Bonnskij

I finished this little knife the other day and had planned to make a neat wooden scabbard for it and offer it up as my top end type of carving knife on the next market. I ended up getting sick for a few days though and never got time for it. Market day came around today and it sold within five minutes anyway. My type c axe with copper inlay went to a lady who fell in love with it completely and couldn't get it out of her head. My Viking age curved knives are gone. The last one went to a teenager with her mum. Super enthusiastic and clearly just loved it. I was all out of small change by that point, so knocked ten dollars of the price so she could buy it. I have almost no hooks left and just one remaining set of bbq tools. The cleaver would have sold a couple of times, but the blokes that wanted it got shot down by their wives. Ah well. Such is life Really gotta ramp it up for the last haul before Christmas now me thinks. Hoping the steel place gets more 6mm round bar soon. The j-hooks all sold like hotcakes. And I'm all out of axes... Nothing has gone at all like I expected.

My little curly haired three year old can melt any heart I'm sure (: Black bear forge is my favourite youtube smith, so that sounds like a good plan to watch. No idea how much time I spent on the axe. It was more for funsies and as a proof of concept. I made it for an instructables competition and it won me enough money to buy a welder. I'm always debating whether I should price my time exactly as it is, or if I should take into account that I have quite rudimentary equipment and therefore will work slower than someone with say a power hammer, and not try to make the customers pay for my lack of equipment. Even so, I hope I've priced most of my things fairly. My axes, probably not. They took me quite some time. The second axe with the copper inlay took longer han the chain damascus, and if it sells for less than AU$280 I'd rather not sell it at all. Things like hooks i can make fairly quick (or so Iike to think) now. I made the three below last night in 40 minutes, and though I'm not sure of the price to put on them, I think I could put a price that would equal a fair wage.

I don't mind. I wasn't sure what to price it at, but eventually priced and sold it for 180 dollaridoos. Haha! I think my son could pull that off pretty well, though my daughter probably even better. I'll show them / read them A christmas carol a couple of times to illustrate what we need to aim for

Thanks! Yep. I brought it along just as a conversation starter piece last minute really. I didn't expect to actually sell it.

That's it. I keep on accumulating improvised tools and things. But at the moment, though the traditional ring style bottle opener is quite doable, it would just be a very inefficient design for me to make. So on bottle openers, instead of being inventive on the tool side of things, i've decided to be inventive on the product side to get around the challenges.

I don't have a proper anvil with hardy hole and horn, so I've had to adapt my bottle openers accordingly.

I think these ones turned out kinda cool: Sløyd with o1 core and mild steel jacket. Coffee etched. Leaf spring chopper with Tasmanian blackwood and Huon pine handle.

First markets done, and it's been a great although exhausting experience. Not many blacksmiths around here, and a lot of people were head over heals about the things I had on offer. According to the regular stall holders it was very dead compared to how it normally is, but I sold a few things and made a few hundred dollars. I unexpectedly sold my talking / centrepiece. My bike chain damascus axe, so now I'm going to need a new people magnet. For the next market I hope my son understands that sitting under the table yelling "are ya gonna buy something??" is probably not appropriate...

Fair enough. Maybe I can use it in some laminate instead then.

Will, I have gone past my initial goals for blacksmithing, and probably make more blunt than sharp things these days, so i'll certainly keep a pry bar in mind as a project. Well that is certainly encouraging. Seems to be likely to be a mid-high carbon steel. Perfect thickness for both wood carving and kitchen knives too, so that's a good start. Thanks!

Found these two huge leaf springs and saw blade for fifty dollarbucks. The leaf spring must be over 40 kilos each. Not running out of spring steel any time soon. Any idea what steel the saw blade is?

George. I feel the exact same way about the things I make, and it is for that reason I've made my touch mark as well. We only really die when we are forgotten. And thank you both for your encouraging words. It wasn't really a job that made me happy, especially the way things were going. It started as a good job, but one colleague took off to Indonesia to be with his family when the pandemic broke out and has been stuck there since, another got a better job. All the while we got a whole new building for the institute and no additional replacement staff, leaving my manager, me and occasionally casual support staff to pick up all the slack. Only contracts and no job security. Higher education as a whole seems to be suffering in Australia. Full commercialisation and market capitalism is no way to run a university. But I'm rambling. I had no plans to stay indefinitely, but was working on getting the right experience to be able to leave on my own terms. With any luck, my family and I will also be able to change our geographic location to somewhere we are happier as well. Time will tell what is in store for us.

Good point George. I do take pride in the fact that I make everything with the intent to last for ever, however bad that may be for consistent business over the years. Hoping to capture the christmas gift hunters for the markets. I was a bit late to the party, so I didn't get a spot for most of them, but hopefully a couple will do. And who knows what new adventures life has in store. I may not have to bank on a second or third year either. Contract runs until the end of the year, and I get 11 weeks severance pay. I also have another couple of small baskets of eggs. I was three weeks away from being able to access my long-service leave though, which really rubs me the wrong way. And thanks. I don't enjoy the job hunt, but I suppose it's something we all have to do at times. Might be an opportunity or necessity to change my career trajectory.

Yeah. It's a bit of a depressing and surprising turn of events. I'm the last remaining technical staff at the department and the decision to let me go to save money was made by people 400km away from here and earning ten times as much as me. Sounds sensible aye? I'm in science, but have been accumulating experience that I was hoping I could use to eventually pivot into aquaculture. The stereotypes aren't wrong! BBQ's are a big thing here too. Thanks for the tips on the forks and skewers. I'll give it a crack. Hopefully I'll get a good idea of what will sell or not after the first market. I've got about a month to prepare. My contract runs out at the end of the year, so I guess I've got some time to look for a new job too, although the job market is a bit bare bones in my field(s).

Well I've been made redundant, so that's absolutely wonderful... Nevertheless, man's gotta eat. As does everyone else in the household. Among other ventures I'll attempt a couple of markets before Christmas. I might not have the skill of most people on here, but at the end of the day, I do like how many of my things looks and with any luck, so does somebody else. And as it turns out there's not a lot of competition in the tropical blacksmith scene. Here's a few of the things I've finished/ am still working on:

Aah. Well that makes a lot more sense that carbon content would equalise fairly quickly in a billet with hundreds of thin layers. Presumably not something I have to worry about with my three layers. Today I put the billets back in the forge, brought up to non-magnetic and turned off the forge while insulating as best as I could with the billets still inside. After a quick test, files seem to bite on the core now.

How thin layers are we talking? I would have thought that the carbon would be fairly equalised in that case, yet the core is far harder than the jacket. Could it be due to formation of tungsten carbides in the core steel? (Presumably tungsten doesn't migrate, or at least not at the same rate).

Might have to do something like that. I'm not doing any decorative file work or drilling the tang though, so I'll see if I can get away with finishing the blade shape on the grinder. I'm just better with files than power tools that's all. I'm recalling a discussion on bladesmithsforum based on a research paper indicating carbon migration happens extremely quickly and that you'd need a layer of nickel between the steel layers to prevent it. Based on my own anecdotes that doesnseem to be right however.

Certainly won't! Key curry ingredient. No spice left behind!

Well here's a problem: I like to finish knives with hand files, but the o1 core has indeed air hardened, so all my files skates off. Bites fine on the jacket though so my attempt filed the jacket and buffed the core. Bit annoying, but it certainly answered some questions I had about carbon migration. (And looking at the photo I took again, I'm seeing where my daughter put the fenugreek jar...)

With the billets being as thin as they are i will probably grind the bevels on these ones. I will leave the sides rough forged though, so there will be plenty of mild steel on the sides. As for the reason. A little bit of everything I suppose. I think I'm in a sense finding my little niche that I like to focus my forging on, and as far as blades go that is mainly Scandinavian style wood working and outdoor knives (and other bladed tools). Laminated steel is a common feature of many typical Scandinavian knives and so I'm attempting to make a few. I'm not sure the laminated nature of the knives matters much when it comes to something like a sløyd blade that I will be making here, or whether it makes much of a difference when using modern steels for that matter, but I think it makes a nice talking point (and opens up for inlay work later on).

That is always an option. However I'm forging the billet down to around 3mm, and with mild steel moving easier than o1 under the hammer, don't i risk the mild steel being barely present at the end of the forging?

I don't think I have much to contribute in the whey of cheese related puns, and that's probably just as duddleswell. I chose to weld instead of flux for a couple of reasons. I just wanted to try a different approach, I thought I'd have less chance of having parts of my bill oxidise and not weld properly and the flux accumulating on the floor of my forge is getting a bit annoying when I'm not forge welding. Thanks for the advise Buzzkill. I'll keep that in mind for sure. As it stands all my mild steel is either the same thickness or thicker than any high carbon steel I have.

You know, I think that might be the problem. Looks like there's a danger of crack formation when welding o1 and I know absolutely nothing about welding. I managed to grind past the cracks and the rest of the billet looks fine .

It only showed up after a couple of days in vinegar, which is why I thought it could have hardened, but it could ofcourse just be that it only showed up after an extended time in the vinegar. I decided to put it back in the fire again. After vinegar there seems to be a visible crsck down the middle of the o1 on the outer part of the billet: The inside looks fine though. (I cut it in half down the length of it). I haven't tried to forge o1 before myself. I just happened to have a flat bar lying around that I got for free.