medium, best process to use to get good hardness while avoiding cracks around the eye, that sort of thing....(And yes, I realize the fact that this is mystery steel complicates things some.)

And how will he or she accomplish the quench? AFAIK, successfully quenching an anvil-sized chunk of tool steel (i.e., quenching it fast enough to harden satisfactorily) is one of the more challenging parts of the process.

Did some reading about this a while back when I was exploring the possibility of switching to oxy-propane over oxy-acetylene (b/c acetylene skeers me a little more than propane, and b/c propane is cheaper and more readily available). The conclusion I eventually came up with is that it's possible to weld with a lot of oxy-gas torches, but (except with acetylene) the welds will tend to be low quality and hydrogen embrittled. But they're fine for cutting, and in rosebuds for brazing and heating. Don't ask me for citations. I don't have 'em anymore. But it's a big Internet.

Colonel H, I think you may have it backward. You said it's not that hard to make a sword with sufficient experience. I wonder if it might not be more accurate to say that with enough experience swordmaking seems easy. ;)

I think he's talking about these: Gas Forges: Metal & Heat Treatment Equipment: Flamefast We had a thread about these recently.

In my experience, HF has a very friendly return policy. I've known them to accept returns without a receipt -- for store credit only.

I'd expect the clay to crack and fall apart as i dries. It'll shrink considerably as it dries; the pipe won't. Wrapping in some wire might help hold the pieces together when that happens.

I am guessing that no one in the picture had ever heard of safety glasses. And corrective lenses may have been too expensive for children and teens back then. (I'm sure they were ground by hand.)

I wonder if either of the power hammers along the back wall is still running. Could very well be. . .

I had a rail anchor -- probably from Unit -- analyzed recently. Here's the chemical breakdown: C: 0.51 | Mn: 0.80 | P: 0.01 | S: 0.03 | Si: 0.18 | Cu: 0.24 | Cr: 0.07 | Mo: 0.02 | Ni: 0.07 | Sn: 0.010 | V: 0.002 | Cb/Nb: 0.015 That came from a CSX/Amtrak rail bed.

Certain nuclear instruments require components made of lead with almost no radioactive components, a.k.a. low-background lead. All lead mined or processed since about July 16, 1945, has been contaminated by nuclear fallout. (In tiny amounts, of course, but for extremely sensitive instruments those tiny amounts matter.) Lead from shipwrecks that went down prior to the first nuclear detonation is a big (the only?) source of low-background lead. It can be many times more valuable than newly mined lead. That may be what you're thinking of. I don't know if there's a similar issue with steel.

I know what you all are saying as far as not being too quick to start grinding on it. I guess that urge comes mainly from a concern that the spot where the piece of face chipped off is a weak spot, and cracks could spread from there. Seems like rounding it off might help prevent that. But yes, for the time being I can probably just stay away from that spot.

So far in my (hobby) smithing career I've had two anvils. One was a piece of 3/4" plate MIG welded to the end of a chunk of largish I-beam. The second I cobbled together from some railroad switch plates with my then-new stick welder cranked up to about 180 amps, plus a bunch of 7018 and some hardfacing rods. It's heavy and puts plenty of mass under the hammer, but it has its limits. Well, no more of that for me. My Easter present was an anvil -- a real, 120.8 pound (by my scale -- 124 pounds by the hundredweight markings on the side), London pattern, made-in-England, Wilkinson anvil that's probably a hundred years old, if not more. Mom's neighbors (well, a couple doors down) had it sitting in their front yard. They found it in the overgrown back yard of their former house in Rhode Island years ago, and have been toting it around the country ever since. Price: $0. I owe them a favor. We left it at that. Which just goes to show that the old advice about keeping your eyes open is spot-on. The edges are in pretty rough in a couple spots; it's going to take some time with the angle grinder and flap disk to clean them up, and the radii in those spots will be rather large. In fact a small piece of the steel face flat-out chipped off the body of the anvil in one spot, which you can see in the photos. But it has a horn, hardy and pritchel holes, the face is reasonably flat, it doesn't seem to be dead, ring-wise, and for the price I can't possibly complain.

I've bought Crucible L6 from Chuck Bybee at Alpha Knife Supply, but he doesn't seem to have any listed on the site right now. You might email him and see what's up. I hope he hasn't stopped carrying it.

Why not turn your pallets into charcoal? A charcoal fired cupola certainly would do the job. Wood probably would work, but it's not as pleasant to work with as charcoal.

Bentiron makes an excellent point. Harbor Freight carries brass hammers surprisingly cheap. I realize you may not have Harbor Freight in the Netherlands, but surely you can buy brass hammers. It'll be cheaper and easier than buying a crucible and casting your own.

I have considered buying Roxul as backup insulation for a layer of ceramic fiber. It's cheap, so it'd allow you to cut costs compared to using multiple layers of ceramic fiber. But no, it definitely shouldn't be the innermost layer.