Hi all!
New hobbies needed due to quarantine madness, and forging is something I've wanted to try for many years.
A simple place to start seemed to be turning a file into a knife. I had a suitable hardened, high carbon, blunt old file, so needed a forge to anneal and harden it.
This was the (not very pretty) result. Based in an old steel 10" cake tin & £10 pot of fire cement, with a length of electrical pipe for air (connected to a hairdryer via a large paper cone, not in view).
The size is awkward - not really long enough and too deep. I had to heat the file in 3 sections (each end, and the middle). Also the high sides all round mean I can't hold it level in the heat, so one end will always be hotter than the other. I think I need to cut a notch at one end, so I can lay something down along the line of the air pipe.
I used a magnet to judge the temperature, which worked well.
I then shaped the knife blank using various tools: angle grinder, files, belt sander, sharpening stones, sandpaper. Whatever was to hand.
Now, a couple of photos of the closest this knife came to finished. The blade was quite thick, and there are no holes for rivets. The epoxy didn't take well (I guess I didn't clean the residue from the used engine oil quench well enough), so I had to remove the scales and re-anneal it to drill holes in the tang. At the same time I thinned down the blade a little:
Then to practice rivets. I didn't have any rods of soft metal available, so practiced peining mild steel from various sources, in strips of wood of similar thickness to the scales. Although I managed some, I also split the wood just as often, so decided to defer that, and ordered some brass rod on the internet.
Finally, to re-harden it (second time). Sadly, at this point, things went wrong. I must have got the forge too hot, and melted / burnt the tip of the blade.
So, re-annealed (3rd time), re-shaped the blade to shorten it, then re-hardened it (3rd time). That time, either in the forge or quenching, the blade warped. After tempering it I tried to straighten it but it snapped.
So, after all that, I've learned a xxxx of a lot (modification to forge needed to make it shallower, drill holes in the tang early in the process, don't quench in used engine oil, charcoal can get hotter than it needs to be very fast, etc), and feel ready to tackle the next file with confidence! Now to source some old files.