Viking Dagger

Vikings didn't really use daggers as far as we know.  But that doesn't mean I can't make daggers in a viking style!

 I did all the forge-welding of this blade in J. Arthur Loose's Viking Dagger class at the New England School of Metalwork a year or more back.  I just didn't have time to forge out the bevels in class, and it sat for a year or so before I got around to it.  The core of the blade is two pattern-welded rods of 1095 and 15N20 that I was attempting to make into a serpent pattern, but ended up with something more like tangled strings.  I wrapped and edge bar of 1084 around the core and welded it on. The blade overall is finished down to 800 grit, but the wrapped edge I took down to 2000 grit so it's pretty much a mirror finish.  If you look carefully in the picture above you can see the snow reflected in the blade along the upper edge.  This is a larger version of this blade, which I made in the same class from the same billets of steel.

The fitting of the blade are all bronze castings I carved myself in wax.  I used this dagger as an excuse to push myself and see what I could accomplish, so not only did I try complex carvings, but I also taught myself to cast gems in place in the bronze.  That took some learning--you're looking at the third hilt here.  The first two I didn't hollow out enough space behind the gem for the investment to form a strong supporting pillar and the rush of liquid bronze into the mold broke the gems loose and they were lost somewhere in the interior of the hilt.  Between the hilt and the pommel I lost 6 rubies.  Luckily lab-grown rubies are only $3 each in this size.  They are 'real' rubies in that they are the exact same substance as a natural ruby, but because they come from a lab they are 1/1000th the price.

The decorative theme is kind of a mash-up of Nordic/Celtic and my own work which I think looks like Dungeons & Dragons meets Roman friezes.

The sheath is a core of quince wood.  I split the board in half and carefully carved out a space for the blade using chisels.  I took a clue from Japanese scabbard makers and didn't use any sandpaper, because you risk leaving behind a grain of abrasive that will scratch the blade when it is drawn/inserted.  The core is wrapped in leather, fittings are attached, and the whole thing is waxed.

The handle is ebony that had been sitting in my shop for literally 20 years.  Wish I'd stocked up more back then :-\

And then there's that question that always comes up with blades like this--is it a sword? The blade itself is 16" long, 23" overall.  I guess it depend on who is holding it.  For my 5'6" daughter it's a short sword.  For a big guy it would be a dagger, and for a hobbit it's probably a full blown sword.  I'm inclined to call it a short sword because of the way it handles.  But hey, whoever buys it can categorize it any way they want.

Little Things

Blōdlǣtere took me so freakin' long to make that I've been just doing some little things while I build up my patience for another big piece.  
I made this knife out of the piece of tang I had to chop off Blōdlǣtere so it would fit in the heat treating oven.  Given that relationship, I decided to name it Finger-Pricker as a counterbalance to the pretentiousness of "Blōdlǣtere".  

You can also see little thing #2 in this pic - the thumb ring.  It's a simple band of 20ga sterling silver I made in my jewelry class at Guilford Art Center.  I stamped it with the same stamp I used on the sheath.
Having gained a partial clue after 26 years of marriage, the second thing I made in class was a set of earrings for my wife.  They are sterling silver with bezel set  onyx:

 The third little thing is an amethyst ring I made for my daughter.

So in the future I should be setting some stones in the sheaths and handles of my knives, and I'll probably end up making some jewelry for sale too.

Blōdlǣtere

"My name is Blōdlǣtere. I burst asunder mail.  I rend flesh.  MHB made me."

Or at least I think that what the runes on the blade say in Old English.  Blōdlǣtere is old english for blood-letter. I feel like I've been working on this puppy forever.  It took me well over 100 hours to make this.

It's a broken-back seax, the kind that would have been used in the British Isles during the Dark Ages.  I think it might qualify as my first sword: the blade is a little over 19" (490mm) long, and the overall length is 28".  It's 1 3/4" (45mm)wide at the break (the peak of the blade).  It's a fairly thick blade (made from 1075).  The spine is 6.5mm thick at the break, and it tapers slightly back toward the handle where it's 4.5mm.  Despite it's size it only weighs in at 1 lb 7 oz.  The point of balance is 4" in front if the handle, and the node of rotation is about 1" in front of the break (12" out) so it handles just about right for a hacking/slashing blade.  It feels very good to my hand.
As you can probably tell from the photos, I hand-sanded it to a fairly high polish (600grit), so it's hard to get a good picture of the runes.  This is the best one so far:

The runes were cut into the blade when it was still soft, and I hammered Nu Gold wire into the grooves.  Nu Gold is a copper alloy that looks a lot like 18k gold.
I have to say my favorite part of making this seax was casting all the fittings in bronze.  It really lets you take the whole package to the next level of bling:

Most of the hardware here is stuff that I posted about already when I was making it - I carve the original in wax and then cast copies of it

The handle is a piece of black walnut from a tree my brother and I felled.  I carved a couple of Celtic fighting dogs on it.  Unfortunately it appears Dover is not longer listing where the images they put in their books came from, so I can't tell you about it's origin.  Color me peeved.  And the same is true for the leather carving on the sheath:

I hardened the sheath by heating it to 200 degrees and brushing on liquid bees wax.  This makes it fairly waterproof, but more important in this case is the stiffening.  With such a long blade and heavy sheath hardware the sheath tended to bend.  I had visions of the owner sheathing the blade and the tip coming out the side of the sheath - not good at all.
I also learned my lesson with my last war knife: here's a shot for scale.  Definitely not a pocket knife.

I'll probably put this up for sale on Etsy in a couple weeks, but first I have some saplings to cut with it, and a conference to take it to.

Bronze: Sprues & Captive Rings

Still obsessively casting bronze.  I have a 19"seax and a 16" dagger both of which will get cast bronze fittings and sheath work.  Getting bronze to pour is one thing, and getting the objects to come out correctly is another.  It's largely a matter of spruing them correctly (making the channels for the metal to pour in).  People call it an art, but it's really a science.  It's all about hydraulic turbulence in the metal and cooling rates as the metal flows through the mold.
I decided to try a complicated casting this week.  One problem I've been encountering  in making the sheathes for my seaxes is the relationship between the sheath hangers and the rings they are connected to.  If you look at the two hangers below you can see the problem.  The hanger on the left looks ok, but it's function isn't optimal.  Because the strap exerts some sideways pressure the hanger tends to turn, even if the rivet is very tight.  The solution is two rivets, which is what I did for the sheath on the right.  But it has it's own problem - the ring doesn't fit over the hanger, so you have to carefully bend in the 'wings' on one side and slip the ring onto the hanger, then flatten it back out.  That is not going to happen with cast hangers.

I could make bigger rings, but they'd look stupid.  They'd be out of proportion.  I could split the rings and then solder them back together, but that's a bit of work and feels...  like it's too much of a compromise.  I've looked at the original baltic area seaxes and they solved the problem by making rings out of a couple of wire wound around a couple times.  It's authentic, but not what I'm looking for.

The solution I'm trying is sheath hangers with captive rings. What's a captive ring? It's a ring that can't be removed from another object without breaking the object.  What I did with both of them is create the hanger in halves in wax.  Then I took the wax ring and put it over the neck of one half, wax-welded the two halves together and voila!  a captive ring.

The big technical problem now is spruing.  The hanger & ring that are closer in the picture below were a success because the metal was delivered as directly as possible to the parts

The ring below failed to fill because the sprue to the outer ring was connected to the corner of the hanger, so the hanger essentially stole the rings metal.  By the time the hanger was full the metal had cooled too much for the remained metal in the pour to get to the ring.  Bummer.

Here's a shot from a couple ours later where I've gotten the spruing down.  Note the each sprue has one and only one destination:

Here's the final result - a nicely proportioned sheath hanger ready to install.

Bronze!

I have wanted to be able to cast my own bronze pieces since I first did lost wax bronze in 1985 in Senior Sculpture Seminar.  I finally got there this weekend!  It was more than a little bit nerve-wracking.  I was heating the metal for my first pour and it wasn't melting.  I started getting flashbacks to my last attempt in 1994 when I had a primitive set-up and the furnace just didn't have the juice to melt the bronze.  I was doing it just like we did in class - what could be wrong?  All the little mental hamsters were running around in my head panicking:  
"Oh my God! We're doomed to failure!"
"All that money wasted you idiot!"
"We should have stayed home and darned socks you moron!"
And then the sleeping polar bear in the back of my head opened one eye and said two words:
"MORE POWER"

Duh.  I turned the torch up, and it melted.  Unfortunately I was still discombobulated enough  that I forgot to turn the vacuum puller on and tipped the crucible too fast, so half the bronze ended up on the machine, on the counter, and on the floor.  So I ended up taking this nice wax tree:

And turning it into this pile of bronze poop:

Luckily I calmed down and the second mold went much better:

This is what you should end up with - an exact replica of the wax tree in bronze.  If you look carefully you'll see one of the rings didn't fill completely.  I thought about it for a while and decided I hadn't let the bronze get hot enough.  It had just gotten past the slushy stage (yes, metal gets slushy. It's a very weird sensation.  It's just like stirring a margarita except that it's 1800 degrees warmer.)

Saturday I made a second set of molds, and things went much better.  Again, I forgot to turn on the vacuum on the first flask, but remembered 2 seconds after I poured the metal, so I only lost one of the two fittings.  The second flask went great.

I'm sure this weekend will go even better, but I consider this a pretty good haul for my first solo casting attempt with a new set-up: 

You should see these pieces again as part of completed knives & scabbards.  That is if I can tear myself away from sculpting and casting long enough to actually put a knife together.

Wire Inlaid Blade

I made a utility knife that's a little different than my normal style.

I went with a simple geometric theme.  It started because this knife was a proof-of-concept for inlaying non-ferrous wire into the blade before heat-treat.  Cutting the dovetail grooves in the steel is way easier when the steel is soft.  I've seen people do it after hardening by only hardening the edge and leaving the back soft so they could still cut the steel.  I didn't really want to do that because it limits your design options, and it probably wouldn't work well on a knife this small.

Luckily, it worked!  I left extra metal sticking proud of the grooves when I did the heat treat, and hammered it in some more after the blade was tempered.  I don't know that I needed to, but i figured why take chances that stuff moved around during the heating & quenching.  The inlay metal I used is Nu-Gold, which is a copper &Zinc alloy that looks a lot like gold, but only costs about 1/1600th what gold costs.
the 3 lines on the blade became 3 right angles on the guard, which I cut in with an engraving tool.

And the 3 right angles turned into this when they got the pommel.

The handle is some stabilized maple from Pete's woodpile (again).  It was nicely spalted (invaded by fungus after death).

And just because, here's a shot of the knife without the wooden handle on it.  It lets you see how the tang of the knife extends through the handle to the back.  It also shows how thick the tang is which is important for strength.  And yes, it is a pain to cut a tapered rectangular hole through the wood and not break through the surface of the handle.

Lost Wax Casting

I took a most awesome class at PetersValley this last week: lost wax casting for jewelry.  I took it because I wanted to make knife parts, and it was fantastic!  It was taught by Paul Nielsen, and the studio manager/artist in residence was Kristal Romano.
The basic idea is that you make something in wax and embed it in a plaster mold:

This is a wax butt cap for a knife set up on a base for casting.  The metal cylinder behind it will go over the top and the whole thing gets filled with plaster.  The wax gets melted out, and hot metal is poured in.  Let the metal cool, break away the plaster, and you get these:

The metal version of the wax from in the first picture the second one back.

Once you clean these rough castings up, you end up with something like this:

And even better, if you make a rubber mold of the original first, you can make multiple wax copies, and thus multiple metal copies:

A couple of the wax copies are on the right.  The ones on the left are white bronze, and the ones in the middle are classic bronze.  So sometime in the next couple months I should get some knives done with fancy cast guards!

Sgain-Dubh

I just finished my first sgian-dubh.  A sgian-dubh is the little knife Scotsmen carry in their sock.  It's going to an old friend who is (or at least used to be) a piper.  I made sure I played bagpipe music while making it.

The blade is 1084, the handle is African blackwood I carved into a spiral, and the fittings are nickel silver with my primitive attempt at engraving them.

The spine has a tapering vine pattern carved into it, and the sheath is designed to go in a sock, of course.  The whole knife is only 8" long, split evenly between handle and blade.

First Chef's Knife

I took the plunge and tried my first chef's knife.  I think chef's knives are some of the hardest knives to make correctly because they need to be so thin.  It makes forging, heat treat, and grinding that much harder - you've got almost zero room for mistakes.

It's made from 1084 with brass bolsters and pins, and the handle is caramelized stabilized maple from a tree I cut.  The blade is 8", and despite my best efforts it's a little too thick (d'oh!).  I ground the edge down to 0.5mm before sharpening, but it really needed to be more like 0.3mm.  The pine is about 2.8mm in the middle, but again it needed to be more like 2 mm (or less).  As small as these differences are, they make a big difference in the performance of the knife.  We've been using it for a week now in the kitchen, and it tends to get stuck cutting raw sweet potatoes and other root vegetables.  This leads to pushing a bit harder, which is what leads to accidents.  It's great for meat and it chopped peppers  & onions last night with no effort.  But as a professional chef friend who played with it said "it's not for fine work."

So, not a failure, but not really what I wanted.  The next attempt will be a 6" chef from O-1 tool steel.  O-1 has a much longer window for getting it into the quench from the kiln, so super thin blades are easier to heat treat because you don't have to worry nearly as much  about heat loss.

Beautiful Failure

Learning often hurts.  I learned a lot with this blade, and it was incredibly painful.

This seax was going to be a beauty.  19" long blade out of 1075.  I'd cut two fullers down each side.  The tapers were not quite what I wanted but were in the acceptable range.  I had a nice handle planned for it.  Then the trouble began...
After heat treat the blade still  had a little more up-sweep than I wanted.  Single edge blades curl downward when quenched in oil, up when quenched in water.  Katanas are forged straight and only get their characteristic curve when quenched in water.  I had forged this blade with a bit of a curve upwards, knowing it would curl down a bit.
The bigger problem was that it wasn't  uniformly hard on the edge.  Some spots were nice and hard, others were quite soft.  So I decided to heat treat again.  The blade curled down to exactly where I wanted it (the shape in the photo), but again it had weird splotchy hardening that didn't really make sense.  Back into the heat treat oven.
I let it soak for 7 minutes at temp this time, even though 1075 doesn't need it.  My theory was that was such a big mass of steel it wasn't completely getting up to temp.  Wrong - same result.  And now the blade had a slight downward curve-ok, but not ideal.  So one more time.  This time upped the temp 50 degrees and soaked again.  The results were better, but still not ideal.  And now it was definitively curved down.  I pondered...
My next theory was that the problem was me.  Simple carbon steel needs to go from it's critical temperature to below 900 degrees in less than a second.  Because this blade was so big, I think I was simply missing the window because it took me a second or more to get it our of the kiln and into the oil.  Because I was missing the window, pearlite (a softer form of steel) was starting to form in spots.  This would explain the splotchy pattern of hardness, which was very different from what I'd see if the blade were inadequately heated.  It didn't help that I was using McMaster-Carr Fastquench oil, which is an 11 second oil.  Simple carbon steel would harden better in a faster oil (5-6 second) or water.
With the ugly downward curve, and the questionable hardness, I decided I couldn't leave the blade as it was.  Besides, I needed to know!  So I rolled the dice and did a final heat treat.  I heated it to 1550 (50 over normal) set up so I could move from the kiln to the quench as fast as possible, and used 120 degree brine as a quench.  Brine is dangerous because it's so fast a quenchant it can crack blades.  But it's virtue is speed, and being mostly water it would cause the blade to curl upwards.  This would solve both my problems at the same time.
The result?  The picture above is the result.  Edge hardness was decent (I'm still not fast enough), and the blade curled upward to exactly where i had wanted it, but...

This is what makes bladesmiths cry.  I heard the ping of failure about a second and a half into the quench.  I actually heard 3 pings - each a big crack.

So, as painful as it was I learned a few things:
1)  I'm too slow with blades over 12" or so to use simple steels with my current setup.
2)  MC Fastquech is borderline too slow for simple steels.
3)  I hate water & brine as quenchants (kinda knew that already).

The orders went out a couple days ago for some 80CRV2 steel and Parks 50 quenchant.  Hopefully I'll be posting happy picture of a blade similar to this in a couple months (life gets in the way of smithing).

Curved Hunter

Finished a hunting knife this week:

I made it in the process of showing my apprentice Otto how to make a knife.  The blade is 4.5" long and it's 9.5" overall.  It's made from 3/16ths 1084.  I had two main goals for the knife (besides showing Otto what to do):
First, I wanted to explore the handle shape.  The downward curve and the two partial circles leading up to the blade are what makes the shape interesting to me.  It makes it comfortable to hold and gives two distinct hand positions for holding it.  Having the index finger in the partial circle closest to the edge and your thumb on the back of the blade gives great control for small cuts.

Second, I wanted to test out the pin press I built.  It's basically a 12 ton hydraulic jack in a square frame with two dies that down to 1/4" circles.  The bolster on this knife was soldered into place, then I drilled a 1/8" hole through the center of it, tapered both sides with a pin reamer, put a brass pin in the whole, and crushed it with the pin press so it filled out the hole.  You could do this with a hammer, but the pin press has so much more force that the seams between the pin and the bolster become invisible.  It's pretty awesome.

I also got my seams around the handle much closer to perfect on this knife than the last full tang I did.  Still not perfect, but you have to look really closely to see the gaps.

The wood on the handle is caramelized, stabilized maple burls from my brother's wood pile, again.  It's amazing how much great handle material is in people's wood piles when you start looking for it.  I'm also very happy that I invested in a stabilizing set-up.  It cost a few hundred to set up and the acrylic is $100 a gallon, but stabilized wood runs $30-$40 for a single handle so the payback point comes up really fast (10 knives).  I get about 50 handles per gallon of acrylic.

I plan to evolve this design some more.  I want to do it again with a smaller clip in the blade so there is more room for your thumb, and I want to do file work on the back for better grip.

Size Matters

My brother came over today and saw Viveka's War Knife in person for the first time.  "Holy sh!t it's huge!'  was his reaction.  So I thought I'd post this pic for a sense of scale.  I'm just a bit under 6' tall:

It's a BFK (Big F'ing Knife). Almost a Swedish wakazashi...

Viveka's War Knife

I once knew a woman of Scandinavian descent named Viveka.  She was long and lean, strong and sharp.  This knife makes me think of her, and so I named it for her.
(And yes, I do find it kind of pretentious to name a knife.  But then I ran into the problem of referring to individuals knives "You know, the big one with the carving of the dragons on the handle?...  No, not that one, the one I made after that."  Plus listing them on Etsy in a way people might remember is tough--"Seax #12"-- so I bowed to practicality and started naming them.)

Viveka's War Knife is a type of seax called a Baltic war knife because they are found all along the coast of the Baltic sea, and the assumption is that they were used for fighting, among other things.  I started out trying to stay closer to the originals that the Dog Seax I made last year.  The blade is 15" long and 1.25" wide (381 mm by 32 mm).  The spine is just under a quarter inch (15/64th or 5.8mm) at the handle and has a very slight distal taper out the where the point begins where it is 11/64ths (4.4mm).  It's made out of my usual 1084 carbon steel, hand finished to 600 grit.  The bevels are sloped so that before sharpening the edge was .5 -.6mm wide.  I'm going to have to do some experiments with it to see how such a radical change in width affects it's ability to cut.

The original handle i had planned was fairly simple, with the only carving on a small bone inlay.  But then I decided not to do that for technical reasons, and started carving.  The handle is cherry, and the carving is a mirror image on each side.  It's a composite pattern off of two viking animal brooches.  The spacers are brass and the white section front and rear are cow bone.  The runes...  well, I kinda f'ed them up.  Don't ask.  They are burned into the bone using a wood burner (something I wouldn't do again).  The handle is 7" long, so the whole thing is 22" overall without the ring.

The sheath took it's queues from the handle, and so ended up being a long project. It's 8-10 tooling leather with brass fitting I cut & stamped by hand.  The pattern along the blade section comes off of a sword hilt that is in a museum in Finland.  The pattern on the handle section is something I made up, but it's just variation of a very standard Norse/Celtic animal pattern.

While I like this knife a lot, I have to do a simpler knife next.  All those patterns & little metal bits take a lot of patience and make you a bit loopy after a while.  I'll probably try this blade again with a simple wooden handle and a plain sheath.  But first I have a sgain-dubh to do, which at 3" should be a nice change of scale.