HondoWalker

I've started using full strength epoxy on my knife handles. Gives it a glossy finish and will keep the wood from getting to and soft.

First knife I ever made was deer bone handle. It does good. It has held up too. Made that knife 37 years ago.

This knife is the last thing I will forge for a long while. My forge is outside under a tree and my heart condition has worsened to the point that I'm not allowed to be out in the Carolina heat anymore. I really like smithing. It's been fun. My last try at tongs did what the last three tries did. They broke. Right on the hole for the bolt. Drilled it once and punched it out once and used a combination of the two. All broke after about ten minutes of use. The knife is made from a piece of steel that had been living in my dad's tool box for 40 years. It was a small flat piece about 2 x 3 inches and about 1/8 inch thick. I wanted to see if I could forge that thin of a piece into a working knife. I think I did that. The handle is elm and the hilt is nickel silver. I put my mark on it upside down. Didn't mean to. Hopefully they will get my heart fixed and this fall I can go back at it.

I made a spoon today. And roughed out another knife. The knife was a section of 3/4 grounding rod. The spoon was a bolt. Thought I had a steel bolt I was going to use as a rivet, but it wasn't steel. I know if you burn brass it turn the coal yellow and makes whit smoke, what makes green flame and white smoke? Cause it burned up quick leaving no trace.

I looked it up. Apparently I've been doing it since I was a kid. Just never knew it had a specific name. I always called it filing no matter how you did it.

Never heard of draw filing. What is it and how do I do it? I was going to pour a bronze bowl when I made the bronze. My crucibal melted though and I only got one flat piece. It became the hilt.

Still needs a lot of polishing, but it's what I've been doing in my shop lately. Brass made from scratch and blade made from old farming equipment someone buried 50 years ago at my mother's house. My first forged knife. Second one using deer antler. I was 15 when I made the first one. So it's been a while.

I gather that when the iron starts sparking like a sparkler it's too hot, but shouldn't that be hot enough to forge weld? So far I'm batting 0 on the welding. I've nearly finished my first real knife, just needs polishing and cleaning up. Where would a person get brass for making hilts? Luckily there was a dollop of brass I made when my crucible melted. It was just enough for a small hilt. But it's all I could use. And it is odd brass, made of copper, lead, tin, and zinc. (what I had laying around the shop when I went to melting stuff.) I figure a graphite crucible in a coal fire would just burn up. So I'll have to make a ceramic crucible, do I just use regular clay out of the ground? My memory isn't reliable since the strokes so if I'm repeating myself just ignore it I guess.

I mostly failed in the shop today. First up tried to make tongs today. I got the hole punched in it and that's where it broke. So I made half a tong today and I still have the good part of the first try. Going to attempt to join them. A knife I was working on kept getting too hot and melting. Got a 2 inch piece of tang melted off. Found it in the clinkers. Despite getting hot and being mashed together the hole that was in the metal decades before I found it refused to weld together so it stretched out about four inches long. I remade the tang and beat it into a blade. Kind of shoddy looking but it quenched well and got hard. It'll be handle making and polishing this week. My workshop is in my attic and it gets unbelievably hot up there. Have to take my time up there. I'll post the knife it when it's finished.

It is 1/2 inch rebar. Don't know more than that about it

I finally got to try out the tongs I made.And they worked perfectly about 5 heats. Then one of halves broke off. I quickly reformed it and tried again only it too broke off. I'm going to make another one this weekend. I think the problem was an accidental temper. The half I was working with was getting too hot to hold but it wasn't glowing. So I dippedc it in the water to cool it off. I think that tempered it. made it brittle and made it break. I might be wrong. So far it's the only reason I can figure why it happened. Any better ideas on a cause?

Thanks for the great tips. Now I gotta conince the wife to take me to the machinist shops and such. She isn't very supportive of my hobbies but she helps a little. I am disabled and can't drive. Lost too much eyesight due to strokes. Also lost a ton of my coordination and balance. It took me three years to be able to turn bowls that don't look like Micheal Fox made them. Learning how to drive nails again in my free time. It isn't fun if it's not hard to do.

Well my budget is as close to zero as you can get. I built my forge out of car parts and donated cinderblocks. My first 5 forgings I did using channel locks and corn tongs from the dollar store. It was very difficult using those things. I needed tongs. So I looked online and people want $50 for those things! No way can I afford that. I scrape up the $4 in change I found and went to Lowes and bought a piece of rebar. I forged a set of tongs out of it. Yeah they're not very good. Didn't expect them to be. But they work far, far better than dollar store corn tongs. I figure I can muddle through with them long enough to aquire the talent needed to make good tongs. Sorta like my anvil. It is a piece of 2 inch thick by 8 inch round sunk into a large chunk of wood. I might be able to get the $15 anvil at Harbor Freight in a few weeks but I keep hearing they suck. I would like to have a real anvil but it's just not possible.

Yeah I did not know about zinc toxicity. When I put that lock in the forge the brass burned out of it and the zinc turned my coal white. Lucky for me I guess my forge is outside in the open air so I didn't breathe any of it. Still learning new things.

Maybe I should have wrote: The only steel that I could find that is not way too thick to easily turn into tongs. My step son has a stripped Mitsubishi truck in my yard that I cut pieces off to forge. It has no springs to take. He has sold all of it he can and there's not nuch left. The leaf springs will be gone when I get to be home and work on things. I found an ancient bar of steel on a one inch thick formerly threaded rod. I've got most of the chunks of rust off it. I'll figure out what to make when it's heating up in the forge.

I made a set of tongs that still need adjusting. I used a bolt to hold them together since I don't have the thing you drive rivets through to shape and size them. It got me wondering, Can't I take a bolt and use it as a rivet? Does that work? And my second question is: I have a broken file. Can I put the piece in the tongs when they are red hot an hit it a few times with a hammer and get that grippy texture on my tongs?

I was using corn tongs and channel locks before. So today I made my first set of tongs. Only steel I could get was rebar. The guys on youtube make it look easy. They're crude and will need adjusting in the forge. I think they will work better than what I had before.

Not from today, from since 5-1 It's everything I've done so far. Not too bad for a guy with no experience and only about 25% of remaining vision and hands and fingers all screwed up and not working very well. I've been disabled by 7 strokes. Gave me a ton of free time and cranked up the difficulty level .

Made a knife out of an old mower driveshaft. Learned that one cannot use a steel crucible. Now I've got a few ounces of copper stuck to the bottom of my forge. When I get some clay and rebuild the forge I'll recover my metal.

Made my first hook today. I had a small piece of quarter inch bar stock and beat it into a hook. Used my brand new cross peen hammer to do it. Reckon I'll be able to learn this hobby if the wife would quit complaining about me forging things. I

Had a broken lock and saw all those layers that were riveted together and wondered if they would forge weld into a usable piece of metal and no, it wouldn't. It was a waste of time. Well that's how we learn. Right?

My father was a machinist. He died in 1986. Most of the stuff in his toolbox was his. I dug out a piece of steel he had and got to beating it into a bar. It really didn't want to become a bar but I kept hitting it until it had become one. When it cooled I got to looking at it and the end had started to crumble. It was hard like it had been heat treated. It barely gave off any sparks when I tried to clean it up a little. I've read quite a bit about spark tests and such but this didn't seem to fit in with the other descriptions. Am I correct in thinking this may not be workable? I wanted to try to make a knife out of it but the end crumbling seems to say it won't work.

Didn't make anything metal today. Yesterday I took an old bolt that had been my toolbox for over 30 years and turned it into a butter knife. Also I used my forge to heat some brass for casting, which did not work. It melted but didn't cast. Had too much water in my greensand. Today I took a piece of noak tree and made a nice sized bowl out of it.

Was cleaning the clinkers out of my forge today and found that I melted one of the walls! I knew cinder block would get soft and crumble over time. But I had no idea I'd melt it. I was planning on upgrading at some point anyway. Guess it'll be sooner than I thought.

Here's the draw knife. Barely cuts but it's my first thing i've smithed. I'll probably get better at it. I wasn't very good at turning wood for the first couple years either.