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I Forge Iron

anyone ever tred a mace?


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I built a combination Mace - Bottle opener on a bet... lost the pics to a hard drive crash... A friend and I were talking about most unlikely items to combine... so we went back and forth and came up the the mace bottle opener

... He loves it ... get pictures of smashed stuff once in a while with no explanation... it is great..

for as simple as a mace is.. meaning a heavy jagged item on a stick that is swung at opponents ... there is a lot that goes into making one...

you should put up pics of what you did get done for some suggestions of how to proceed better next time

Cliff

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For setting spikes you can partially form the spike like a nail, then hot punch a small hole in the ball, then have the spike cool and the ball hot and drive the spike in. As the spike heats it should mushroom or clench nail in the ball as it gets hot. Then heat the spike and forge the other end.

No I haven't made a morning star, but I have ruined a punch.

Phil

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no, cant say that ive tred a mace, but ive tred on quite a few rakes, never ended well :P sorry, i can be that way. but i digress. i would make a mace by punching a hole in a block of steel, and adding any projections on by welding, brazing etc. i would make a morning star by startinh with thw ball and drilling blind holes in it and making spikes out of round or tennoned square, then shrinking, shreading, or brazing them into the ball. just my thoughts. hope they were helpful.


Ed Steinkirchner

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Maces/morning stars tended to not be that heavy; heavy = slow and slow = dead on a battlefield.

They tended not to be as large as hollywood portrays them too.

I have made several of each based on museum examples; sorry they predated digital pictures (back in the '70's)

On making a flanged mace: I once posited that one could make a flanged mace by taking a sheet of wrought iron and folding it, welding the fold and then cutting the first flange out of it and then folding it again and welding it and cutting the second flange, usw until you have them all done and then rolling it around a mandrel and welding the seem where the sheet would overlap.

Another method would be to forge the WI flanges and then forge weld them to the WI tube---I think the integral flanges would be stouter though.

Spikes were more a "holy water sprinkler" item often made from wood with WI spikes added to improve bite. for maces and morning stars spikes were often low and pyramidal just to help the item not glance in use and so transfer the energy into the target.

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Maces/morning stars tended to not be that heavy; heavy = slow and slow = dead on a battlefield.

They tended not to be as large as hollywood portrays them too.

I have made several of each based on museum examples; sorry they predated digital pictures (back in the '70's)

On making a flanged mace: I once posited that one could make a flanged mace by taking a sheet of wrought iron and folding it, welding the fold and then cutting the first flange out of it and then folding it again and welding it and cutting the second flange, usw until you have them all done and then rolling it around a mandrel and welding the seem where the sheet would overlap.

Another method would be to forge the WI flanges and then forge weld them to the WI tube---I think the integral flanges would be stouter though.

Spikes were more a "holy water sprinkler" item often made from wood with WI spikes added to improve bite. for maces
and morning stars spikes were often low and pyramidal just to help the item not glance in use and so transfer the energy into the target.


wow amazingly informative thomas! I am still learning to weld. I have a little HF 110 that am rewiring it for running on 220 hopefully that will make it a little better.
Thanks so much for letting me in on some knowledge!
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Funny that this comes up, because I was looking at that mace page about a month ago and researching how to make a flanged mace. And Thomas, in the course of that research I found the old post you're talking about! That's a clever suggestion you have there. But why would you need to cut the flanges? Why not just make one big series of accordion style folds, then weld the two ends? (Then copper braze the whole thing to the socket, as seems to have been the case with some of the originals.)

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I was thinking about some of the lovely pierced work gothic maces where the flanges go out to an peak in the middle and simple folding would just get you straight flanges.

I had a friend duplicate one of the parrying daggers that when you slide a stud the sides of the blade pop open. He had been wondering about heat treat of the side pieces till he examined the original carefully and noticed that it had the springs brazed on (and so could not have been heat treated afterwards).

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Before I started researching, I wondered if some of the flanges might have been brazed onto the sockets as individual units, though it'd take some planning to do that. I kind of pictured each individual flange as a separate piece, with a couple lugs projecting from the side that'll lie next to the eye, and matching perforations in a sheet of wrought. Insert lugs into holes, pein from the back side, roll up the sheet, then braze the flange joints for extra strength. The ends of the sheet that forms the socket could be welded (before the brazing) or brazed themselves. The riveted lugs would hold everything in place during brazing, as well as providing extra strength.

That was my just idea; I have no evidence that it was ever used "back in the day." It's probably not very efficient, in terms of time.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Having read the answers here and looking at the examples ... could you take a piece of 3/8" plate, cut to the right length, punch 4-5 1/4" holes in it along a central line and forge weld nail like points into the holes, then form the 3/8" plate around a mandrel (leaving a tapered hole like on a hawk) and forge weld it shut ... the points will point outward from the core and can be of any length... couldja??

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I've never made a mace, but I have a thing for making Semi-functional war-hammers out of unlikely/recovered materials. You may try that for your mace, if you are only making one for fun or if you favor an "interesting" look over functionality for this particular project. 3 Pound bridge bolts make great hammers and are fully HT-able, for example (I'll post pictures upon request).

I think I've been inspired to make a mace now. :P

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I've never made a mace, but I have a thing for making Semi-functional war-hammers out of unlikely/recovered materials. You may try that for your mace, if you are only making one for fun or if you favor an "interesting" look over functionality for this particular project. 3 Pound bridge bolts make great hammers and are fully HT-able, for example (I'll post pictures upon request).

I think I've been inspired to make a mace now. :P



Great idea sounds fun post those pics wll ya?
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I did a metal sculpture for the yard of a giant icosahedron. Twenty triangles welded together make a geometric figure close to looking like a mace. These triangles were 12" big and this ended up being 26" point to point. I couldn't tell anyone how to blacksmith one of these but if you pick up a 20 sided dice for Dungeons and Dragons you would have a small model of this. Just maybe food for thought. Spears.

post-9545-027391500 1273853189_thumb.jpg

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as far as morning star maces are concerned i cant say any more then what everyone else has said but if your talking about a flail i once saw someone use "strips" with spikes attached to form a ball...so basically take your flat stock, fold it over (about 3 inches or so) forgeweld each end, open up the center and round it and shape welded ends into spikes...and repeat im not sure how he attached them but an easy way would be to rivet them together and it cuts down on weight by a ton!

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  • 1 month later...

Here are a few of em'. The hexagonal face is the bridge-bolt. The roundy-round guy is a new one that is not yet complete. It's face is made of 4140 and has a mild-steel body. The spikes on both are just rail-road spikes pounded down into tapers. The square faced hammer is actually the one I use to smith. It was an old maul that was left in the dirt. :D

post-12446-048556700 1276830492_thumb.jp

post-12446-035555600 1276830521_thumb.jp

post-12446-038516400 1276830541_thumb.jp

post-12446-039449100 1276830559_thumb.jp

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