Hello all. Great forum, great art! I am a fan of the forging show, and while I don't make blades, I sure enjoy buying them. I have noticed at the gun shows that there are many more hand made knife vendors around which is a great thing! Blacksmith revival!! On to business, I recently bought sight unseen the ( try not to cringe) budk jousting sword. item 44 bk2304 and I post that because the description is all I know about the construction. It is an India blade that has grain, does that mean it was forged? 30" long 3/16th inch thick, and the edge is the size of a dime. I do have some hand forged katanas and the grain on my 1060 blade looks very similar under magnification. (25x) My 1095 is much finer grained. The jouster seems to be in a state of anneal rather than treated as it is soft with no obvious (to me) cracks or gaps in the grain, which, to me looks really nice. All of the qualities I would look for if I were scouting a blade for purchase. Very fingerprinty, long and consistent. It is also polished and barely beveled. The pommel is threaded, on a half tang welded to a threaded rod and the hardware isn't bad, albeit the cross guard is too heavy. It was forty bucks with engraving so I'm losing nothing. I read up on Steve's heat treat and the posts on the subject. This is a one time thing as I meant to buy a treated blade but misread "high carbon" to mean treated. nope. I want to attempt to treat it.
I plan to dig a trench and use charcoal to normalize, I've re purposed a bench grinder stand as a quench tank and then use the hood of an old grill to cover the trench to treat. I will be using heated used synthetic motor oil as this is a one time thing and I have it on-hand for free. I have a respirator and will be outside upwind. I read that 250* gives a good durability and I was thinking maybe 275 or 300 for some better edge retention? Provided that some flaw in the blade doesn't cause it to explode in the quench, does that happen? So my expectations are that I completely burn this thing to cinders or it explodes in the quench. I am not out to destroy it, but I do not like having non functional blades. Any hardening would be an improvement I would like for it to preform around that of a machete, moderate cuts such as layered cardboard, mats, 1/2" dowels etc. I still have to read more on how to preform the tang. Do I heat the tang to non magnetic and do I quench the tang? I'm sure the answers are there and I will find them. My question is this, is there prep or anything I need to do that will help not destroy this blade, short of just hanging on the wall? I could leave it alone but I know myself... I wont. Replacements aren't that bad so again no loss. It would be nice to pull this off. There are some waves in it and I am guessing I need to remove those before heating? I have welding experience and fire extinguishers plus I will be doing this far away from my house with thick welding gloves. safety first. I would rather not get a fire peel. Cosmetic surgery is best left in the doctors office. lol
