Latticino

As far as I'm concerned, for a hawk I would not go out of my way to get any specialty type of tool steel. I'd use whatever I had lying around that I had successfully forge welded or heat treated in the past. For my money the bit on a hawk doesn't have as stringent requirements as a high end knife, but if to be thrown impact resistance is probably more important than edge holding ability. 5160 or 4140 might be good choices, but I expect O1 would work fine also. In any case I would use mild steel for the body. If you haven't seen this yet, this is a nice tutorial on the "butterfly" method of forming the eye and setting a bit: http://www.bladesmithsforum.com/index.php?showtopic=26567. I've used a modified method of this with some fullering of the body stock for the cheeks to preform the eye and improve the chances of getting a good weld at the front of the eye (thin the cheeks and keep the area to be welded thicker), a typical place for failure. Just remember not to drive in the drift to open up the eye once welded (though using it as an inner form to forge onto works nicely, if that makes any sense). Good luck

Wrap and weld hawks that I've made were mild steel with 1084 or 1075 bits forge welded in place (I've also seen folks forge weld a small section of old rasp or file for the bits). I wouldn't use 5160 for a wrap and weld without putting a sacrificial thin shim between the sides to aid in forge welding the 5160 together. Actually in that case I'd probably do an eccentric forge welded eye rather than a "butterfly" join so I didn't have the shim centered in the business end of the hawk. 5160 would be great for a slit and drift hawk, though a lot of work to move around. Would be pretty easy if you have a power hammer or agreeable striker though. Needless to say you can still do a slit and drift in mild steel and add a high carbon bit to it after rough shaping.

Finding the same problem with my treadle hammer, which I placed on some of those thin rubber floor mats to try and absorb some sound. After a bit of use it shifts around on the floor and has walked a good bit. Will need to lag it down in the near future before it exits the shop through the side walls .

Nice clean work. I particularly like the knotwork details. Was that conventional hand engraving, chisel and chasing, or machine engraving? Also, did you upset the stock ends before you forged out the two blade ends, or was the 1" stock large enough to do this? Really like your double edged hawk, though I'm not exactly sure why it isn't just a double bladed hand axe (think some of them had tapered handles, didn't they)? The last question I have is with the handle wrapping. Not that you would be likely to throw this kind of presentation weapon, but having thrown some hawks I can see where a full wrap like this would get in the way of a clean release.

Looks a bit like one of these: They call it a multi-function utility bar.

What a great file storage and handle idea. Going to steal that one.

I did try a hardening test on the material, but you are correct I probably should have checked into tempering it as well. Jumped the gun, but ran out of time before getting to use a coal forge with my smithing group (my forced air natural gas forge struggles just a bit getting up to the high forge welding heat that is recommended for wrought). Well, I don't know what kind of steel it is, but I struggled quite a bit today with forge welding it onto the wrought iron body. Did pretty well with the first face, but when I got to the cross peen I ran into some trouble. As far as I know from my limited experience with wrought, I needed to heat the wrought up to high yellow heat, at least, to weld. Unfortunately the face material (possibly 52100) would crumble when I hit it at that elevated temperature. Clearly whatever it is I used has a rather short working range, though it does forge pretty well (but slowly) at orange temperatures. It was fine when I could heat the wrought from below first, but once I had a face on that side I had trouble. Right now it appears to be bonded pretty well, though I do have a few cracks in the cross peen face I'll need to attempt to weld back together as I finalize the form. Still, if it is 52100 I certainly would recommend using a different tool steel for hammer faces. My buddy was working in tandem with me, also making a hammer, and had much better luck with 5160 and 1084. The previous wrought Iron/hard face hammer I forged had 1075 faces, and I'll probably stick with one of these easier tool steels in the future. Just got lazy and used what I had in the thickness I wanted to work with. Valuable lesson there: 15 minutes of upsetting and resizing the 1084 I had on hand would have saved me a lot of grief. I have lots more respect for those who can work with the more exotic tool steels after this.

Thanks to all for the assistance. Will likely take Glenn's recommendation and just work on it as is, after I get back from Peters Valley and have time to build a stand. Actually I have the parts for a striking anvil and the hardy hole started in same. Still need to try to drift it to size (or do a lot of chisel and filing) and fab up the stand. Heating up 75 # of steel and moving it around is a bit daunting though. Fortunately both this mousehole like anvil and the Wright both have 3/4 hardy holes. Still want to make a larger hole to make it easier to drift hammer eyes and the like. May try to just drill that one.

Thanks, I'm pretty excited to put it to use and get forging. The small horn means that a lot of the anvil mass is under the sweet spot, so I expect to get a bunch of efficiency increase from my current 125# Peter Wright that has a relatively large horn. Not that I had difficulties moving metal on the PW, just that I've had some projects recently that used larger stock and always worried about striking with a 15 # sledge on the smaller anvil. Probably didn't need another anvil, but I just could leave this one to rust away where it was being kept, or get grabbed up by an interior designer.

Just got lucky and picked up my second anvil off a Craig's List add. It is 165# with a 5" wide face, relatively small horn, no Pritchet hole and a 3/4" hardy hole. The face is flat and the edges just lightly radiused. Rebound, as checked with a 3/4" bearing is at around 85%. Needless to say I'm thrilled. Did a quick clean up with a wire wheel on a 4 1/2" grinder and removed the coating of rust. There are no discernible manufacturer's marks, but I'm wondering if anyone can help me with the manufacturer from the photos below. My current theory, from what little I know of anvil types, is that it may be an early Mousehole, but I'm really guessing there. Also there is some degree of rust pitting on the surface. I know enough not to go get it ground, or to try to "flatten the top" with any kind of grinder myself (it is plenty flat right now), but other than just using it and slowly burnishing the surface by working on the anvil, is there anything that can be done to safely accelerate the cleanup? Some light duty hand sanding just to remove the peak layer of rusted metal for example? Thanks for any assistance.

It might have just been a parallel, I'm not a machinist. I have no idea what it cost, it was just rusting away in a bucket down in my father's basement. He probably got it at a garage sale somewhere. I plan on tempering it down after the quench using my rudimentary heat treat oven. Found out the other day that it can get up to 1600 deg. F with little trouble, so should be able to use it to both anneal the hammer head before any grinding and eventually temper it there. If I can temper it down to 58 HRC (per ASTM tempering twice at around 450 deg. F) I would figure it to be OK, but I'm not sure. I've only made hammers out of solid 4140 and wrought with 1075 faces in the past. I've read that 52100 makes good tough knives, if heat treated properly, so wasn't initially worried about it being brittle. What do you think? Thanks all for the information. As usual, members on this site are very helpful

Thanks for the feedback. The stock did seem to be quite tough, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was 52100. I think one side had a serial number on it, but I may have torched that when I hot cut it... Seems to work pretty similarly to the tank turret ball bearing I tried hand forging a while back (2.5" diameter bearing, extremely difficult to hand forge). Will probably make excellent hammer faces though.

A friend and I are working on forging some Viking style forging hammers using a wrought iron "core" with forge welded faces for both the large face and cross peen. I have an old, rusty 1 1/2" x 1/2" x 18" gage block that I plan to sacrifice to use for face material. I hot cut a section off last night and quenched it in water at a dull orange heat and it hardened up wonderfully, but if anyone has any idea what the typical steel type is for these I'd appreciate more accurate information so I can address proper heat treatment. Thanks

sweet

Assumed since the OP said the wood was just "laying around the house" that it would not be stabilized.

I've personally never done this, but if I were commissioned to do so would probably glue the scales to a thin metal backing, for stability and to have something for the fasteners to bear on, then assemble the knife with Corby rivets or Torx fasteners (http://www.knifemaking.com/category-s/75.htm), using a method similar to that for "takedown" folding knife assembly. Good luck and please post a photo of the finished knife. Would love to see what you come up with.

Clearly you can do anything that you want, but the configuration will be subtly different from the one that Frosty has designed and tested. Depending on how good a pipe fitter you are, your weld joint connection may be cleaner than the equivalent fitting, or (like mine would be) not perpendicular in all axis and leaving a lot of weld slag on the joint interior to cause unusual flow patterns. One of the key positive characteristics of the Frosty TEE burner is that it can be manufactured from standard plumbing and welding machine parts, with minimal specialty metalworking equipment, jigs and critical measurements. Shifting to a welded assembly runs counter to that design elegance. If you vary the design for custom manufacture, you might as well go for building a Mikey, Zoeller or Mini Mongo style burner. Personally if I wanted to go all out and do a custom welded fabricated NA burner assembly, I'd probably try to copy a Ransome style system with a true ventauri mixing and induction chamber. We are constantly seeing posts from folks who want to "improve" the Frosty Tee design and then want direction on how to tune their variant successfully. If you make changes to the design it will be significantly more difficult for folks (Frosty most likely) to give you any direction.

Traditionally it is work hardened. Note that there is a reason that steel has supplanted copper for tool manufacture...

Well that is a tough story to follow, but I do have one additional caution, from my own personal experience being a former self employed craftsman. In addition to taking the previous advise very seriously regarding the amount of time you will need to concentrate on the business side of the equation (sales, marketing, shipping, paperwork...), you also need to be prepared for the mind numbing effect of doing production work, even in a trade you love. I dropped out of engineering, went and got an MFA from a craft school and had a self supporting small hot shop glass studio for around 10 years. I sold at both retail and wholesale shows around the country (U.S.), but it was an uncertain existance. In my experience customers typically don't want, or at least don't want to pay for, original one of a kind art pieces in any great amounts. They want the low end, easily approachable, paperweights, Christmas ornaments, tumblers and small vases (key fobs, S-hooks, bottle openers and candlesticks for the blacksmith). Before you make a final decision I suggest you get yourself a small forge setup, take a mini-vacation for 2 weeks from your desk job and crank out a couple hundred S-hooks, and at least a hundred bottle openers with jigs made to standardize as much as possible. If you are still enamored regarding blacksmithing, put a finish coat of some sort on your products and take them to a decent local craft fair and set up a table. See how well you do selling your work and what the overall simple hourly rate works out to. While there are some craftsmen who are supporting themselves on either custom commissioned work, or have become nationally famous for their major sculpture or collectable craftwork (yes Albert Paley is up in my area, and I've attended lectures by Chihuly, Marioni, and Morris, among others), for each one of them there are literally thousands struggling to get by. A year after my son was born I went back to engineering. On the other hand, in your shoes I would probably still head off to the apprenticeship. After all, I basically did that when I could for myself. It was a great life experience, and one I still cherish. Certainly not an easy life, but at least you have a fall back position.

If you are going to use a hard fire brick for the floor, I'd suggest going with a brick "split" (half thickness) and supporting it from the forge casing with a backing of some type of insulation (I use compressed frax blanket with small steel standoffs welded to the casing). If it is set inside the forge insulation layer it won't bleed as much heat as Frosty indicates, but will act as a bit of a thermal sink (i.e. will take longer to get up to temperature, but will transfer some of that heat back to the cold steel when it is put into the forge, or the door is opened for same). I've only used AP Green high alumina fire bricks, as they are more resistant to flux contact, and I had some on hand from another project. The high alumina kiln shelf Frosty recommends is likely the same type of material (use a wet diamond "tile saw" to cut one down to size). If I had to source something new I'd certainly consider looking at bubble alumina fire bricks like these: http://www.ktrefractories.com/Alumina-Bubble-Bricks.cfm. Maybe they would send you one as a sample if you ask correctly...

Try this: Ferguson reducing TEE. This is a very standard plumbing item, common for natural gas and hydronic piping. Any decent plumbing supply shop should have them.

Old files are typically reasonable to good high carbon tool steel and should be able to be successfully hardened (unless they are medium carbon steel with case hardening, but that is another story). Would have been a good plan to chop off a small section first to see if it hardened, but since you are here I'll tell you what I would do. A bit involved, but this will give you a chance at a final knife rather than a KSO. Basically I would go through the conventional "safe" heat treatment cycle for unknown tool steels (do read the stickies for details, I'm not going to repeat everything that has been written on this complex subject). Be careful when heating to not burn off your thin edges as they will heat more quickly. You will probably have to make a less hot forge environment and move the stock in and out of the fire to heat it evenly: Normalize 2-3 times by bringing the stock up to successively lower temperatures in the cherry red range and below and letting it air cool without resting on any surfaces. Heat to just above nonmagnetic and quickly quench blade section only in preheated canola oil (preheat to around 140 deg. F) Check if hardened with a fine file (skates on surface rather than biting) Wash off all surface oil with steel wool or the like Temper in oven twice at around 400 deg. F for an hour Finish sand surface to remove any new scaling (reducing atmosphere during any heating will help with this) Assemble blade with handle

The Resco refractory looks to be a good product, and they have an even higher alumina version (90%) that is likely to be even more resistant to flux damage. The white color of the material will likely help as well with the thermal efficiency of the liner. I'll let Frosty respond to the proposed modification to the burner, but I do recall him mentioning on another thread that he does not recommend using a bushing as the gas/air flow patterns at that portion of the assembly are fairly critical and the bushing makes a change in the geometry of the unit. Any decent plumbing supply shop should be able to set you up with a reducing TEE, and they are cheap. I would recommend following the design, as listed, and see how it works for you before you make modifications. My experience with flares is that they are less necessary for burners that are used inside forges (as opposed to those in free air), but the stainless end will be a bit less likely to break down from the heat (and can be replaced if it does). Without knowing the details of the nozzle configuration it will be difficult to predict how it affects the burner outlet.

Unfortunately that is almost completely backwards of what you should be doing. Many smiths who work exclusively with tool steel (bladesmiths) don't even have a slack bucket in their shops to avoid this temptation. Water quenching tool steel, particularly with strong variations in crossection is a recipe for cracks and surface microfractures. There are some tool steels and situations where water quenching is a prudent option, but with the steel you probably have and the work you are doing it is highly unlikely. As others have already stated, slitting and drifting should be done quite hot (I don't bother drifting unless the stock is in the orange/yellow range, too much work otherwise. If it gets below cherry red you are asking for trouble, and remember the side in contact with the anvil will cool faster). Also you can try to forge down the sides of your blank around the drift on the anvil a bit rather than just forcing the drift through. This will raise cheeks on the side of the hawk around the opening, but these can either be a design element, or forged out as well. Rounding corners of your drift will also help. I like the traditional teardrop crossection for hawks, but many different styles have been made historically.