Midnight

16 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

look into discussions on the Center of Percussion AKA COP AKA sweet spot on swords used for edge work.

thanks, Thomas.

1 hour ago, ThomasPowers said:

you ever take a fairly inflexible rod and hit something hard with it and have it "buzz" your hand so you drop it? You were not holding it at a node!

Nodes are places where a standing wave in an item has an amplitude of zero  So you really really want the grip of your sword to be at a node as it will feel more like it's glued in your hand when you hit something rather than that it's biting your hand to get free.

So many ways to shift nodes around---length, cross section, taper, pommel, guard, etc and so on and is one of the major things that make a sword not just a big knife.  You can test your blades for where the nodes are as you build them and try to adjust if it looks like the grip is not at a good point---unless you are making it for an enemy....

cf vibration node in wiki and elsewhere

very interesting...so, I would assume that, besides wanting a node in the handle, you would also want a node at about 4 inches or so from the tip(depending on the swords length, of course) so that when you hit with it, the wobble was minimal, allowing for a cleaner cut?

Can someone tell me about this "node" business? I remember coming upon it in a book somewhere, but the author failed to make much mention of its implications, nor any sort of technique one could use to move it through the sword.

1 hour ago, Frosty said:

Sure blue is a temper color. In some cases it may be drawn so low as to be useless, especially for a blade but it's certainly not drawn to "normalized" let alone annealed. In the local spring shop, 5160 leaf is drawn to blue and oil stopped leaving a black finish.

As Thomas says different alloys have different requirements, some are "as quenched" alloys requiring no tempering at all.

As to books saying the "temper" is lost. That's a misuse of the term we talk about all the time, what they MEAN is a loss of HARDNESS, tempering is a deliberate controlled reduction of HARDNESS, softening. Completely tempered would be annealed. How many times has someone here corrected a person who said they "tempered" their blade by heating it to ?orange and quenching it in: oil, water, whatever.

Getting the craft's language/jargon standardized is probably the #1 contribution Iforge is making to the craft. We have to know what a person means or we're just guessing at what they mean.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

I agree: many a mistake has been made due to people who say one thing, and mean the other.

I am awfully sorry, guys. Neither my phone, nor my laptop would open up the second page of this thread for the longest time. However, I have found a way around the apparent broken code.

As for the sword's length, in total it was 30 inches, with a 25 inch blade, the cross section was hexagonal and the blade itself was modeled after a Greek xiphos. I "drew the temper" to a medium straw color, as I am well aware of how brittle(but also how fantastic) very high carbon steels can be like 1095. There was no fuller, as after drawing the sword in my head I found that the fuller made it look silly.

I'm going to be honest, Thomas, I don't really know what you are talking about when you ask what I drew it to. Do you mean the thickness of the blade at tip, and 2" from the tang?

Thomas, the sword was 25 inches, weighted 1.8 pounds, had a COB approx. 8 inches from the handles, I used 1095 for the entirety of it, it was heat treated in a fire, but I made sure that the temp was as uniform as I could make it. I would attach pictures, but lost the camera that had the pictures in a flood, and the sword was sold to a friend of my dad shortly after I finished it.

Okay, okay. I would like to start by thanking all of you for your input; hearing what everyone had to say has been rather eye opening. I asked the person who owned it before I, and he said that he hadn't done any refurbishing to it, and given that besides the foundry that bought it all those years ago he is the only one who has owned it I think that it's rarely easy to say that the face on that anvil is the original forge weld. Anyways, I have been blacksmithing for a couple years now, but this is my first anvil, I only ever used ALOs. I have made a sword before now, and even though they are a lot of work, I wouldn't call them hard, with that being said though, I bet the difficulty scales exponentially with the length of the blade. Anyways, I have decided that I am going to take the unanimous advice that y'all are handing me and just leave it as is. Thank you all, once again; what a wonderful community you seem to have here!

The reason I didn't include a photo of the face was simply because the pitting doesn't concern me. As for the use, this is going to be my general purpose anvil; everything from axes to swords will be made on this.

Hey, guys! I just bought this anvil, and I was wondering if I should use it as is, or if I should resurface it? If you can't tell from the pictures, it's an old peter wright from a foundry here where I live.