j.w.s.

How many OSHA violations do you count? lol Watching this really makes me realize how much I love my shop and that it's not worth complaining about not having something. -J

For my daughter, my first duty is to be a good daddy, not a perfect one, but a good one. Fair, loving, supportive and encouraging.. my second is to ensure that she never dates until she's out of college, has a good head on her shoulders and is able to fend for herself. After that, I'll slowly start considering allowing her to date.. As for my son, he's 15, and I already found him a good girl that will keep him on the straight and narrow, plus give him a good kick in the pants when he needs it,. and she's testing this summer for her 2nd degree in tang soo do, so I have no doubt she can woop him when he needs it, and according to both of them "they're just friends" which is even better in my book, but those two are as thick as thieves... lol -J

Thank you Charles, I really do.. -J

Lol.. you guys do realize she's a customer not a model?.. just because she's cute and all.. Next time I see her around faire I'll have to let her know she's going to be my next knife show model. Time to start going the way of the trade show I guess.. it's no longer about who makes a great knife you'd like to have, but more about the bikini babe's they have selling them.. hehe.. and maybe a few Hershey's Kisses to sweeten the deal. -J

I had a huge reply written, and then it went poof. A quick re-type: I see scratches, I see unsymmetrical curves in the profile, your center line is off at the tip, the bolsters appear to be rounded where it meets the mammoth instead of seemless and the pin issue for a start. In the market you're shooting for, people expect you to be a machine, or even better than one. I know a few knife makers who go that direction and they live quite nicely by selling 2 dozen or less knives a year. Personally, that's not my market. When I'm making a prop piece, I can't have it look like it was just taken from the plastic, it needs to be aged and distressed. When making a tool like a hunting knife, I still take my lines to where you have them, then I booger them up - my market is small and niche, but my customers want a piece that looks like their grandfather trusted it for 50 years and passed it on to them to use for another 50. It's the difference between Piet Mondrian in his grid period and Jackson Pollock - both used the same colors but obviously their styles yielded vastly different results. -J

Haha, welcome to the Dragons Den of Knives.. Allow me to give my own, very humble opinion, and I assure you I mean no disrespect but I wont hold anything back either. I see a few issues: First though, it's a nice knife, it's obvious that you put some time in it. Clean lines but could be better, looks like a decent polish, a few deep scratches here and there, but in general - sloppy (and I make a living with "sloppy" so I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but your using the wrong canvas for your paints if that's where you want to go). I can still see your pins on the bolsters, Steve got his reply in first so I wont say any more on that. I like the mammoth, but if you're not going to be 110% on your fit and finish your customers aren't going to care about the fact that you used an expensive handle material. I'm not a huge fan of mirror polish, and most of my customers are moving away from it too. 440C is not a huge selling point in my own opinion, matter of fact, that goes for just about any stainless for me, and I know a lot of my customers feel the same - let's face it, you can find a blade out of 440C for as little as $9.90, and while it's considered one of the best stainless varieties out there, people still equal it to kitchen knives, folders and sport knives in general. In their minds, it's a decent steel, but that 440 number they typically equate to "wall hangers" when it comes to larger pieces and those customers want the most bang for their buck - $800 could outfit the entire man-cave with all manner of swords, knives and implements of destruction. My biggest issue with the entire piece is the composition. Steve summed it up pretty well with "modern mounting on a kriss style blade" It just doesn't work. I can also show you very similar pieces with 'rosewood' handles that used to flood the $20 market from Pakistan and India in just about every flea market in the 80's. My final thoughts: Composition, composition, composition. If you're going to mess with a design that hasn't been market tested you're just going to waste your own time and money. Salvage the mammoth, rehandle the blade with some cheap wood, put an $80 price tag on it and kiss it goodbye, never think of it again except as a learning experience. Then take your $250 mammoth scales and save them for that piece that just screams for a little more than the usual, but don't go off trying to make that piece, let it come to you. -J

And according to at least one of my customers this weekend, they're "freakin awesome". -J

Overall is 5.5", the blade length is 2.625". I've got a couple variations in the works as well. The idea is to make 10 of them fast, little effort and keep the price marginally above the Pakistani blades for sale around the corner but far below most of my other hand forged fixed blade knives. Give the customer something made by a person they met and got to talk with that's a decent alternative to something cranked out en mass in an over sea factory. -J

Here's a few neck knives I did out of 1080. I'm working on developing something relatively fast to make, a consistent look and with a low price point. One of the things about working the shows I do, just because there's 15,000 people on a weekend doesn't mean that it's 15,000 people willing to drop a few hundred on a hand forged knife, so enter the $60-$75 price range neck knife. So here's a few pictures of some of the ones I made this past week. Sold 3 over the weekend and it was torrential downpours for most of it, so I'll have to wait until PARF starts in August to really make a determination whether or not these are a "thing". I'm wrapping the handles with bamboo cord or hemp cord, then dipping them in clear lacquer to give it a little more resistance to abuse. Keeping the overall look on the rough side, just concentrating on the cutting edges with the sander. The sheaths are just two small pieces of leather, 2 eyelets and a rivet - even with the stitching and dying they take about 10 minutes to throw together from start to finish. -J

Lol, my old friend Ed was a competitor on the original.. wonder if he's coming back? -J

Thank you. Heating the metal blade slightly will help with adhesion. The blend of pewter I'm using is bismuth free, so I wasn't too worried about it becoming porous or too wrinkled, plus I over size the tape so I'm going to be removing some material anyway. I've thought about doing the wax method and plaster forms. In theory they should work well enough as long as the plaster is completely dry - I've cast brass in it before and that's at a much higher temp. Lol, I forgot other people still allow their children on the interwebs.. Maybe I should change the age requirement on YouTube? And the baby has officially been hugged. -J

Nice detailed pics.. This is how I've been building burners for years and absolutely love the performance of them. Nice job with the pics. -J

It's 550F, and it's not all that scary when you take the right steps. It was playing around with raining that day so prior to shooting the video (outside), I blew out any loose debris and put my ladle in my tempering oven on a low temp to drive off any ambient moisture, so there wouldn't be a problem with splashing or popping in the crucible due to water vapor and I can't think of anything else that would be able to make a molten dense metal leap 18 inches to my eyes - I mean this is a ladle designed to handle molten steel at what - 3300F? I'm not saying it couldn't happen.. heck, I'm a firm believer that chaos is the natural state of the universe and us forcing order on it is just looking for trouble.. Pouring, I probably should be wearing a face shield, but my friends all say that chicks dig facial scars, and I listen to my friends way before I listen to logic.. -J

Here's a trio of some blacksmiths knives in 1084 with a little copper accenting them, just wanted to keep it simple. These are heading up to Erie for show there next weekend, wish I could make it but I'm needed in the opposite end of the state those days. -J

Finally finished my latest video on casting pewter directly onto a knife. I know it's not up to my usual editing quality, some of the audio may be a little off and I noticed the focus traveling (maybe I'm nit-picking), but I've got a 3 month little girl who is in constant need of daddy's participation in her life and a completely new piece of software on my linux box to learn for multi-camera shooting. Anyway, I hope someone finds it useful or hopefully at the very least mildly entertaining. Enjoy! -J

I have 5 gallons of a lye/potassium nitrate solution I've used for hot bluing but it's dangerous stuff, even the fumes will get ya.. but it's a brilliant bluing process and no paste or liquid from a tube is going to compare. -J

I like it! And now you're making me want to start doing mokume again.. -J

My forge area is only 12x10 on the inside, just 120 little square feet just for me, my tools, my 2 forges and my knives on the counter. Just the way I like it.. apprentices need fed and are constantly in the way when I'm trying to get work done.. these people are drinking beer and I've only got about 25 minutes to get them entertained, happy, awestruck and reaching for their wallets.. but, if I can be a little not so humble, I'm really good with a crowd (I used to do the whole acting thing and am a former jouster so I'm used to crowds of 10,000, the small crowds I get are a cake walk).. I strategically planned this layout, and trust me there's times where I wish a little molten borax would land on a few people, but it works perfectly for my show and I'm constantly looking for ways to improve audience safety. -J

As someone who does this for a living, let me say that when we used to send our swords out for heat treat it was $500 just for setup and $2/lb. Most places that can heat treat aren't equipped with equipment to do large pieces, so you're limited on where you can take it. The longest sword I've done to date is 6'11" from tip to pommel and it weighs in just shy of 11lbs - if you're just trying to do a single piece it's a little cost prohibitive to pay $522 just to have a piece hardened and tempered. It really only made sense for us because we were doing 200+ swords per run so we got the price down to about $5.80 a piece if I recall correctly and we'd do a few runs each year but it's still an expense we didn't need so I built our first heat treat oven, vertical and capable of accepting 48" long blades. It was 240vac and controlled by a PID/thermocouple, capable of reaching 2100F but it really wasn't the best design and poorly insulated to boot. Our current heat treat oven is horizontal, with an opening 13"x11"x60" deep - it also doubles as a forge capable of hitting welding heat over the entire 5ft length and in winter it does triple duty by being our shops furnace - 15 minutes on and we're opening doors. Here's a picture of it right before I finished construction, it's the behemoth in the corner of the shop - made of 310lbs of I-beam, about 100lbs of refractory cement and better than half a roll of kaowool. -J

Ironically it's the exact same threading for acetylene and propane, CGA-510 or CGA-300 depending on the tanks used, but they're completely interchangeable. I think CGA-510 is also the old bbq grill threading. But as to what the original poster asked, my local AirGas has exchanged cylinders when I wanted to switch gasses and yours should too, as long as it's in date. Which btw is a good way to keep your tanks inspected. J

DSW, I'm thinking the one in Center County. Frosty, my most favorite time is my last demo of the day because the audience decides what I'm going to make. Sometimes I have someone do a quick sketch, sometimes it's an innocent child yelling out something like "a goblin scratcher" - whatever it is I have fun, get to do a lot of improv and the audience gets a kick out of it. My favorite is the one guy who shows up once a year, so far I've made him the Butter-knife of Doom and the Spork of Dispare, I ran into him two weeks ago and his brain is churning for this year's fun collectable to finish out the set. Lol J

Try coating it in a thin slurry of premixed chimney cement mixed with a little bit of water (4:1 ratio). Give it a day or two to completely dry out before firing. Should help eliminate some of that scale.. and you can always hand sand or selectively sand just the blade, fading it back to rough towards the spine. J

If it's kids, I've got a number of teachers that "force" their students to watch a demo when they visit for school days, citing it to be "one of the only historically accurate things to see at the Renaissance Faire". Kids days are a lot of fun. For those days I eliminate the double entendre and dig into more of the science behind what I'm doing and the importance of things like mathematics and physics and how they can all be combined to make a sharp and pointy object capable of obliterating one's enemies. One of these days I need to make it to the Grange Fair.. I've driven through the town when it's happening a few times on my way up to Warren County, but never set any time aside to actually attend it. J

Ummm.. Go through the whole heat treat procedure again! Straighten that blade and make it capable of being a real knife some day! You've used good steel, why waste it?! J

Wrong way? I tried balancing it but the darn thing keeps falling over and I don't want to point it up because I'd probably trip and impale myself on it.. if you want it the other way I suppose you could just walk to the other side.. but like you, I set up my tools to be most useful for me, not for anyone else. As for the audience, well, I think we're averaging around 250,000 during a 13 week season, so finding slightly less than 1% that want to watch blacksmithing demo's isn't all that hard, and since my demo's are each different it keeps them coming back for more. Normally I write up my schedule on the chalk board with things like "1pm, Let's Talk About Seax (and break it like we're Irish) - 3pm Wire We Here? (A not so existential look at forge welding a cable knife) - 5pm Get it Hot and Bang it (Audience buys me beer and calls the blade, anything goes!)" I try to keep it "edutational", make 'em laugh a bit and they wont even realized they're learning something! And aside from my set demo's I'm constantly showing someone how to do something or working on small projects.. something about the sound of the anvil attracts customers. J