Peening a tang

[Chris Waldon]

I'm going to be attempting a basic dagger soon, and, for historical accuracy reasons, I'm wanting to peen the tang. However, while I have seen this done in a video, I'm still not entirely sure how to do it without damaging the blade. Could I get some instructions for this?

Also, on a related note, is it a myth that you can heat the crossguard of a blade, slide it up to the position it will occupy on the tang and when it cools it will tighten around the tang and be impossible to remove?

[Brasilikilt]

If I were you, I would practice on some bits of scrap about the same size as your tang and do a couple trial runs before peening the tang of your dagger.

Get the piece red hot only in the area to be peened, and allow it to cool slowly in some fireplace ashes in order to anneal it.

once the metal is cool to the touch, clamp the blade very tight in a vise between 2 blocks of wood with the tang pointing up. slide the parts of your handle onto the tang to check to see if everything is fitting together correctly. At this point you might want to put some leather washers in between the cross guard and handle and maybe another between the handle and end cap.
Make sure you have some kind of metal washer (preferably matching the cross guard material)to peen onto, and make sure that there's no too much metal sticking out..about 1/4" is good.

Use the round end of a ball peen hammer to make several light to medium blows evenly on the corners and edges of the tang, or else you may see the tang bend to far in one direction.....you should see it starting to mushroom.

Continue doing this until you have peened the tang down far enough to cause your handle to tighten up.

If done correctly, your handle will be solid.

Hope this helps

[ThomasPowers]

DANGER that method of "annealing" may result in HAZ brittleness.

I'd try to just fully draw temper on the end of the tang staying *below* the critical temperature and keeping the blade cool. Historically the tang usually wasn't hardened to start with and sometimes wasn't even hardenable. There are examples where wrought iron was forge welded to a blade to make the tang. Are you going to make a small dimple in the end of the pommel to fill with the tang when it's hammered? Allows you to smooth over the end without worrying about removing all the swell.

You will definitely need some non-marring jaws for your vise to hold the blade in place while riveting.

Yes you can heat shrink parts on with very good results *IF* your fitting is nigh on perfect---chilling the blade can help too.
I heat shrunk a war hammer head onto a steel shaft intending to rivet it down later; but after 10+ years it still hasn't budged.

Note that if it lodges in the wrong place it can be very hard to extract without damaging a blade.

[Mainely,Bob]

What are some of the techniques you folks use to keep one section of a piece from coloring while heating something such as this tang up to dull red or higher?
I used a wet rag once and it created a narrow differential zone I wasn`t happy with.
I`m having better luck using copper chill bars but wondered what others do.

[ThomasPowers]

Anytime you get up to critical you can have issues with auto quenching (self quenching, etc). One thing to do to help avoid this is to heat the entire piece up to its draw temp so any quenching gets automatically tempered. But this makes the piece hard to work with.

One way to draw a tang further back while keeping the blade cool is to stand it in a can of water that reaches up to the tang and use a propane torch on the rest of the tang.

[Akad]

Also, on a related note, is it a myth that you can heat the crossguard of a blade, slide it up to the position it will occupy on the tang and when it cools it will tighten around the tang and be impossible to remove?

It'd be very hard to remove, certainly. Here's the science, it's pretty simple really:

Warmer objects have faster moving particles, and so they expand more. When cooled, they move slower and thus contract. Now, if you heat the crossguard up just enough so it can slip over the tang, once it cools down it would be very tight.