Latticino

Welcome to the forum. I recommend that you work on learning basic forging skills before attempting bladesmithing, but many of us can't seem to hold back from jumping right in. If you can hold off long enough to learn to make good tapers, you will be well on the way to effective bladesmithing. Alex Steel has a good video on making tapers. Note that a lesson or two from a good bladesmith will accelerate your learning curve appreciably. The ABS has a basic bladesmithing class that runs 2 weeks and should help you along. It is actually easier to draw out the length of a blade than the width, so if you have the latter mastered, you are well on the way to success. There are a number of different tricks for manipulating the metal in the direction you want it to go, but these depend on your tooling. In your particular case the type of hammer you are using. If all you have is a flat or rounded peen, you can use the round crossection horn to draw the material longer by laying the stock over the horn at a perpendicular to its axis and hitting the stock with your hammer. There are a number of other tricks, including use of the anvil edges or a straight or diagonal peen hammer, but it all depends on what you have to work with and your experience. Seriously, learning how to make good tapers and basic forged leaves will teach you around 75% of what you need to know for knife forging. Of course that is only a small part of good knife making. Grinding and heat treatment, IMHO, are far more critical, but lots less fun...

Didn't those old natural gas Johnson forges have all metal ribbon burners? Been a lot of years since I've inspected on, and can't remember what I had for breakfast these days, but I vaguely remember a long perforated outlet with a sheet metal slide to cover some of the outlet holes.

Google: Wayne Goddard's $50 knife book.

Sounds like burnt steel to me. Too much heat, as Steve noted, but also possibly too deep in your coal fire. You may have been in the oxidation zone, too close to the tuyer/air inlet. For forge welding in coal, what I've found works is a relatively tall igloo shaped fire, with an opening in the side to take the stock in and out. The hot coals radiate heat all around the stock, and you keep it above the oxidation zone. One trick I was taught is to bring the stock up to that high yellow welding heat (remember that high carbon welds at temperatures below that of mild steel, no need for yellow/white heat, and if you are sparking you are too hot) then shut off the air for a count of ten before pulling the stock out of the fire and moving quickly to the anvil for a light tap together. The soaking seem to help equalize the heat a bit... well it worked for me anyway. Also, if your leaf spring is 5160, it is famously difficult to weld to itself. The trick there is to have a sacrificial layer of some other steel in between the two layers of 5160.

No you described it well, I just missed the boat. Based on the sketch and photo I recommend following Thomas's plan with the solder. I'm not familiar with Stay bright solder, but am sure it will do the trick. Personally I would be inclined to use jeweler's extra EZ solder and a microtorch, but that is just what I am familiar with. Don't forget to clean and flux. You may be able to find the brass c-channel section at a good hobby store. A tight fit around the spine will work best.

I think Thomas has a better idea of what you are trying to accomplish. I got carried away with the concept of "thin layer" and didn't have a good mental picture of the final product. His method seems much easier and cheaper

I'm not completely sure what you are trying to accomplish with this, perhaps a sketch is in order? If you are planning on putting scales on the side of your handle and want to have copper or brass showing in between the two sides of the scales I would recommend you look into frame handles with a hidden tang. In that case you will have to cut down your tang width quite a bit to fit the frame around it, and that will likely be a problem with the large hole in the middle of the tang. Another possibility would be to simply plate the edges of your existing spine/tang with brass rod using a torch (brazing). I would do this before hardening and tempering if possible, and if you are careful with the final heat treatment to just heat the blade the brass on the handle should be fine as it does not melt till 1650 deg. F. Wire inlay is another possibility, but without the ability to cut a groove in the edge of the spine/tang I think it would be fairly weak just held by glue between your scales. Another interesting option would be to make a set of scales that have wood outer layers and a thin sheet of annealed copper or brass added as a liner between the scales and the tang. If this liner is left a little proud of the surface it can be carefully hammered down to fill any gaps between the tang and scales and leave a nice color accent in the handle. A final option would be to electroform the copper or brass (to date I've only done copper, but I know that it is possible with silver and gold, so maybe worth investigating). to the area you want to have that accent. This might be the best option, as it can be done cold so as not to ruin your blade heat treatment. Needless to say you will have to have some sort of resist to keep the plating only in the area you want to see it. Good luck, I look forward to seeing the finished knife.

Definitely on the road to mastery. I well know how difficult it is to get a consistent grind on a double edged blade (still struggling with it myself), so I'm impressed with your symmetry. Is that hand engraving on the blade, or did you do that work with a rotary tool of some kind? Was the engraving done before or after the blade hardening? Actually the thing I'm most impressed with is the copper spacer with the crenelated top (that appears to "toggle" into the dark wood of the handle). Is that just a dark epoxy filling those gaps, or are you doing something very tricky there? Nice job for an early blade. I look forward to seeing your progress. One suggestion to consider: if you are going to remove all the traces of the original file anyway, you might consider annealing the billet first, rough grinding away the teeth, then forging in the bevels to save grinding time after rough forging.

Certainly reads like a pukko to me. Nice clean job. Now you just need to do a traditional style sheath.

I'm sure Frosty will have plenty more detail, but there are a few fairly obvious issues here: flame is lifting off the burner outlet, therefore the air gas mixture is moving at a higher velocity than the flame can burn. Can be any of the following: too much gas pressure, too large a propane orifice, too much air entrained (mig tip not the right length), burner outlet too small (add flare, multiport burner, or flame retention nozzle) Don't see either a regulator or 1/4 turn propane safety valve in your gas train. Without the former you can't adjust the pressure effectively, without the latter you can't shut off the gas in an emergency Alignment of orifice is critical for a stable, high quality flame. I'd dump that one or use it for experimentation on improving the gas inlet mounting with a locking slide of some sort. At times you can get a flame to be more stable closer to the burner outlet after the forge interior heats up a bit. Try candling at a lower pressure for a few minutes before turning it up to full bore. Just suggestions from my experience with gas forges. Remember to change only one thing at a time and check results. Good luck and be safe.

Until the mizzou is fired it should be quite easy to cut. A bimetallic hole saw should do it just fine, if I recall correctly. You will have lots of dust. In future builds I recommend that the mizzou for the burner port be formed around a removable plug. That way you can more precisely design it to both provide a little protection for your burner, and potentially act as a bit of a flare as well. Ideally I like to have the mizzou skin just about the size of the burner outlet and flaring along the thickness of the forge insulation at the standard 12 deg angle to the out let of the forge, but it may have to be different for your design. I'm not completely sure, but I believe that you can radically reduce the strength of your mizzou if you mix it in too thin a consistency. It is not really designed to flow thru a small opening. What I've done in the past for thinner mizzou shells is either trowel it right up against the insulation in sections without an inner form (use a consistency like mortar and just trowel it into place for around 1/3 of the diameter of the forge then after drying rotate and repeat till done). I have also cast rings on end, though more often than not thicker than 3/4" tubes. In this latter case I just dumped the mizzou into the annular form with a garden trowel (stolen from SWMBO, and carefully cleaned before returning) then packed into the form on end using a piece of wood to tamp it down. You can even cast the mizzou to form first, then wrap it in insulation before inserting the assemblage into your metal skin. A bit of loose insulation packed between the two and you are good to go. Another good source for smaller forge tanks are used helium bottles from helium balloon places. These are usually thinner than propane tanks and helium is inert.

Hard to comment when they are not finished. Looks like you are on the road to success, but a lot will depend on how accurately you can replicate the two sides for jaw shape, punch and drift the holes, and draw down your reins. The angle and thickness of the boss on one side of the tongs does not appear to match the other (unless it is a progress shot of the same side) and the angle of the boss in the second to last shot does not line up with the jaws and is too thin, which will be a problem. The jaws on the first tong side pictured are almost definitely too thin (and the other ones are probably too thin as well), but that all depends on whether you used high carbon or mild steel and how well you do with the final shaping. I'm not sure why you are choosing to forge power hammer pickup tongs as your first try. They are hardly the easiest style of tong to forge, and if you are just starting you most likely don't have a power hammer. Nice anvil and rounding hammer though. Good lord, I just saw some of the rest of your shop in another of your posts. You have a decent size power hammer, excellent swage block and stand, large metal lathe and heat treating oven, at least, all in a space that looks to be a minimum of 10 times the size of my forging area (where is that I'm extremely jealous emoji at?...). If I had the cash to support that type of shop I'd not be bothering with asking for advice from a bunch of random guys on the internet. I'd be paying for private lessons from the top smiths in the business.

OK, I love references from the wisdom of the ages, but in ancient Greek without a translation? That's just cruel

That 3/4" stock is fine for making tongs out of, though as a beginner you will likely be battling quite a bit to draw out the reins. There are dozens of tong making videos online these days. Brian Brazeal has a very good one for shaping jaws out of that stock crossection, and I think Mark Aspery does as well. If you have access to a welder you may want to consider forging out the jaws and welding on some 3/8" round handles, at least at first. Once you get a few pair made you may want to switch over to scarf welding on the reins, but that is a pretty tough forge weld for a beginner. For most beginners the bulk of the tong flaws are in the neighborhood of the boss (where the tongs get riveted together). Invariably these are made too thin, or having sharp transitions that lead to the jaws or reins breaking off in use. There are some good blueprints on the anvilfire site, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some here as well, though the blueprint section here is not particularly user friendly to access. Good luck and ask more questions as you progress.

Another issue is depending on what type of steel you are using it is easy to get hardened layers within the steel even if no formal liquid quench is performed. To be fully soft many steels need to be spheroidally annealed (which typically involves bringing the steel to the critical temperature, holding it at that temperature and then cooling it very slowly over a period of many hours). This is not what a typical bladesmith does after forging is completed, so even though a tang is never formally quenched there is always a chance that it may have hardened somewhat (or have some lamellar pearlite hardening) from either being air cooled during normalization or during a differential quench of only the blade or blade edge. I agree completely with the other posters who recommend drawing a temper in the tang as well. For mine I prefer to go this route: Forge the blade. Anneal by either heating to critical and leaving overnight in my gas forge with closed door, or programmable heat treat oven (or in a 5 gallon bucket filled with vermiculite or wood ash, not sand) to cool slowly Grind profile and bevels, and drill pin holes ready for heat treatment Normalize 3 times at successively cooler temperatures Heat to critical and quench entire blade in appropriate quenchant (have also successfully edge quenched to create a temper line and have a softer spine on thicker blades) Temper blade back to desired toughness (using either oven, torch, dragon's breath from forge, tempering tongs...)

Lot of fun. I have seen similar work sold at craft shows in the past, if you want to go that route. Find the right festival and you are all set.

I'm really not a fan of casting normal soda-lime silica glass ("hard" glass) into steel at all. Typically the different thermal expansion coefficients of the two materials interact to put the glass into fairly significant stress, which can result in cracking and spalling at unpredictable times. Reportedly copper and brass are more compatible. On the other hand, there are a lot of different glass compositions out there. Borosilicate glass ("soft" or pyrex glass) is supposed to be less prone to thermal shock and there are a whole series of colored glass rods available that flame workers use that have different working and thermal ratios than I'm used to. I would personally cast the centers in colored resin, but if you are insistent on using glass I would make up a polariscope and do some experimentation. There is a whole field of engineering that is concerned with developing composite materials that marry either ceramics or glass to metal, I'd start looking there for formula suggestions. You will likely have to try a number of different annealing sequences as well as material selections. A cheap polariscope is great for checking on stress in the glass, but is does work best on clear glass. Here is some info on how to DIY one: http://www.davebross.com/GlassTech/polariscope.html

What happens when you modulate the air intake by covering the inlet holes from the "back" of the burner first rather than the "front" as you have been doing? My understanding is that the shroud may be too effective so close to the fuel orifice to allow you to tune it with the relatively gross adjustments that the slip joint allows. By this I mean that a relatively small change will have a large effect on the mixture proportion. Might be easier to tune if you go in the opposite direction.

Extremely impressive. That's some clean, well proportioned work.

Looks more like a Dave Hammer design burner to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxzdqcPzXj8 The multiple offset air ports are the give away.

I thought the same thing, then I heard that Ryu used his winnings to help out his family in the Philippines and set up to teach other bladesmiths over there. From all accounts he is a real stand up guy.

Thanks for this, that was the word I was grasping for.

Mmmm, Beaudry, now that's a nice mechanical hammer.

Typically you don't use a release agent at all if the molten glass is being held inside the high alumina crucible. The crucible gets a thin coating of glass that does not get gathered during the blowing operation (the dross glass on the bottom of the crucible was typically discarded or made into "fancies" like paperweights, glass canes and the like by glassworkers for private sale, it was usually too cordy from dissolved crucible material to be used in fine production). Note that unlike metal casting crucibles, glass crucibles are rarely removed from the furnace, glass is gathered out of them with preheated rods or removed with a cold casting ladle (I used a 6" pipe cap welded onto a 6' long 1" pipe for a ladle). The glass will temporarily stick to the preheated steel for blowing, then crack off once done if suddenly cooled due to differential thermal expansion of the glass and steel. For casting, ideally the glass never adheres to the ladle at all, but it needs to be poured out pretty quickly. For casting glass into molds, the typical release agent is a thin coating of carbon. This can be applied using an acetylene torch (finally a good use for soot) or spray graphite powder. I have also used block graphite molds, but it can be a challenge to use those effectively. If they are too cold they suck the heat right out of the glass, putting chill marks and sometimes cracks on the surface. If they are too hot the bonding agent in the block starts to burn out and they start to exhibit porosity and break down easily.

"best quench media" "Railroad spike knife" "first project= sword" "Harbor Freight/Princess Auto Anvil" "6-burner forge" "budget belt grinder" "Casting Steel" "welding anvil edges" "grinding anvil face"