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I Forge Iron

Fall 2022 challenge!


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My entry, heavy duty letter opener, 48 layers of wood band saw blade and strapping metal off skid of bricks.quenched in brake fluid  (only clean oil I had),tempered in gas BBQ at 425 for one hour.

  Didn't really need to harden it wanted to see if the welds could survive  a quench. Hickory and copper handle.

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Oooh, so pretty! It gives me another idea to file away - in combo with the dragon head - not sure if this would work:
Have the dragon head at the bolster with open mouth facing toward blade. Forge remainder of handle with scales - maybe even a curled tail. Forge blade out of damascus to get the cool pattern so it looks kind of like the dragon is blowing fire. 
I'm guessing the entire piece would have to be damascus but am I assuming correctly that the pattern only really shows if you etch it? So you could just not etch the bolster/handle portion so the pattern was less visible there?

Fun thing about knowing nothing about what's possible is that it makes it easier to think outside the boundaries, lol. Unfortunate thing is the same, lol, as sometimes the ideas aren't really feasible. But anyway, that's what I'm adding to my notes!

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Dave i like that, simple and elegant. 

Shainaru, I think making the dragon head more like a guard, seperate piece, and a through tang. The handle can be forged then drilled for the tang. Attach it with a fancy nut. Also if you want the blade to look like fire from the dragons mouth i would go with a Kris design. 

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my entry scrap leafspring piece from the shop a little scrap of oak i traded for and some brass pins tempered with a butane torch for pattern. sending to grandparents in Germany for Christmas.

blade is 4" OAL is 7 7/8"

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thanks for the challenge or i wouldn't have made it 

M.J.Lampert

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I learned the technique from a Black Bear Forge video, but I'd seen it previously in some Yellin ironwork. I've made two small improvements to the process: first, instead of using a ball-end punch and a round fuller, I modified a hand fuller to have a round edge as well as a round end, rounding over the corner where they meet into a quarter of a sphere. This means that instead of punching the round divot with the ball-end punch and extending it with the fuller, I can do both operations at once. Second, for this most recent version, I used the fly press rather than messing with the hand fuller and a hammer. It went very quickly and fairly precisely, but I'm still getting the hang of the press.

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