My New Apprentice

I got a new apprentice.  She's really strong and good with a hammer, but not much of a conversationalist:

She won't even tell me her name yet :-\

Some people feel that power hammers are cheating--that it's not authentic.  To be honest, I think that's an ignorant opinion.  In all likelihood no smith ever hammered-out the whole sword himself if he had any choice in the matter.  It's just too much work.  They used apprentices.  If you look at traditional japanese sword smithing,  what little evidence we have of medieval european sword smithing, and pretty much all smithing of larger blades across all cultures you'll see that they all use 1 to 3 strikers wielding sledgehammers to get the work done.
Since I can't find 3 strong people to swing sledgehammers for me in return for food and sleeping under the workbench, I have to use a power hammer.  Not strictly authentic (though they had water-powered trip hammers in Europe by the 1100s), but definitely not cheating.
This hammer is a Ken's Iron MZ75 pneumatic hammer.  Once I get some time in with it I'll probably post a review.
I did manage to make a couple things recently. First is a knife for my neighbor who was nice enough to help me move my three 600lb+ pieces of equipment into the shop this year.  He wanted a knife in the style of a Randal diver's knife, so that's what I made him.

 It's a 7" blade from 80CRV2, hollow ground.  80CRV2 is very similar to 5160 (Leaf springs), but it has another 20 points of carbon for increased edge-holding.  I'll be interested to hear how it holds up.
The handle is linen micarta and the fittings are brass.  I haven't made a modern knife in a while, so it was a nice change of pace.
And on the jewelry front I helped make a couple wedding rings out of damascus steel:

My friends Carolyn and Andrew decided to get married, and wanted damascus steel rings.  Then they remembered I made damascus steel...

To make a long story short, they ended up forging each other's rings (what could be better?) while I stood around and kibitzed.  

First Sword

I finally made a sword:

I started it a year ago in Sam Salvati's excellent western sword class at the New England School of Metalwork.

I'm the dork on the right wearing the white shirt.

We spent a week working our butts off to make a real but plain sword with a rough finish on the blade.

 I got mine home a decided I wanted to clean up the blade and maybe make a sheath.  It turned into a complete rebuild...
I cleaned up the profile of the blade and sanded it down to 400grit.  In the process of shaping and polishing the sword also got sharpened.  You have to carefully shape the edge so that it will be strong enough to take the impact force but sharp enough to cut well.
Once I had the blade finished I decided I couldn't put the rough fittings we'd made in class back on, and the handle needed to be replaced because I'd done such a shitty job on it (addict logic).

Fitting the wax parts to the sword

I carved a hilt and pommel and cast them in bronze.  The handle was once again a piece from my brother's firewood pile - maple burl this time.  I finished it just in time to take it to the Ashoken Bladesmithing conference, which this year was focused on swords :-)

The blade is made of 1084 carbon steel and is 31 inches long.  The sword is 40" overall and weighs 2 1/2 lbs.  It's not any particular type of sword.  If I had put the pommel where the little brass divider is in the handle then it clearly would be a one handed cut and thrust sword.  With the extra handle it's more like a little bastard sword.  The balance, nodes of vibration and rotation are all right for a basic one-handed cutting sword.  The sweetspot is about 2/3rds of the way down the blade so it should cut well.  It feels good in the hand - my friend Emilliano's comment was "I like how it kinda disappears in your hand."

The gems are jade, and the medallion set into the pommel is sterling silver. The medallion is a bit of a Rorschach test...

Up next is the sheath, which will probably take another year since it's a personal project and so I have to fit it in between the paying wok and the rest of life.

Viking belt

I managed to buy some viking age boots I liked, as well as a tunic.  I make my own knives, so now all I needed was a belt.  So I made one:

Now I can go to the Ren Faire this fall dressed as a viking and not have my pants fall down! It's 1 1/4" wide made from 10oz tooling leather.  All the fitting on it are bronze that I carved and cast myself.

The buckle is an enlarged copy of a find in Birka, Sweden that is now in the Swedish History Museum.  What style of viking art it is I'm not sure - I think the distinctions are fairly blurry.  I'm thinking it's Jelling style, but feel free to disagree.

The strap end is based on a jelling style strap end also in a Swedish museum, but I altered the overall shape and composition a bit to fit what I wanted.
The little round plates are a reproduction of a period belt plate I liked.

The strap connector and it's two attaching plates are purely my design.  I tried to make them fit with the overall design of the fittings, but my fingers have seen to much Japanese metalwork and Cthulu has colonized parts of my brain so there are definite influences of both that I would remove if I did these again.
The strap connector is used to join 3 straps coming together - this case the two belt parts and the strap that will hold my seax.
The square plate on either side of the connector makes up a majority of the plates on the belt.  The design is a slightly modified bit from another belt that I liked.

There are also 6 plate in convenient spots around the belt with Loki's face on them that have loops for attaching items to the belt.  In the picture above the last whole plate on the right is one of them.
All  the fitting have integral posts casts on the back that I peened over with a washer for attachment.  Yes, it was a huge amount of hammering - there are 100 posts on this belt.
 For the next run I may try the more traditional method of making the posts pointy.  They get attached by pushing the points through and bending them over.
I will sell copies of the hardware starting this fall in my Etsy store, and make full belts as commissions.

Cherry Bowie

I finally got another knife out the door.  This one is a 7.5" bowie with a cherry handle I made for a friend from high school:

The blade is forged from 1/4" thick 1084 carbon steel.  It's a flat grind that I hand finished down to 400 grit.  It's also got some wire inlay done with NuGold wire (a.k.a. Jewelers Brass, Merlins Gold, and others).

My friend grew up in Durham, and so I used a chuck of cherry from a tree I felled on Maple Av (how ironic), probably half a mile from where he lived.  The handle is extra wide and long (6.25" x 1.25" at the guard) because he's got big hands and has trouble with standard knife handles.
I did most of the handle shaping with a fine saw, wood rasps, and files.  I sanded it with 400grit in the end to remove the micro facets that files leave when making curved surfaces.  Then it got 5 coats of Waterlox wiping varnish and a coat of Renaissance Wax.  The fittings were ground from brass barstock.

The sheath is made from 8-10oz top grade tooling leather, dyed, embossed, and stitched by hand.

I sharpened it down to 16k grit using a sharpening guide, and it's crazy sharp.  I often hold the angle by hand and you can get a very sharp knife that way.  But the guides hold the angle perfectly so when you go past 1k grit for sharpening you end up with an edge that you don't even feel cutting you until it's too late - ask me how I know :-\ 

Lost Wax Casting - A dragon head

A number of friends and customers have asked how I make various pieces of jewelry and blade parts, so I thought I would post a visual run through of how I do lost wax casting.  This isn't really a how-to, just a basic overview.
Step 1) Carving.
First you need something to cast.  I had a customer (Jen) ask for a dragon terminal torc bracelet, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to document my process.  I started with a sketch she had sent me of what she wanted:

I started carving a wax block:

This probably took me about 10 hours to carve.  First you have to get the general shape and mass laid out.  Then you work on bigger features and their placement, and finally on subtle shaping and detail. Yes, you have to carve each and every scale.  It's also hard to see detail in wax, because it's semi-translucent.  This helps with thickness, but makes texture harder to see.  I may move to super-stiff clay sometime in the future.

At this point if your carving is made of wax and you only want 1 of them, you could skip directly to step 3, and just cast it.  This is a bit risky as this is LOST wax casting, and if something goes wrong you have to carve another original.  But if you only need 1, your carving didn't take long, and you are fairly confident of your casting ability it can be the way to go.  I do many of my custom rings this way.  You will get better detail for reasons you will see...

Step 2) Rubber Molding.
I spent 10 hours staring through an optivisor carving this sucker.  There is no way I'm going to risk it being ruined by a lump in the investment plaster or a bad pour on my part.  And on top of that I need another one.  So when you need multiples of something you make a rubber mold of it so you can make more copies.

The mold drying.  The frame is bent aluminum strip with plexiglass sides.

Here's the dragon head being molded in silicon rubber.  There are lots of different ways to do this step, but what I do is use a Room Temperature Vulcanizing rubber (RTV).  I use a fairly expensive product called Sorta-Clear  because I can see through it.  This has a bunch of advantages, but the main one is that I can do a much better job of cutting the mold open.  I can see where to put the dividing lines and have a much better chance of getting the original out unharmed.

The mold.  Note the channel for the wax to injected

Here's the mold cut in half.  The very crooked cutting is intentional - it assures that the mold only goes back together with the sides perfectly matched.  The purple dragon head in there is a wax copy I made with the mold.  It's done by injecting hot wax under pressure.

Wax injection

This is a bit of work, and the rubber and the injector aren't cheap ($200 a gallon/ $300 for the injector), but they pay for themselves quickly:

Now I can make as many copies as I want of the dragon head.  You do lose some detail in the injection process, but we're talking very, very fine detail.  Sharp edges get a little rounded, but on flatter surfaces you still get fingerprint-fine detail.

Step 3) Treeing & Investing.

Now that we have wax models we are ok with losing, we need to set them up for being cast in metal. Sometimes this is very simple as in this picture:

A 2.5" mold base for a single ring casting.  The weighed silver for the casting is in the plastic cup on the right.

This is a single ring stuck on a mold base (more on those in a minute).  I simply used a little soft wax to attach the wax model to the pour cup of the mold and it's ready to go.  But usually for efficiency, I cast more than one thing at a time.  Here are the dragon heads attached to big central sprue, which is usually referred to as a tree, for obvious reasons.

A wax tree on a 4" mold base, setup for a 6" flask.

To make the tree I start with the central sprue (which I cast the same way as the heads), and use a hot wax tool to weld the individual parts to the main sprue.  The rubber part at the bottom is a mold base that gets reused.  Bases come in specific sizes, which match flasks that get inserted into them.

In this picture I've put a flask on top of the mold base.  It has a rim that actually fits down into the edge of the mold base making a water-tight seal.  The sides are covered with masking tape to prevent the investment plaster from running out.  

If you look carefully you can see the tree of wax dragon heads in there.  I realize this may not make much sense yet, but keep reading.  If it helps, everything is upside down right now.

This is the mold filled with investment plaster.  Investment plaster has two important properties.  First, it can withstand high heat. Second, it is very finely porous so that we can suck air through it.

This has to dry for a couple hours.  Then I flip it over, pull the base off it, and remove the tape.  The result is:

The flask on the casting machine.  Note the round hole into the machine on the right.

This is the mold right side up.  That dome on the rubber base has left a cup in the top of the mold where we can pour the liquid metal.  Notice that the wax tree base is right there at the bottom of the cup.  It's just upside down from where it was when we were making it.

The dome at the top and the wax tree are what become the empty space in the investment plaster mold

Now we come to the fun part - BURNOUT.  What we need to do next is get that wax out of there so we can pour hot metal into the space left behind by the wax,which will be shaped just like the tree.  The burnout is done with a kiln, which slowly raised the temperature of the mold to 1350 F.  This takes overnight.  The next morning, I melt metal in my electric furnace.  Most jewelers use a torch, but I like the furnace because it takes all the drama out of it.  It's no more complicated than making coffee

liquid silver at 970 C

I use a method of casting called vacuum casting.  It's called that because I put most of the flask in a vacuum chamber which sucks out the air ahead of the liquid metal, pulling the metal into all the details.  The picture below is the top of my vacuum casting machine.  That round hole is where I will put the flask.  All the holes in the side of the flask--which probably seemed kinda stupid--have their purpose here.  When I put the flask in the chamber the air will get sucked out the bottom of the flask and all those holes.  This pulls the metal down and sideways in the mold.

So the actual pour I can't show you because I needed two hands, but here is the situation just after:

The hot flask with all the wax incinerated got put in the vacuum chamber with just the top sticking out.  I turn on the vacuum, pour the metal in the top, and then turn the vacuum off after a few seconds.

I set the hot flask on the floor to cool a bit.  When the silver is no longer glowing but still quite hot, it gets plunged into a bucket of water.

The water boils and the flask shakes and the investment blasts itself apart due to the thermal shock.  Once it stops boiling and shaking you lift out the flask.

The hot plaster has literally blown itself to bits and what is left is the cooled silver in the shape of the void in the plaster.

That shape is pretty much the shape of the wax tree that vaporized, as you can see here.  Because I was trying to take pictures as I did this casting I screwed it up in a number of ways.  I've labeled the problems above.  I broke off a dragon head by pouring the plaster directly onto it for a second instead of down the inside of the mold.  I forgot to de-gas the plaster which means I have a whole lot of air bubbles in the plaster so i get little balls stuck to my casting.  I also have some bigger, irregular lumps which were lumps of unmixed plaster.  These can ruin a casting, but mostly they just make more work as you clean them up.

So now the tree gets cut apart.  Each piece will have it's bubbles cut off, the spot where the sprue was will be ground down and blended in.  Then they get polished, and we have jewelry!

Obviously there's a bit more to make a bracelet.  But that's how the cast bits come about.

Thorvaldr's Seax

I've been working on this seax for about year now.  Luckily the customer who commissioned it was very patient and we agreed up front that there was no set delivery date - it took as long as it took.

It's made in the style of baltic war knives from the Viking Age/Migration Era/Dark Ages - however you want to refer to the period of european history from about 500-1000AD.

 The blade is 10" and the handle is 6".  The blade is forged from 1084 carbon steel.  It's a full 1/4" thick at the spine and is flat ground.   The shape is referred to as a "broken-back", and as you can probably guess this is the great, great grandfather of the bowie knife.  The tang of the blade is a bit over 1/2" wide and 1/4" thick and extends all the way to the back of the handle, so it's a very sturdy knife.

I hand sanded this blade starting at 220 grit, and finished at 600grit.  It is inlaid with younger futhark runes that are a transliteration of "Thorvaldr owns me" on the right side, and "MHB made me" on the left.  They've actually found a number of viking weapons with inscriptions of a similar nature.  I guess that's one way not to loose your spear or knife ( "Dude!  Of course it's mine.  It's got my freaking name right on it!").  I used 18ga jewelers bronze wire for the inlay.  It's a bit brighter than regular bronze and just looks better against the polished steel.

The handle has a bronze plate that I cast up next to the blade.  It has a boar on one side of the blade and a serpent on the other.  The back plate is likewise something I carved and cast in bronze, with a design pulled from the handle carving.  The white spacers are moose antler that I carved a braid into using a dremel and burrs.  The main handle is a piece of cherry from a tree I felled myself about 5 or more years ago.  I carved a design found on a viking sled into the handle, with some changes so it fit the handle shape.  It's finished with 6 coat of Waterlox wiping varnish.

The sheath is 8oz top-grade tooling leather that I carved/embossed and dyed.  The design on the blade section is probably too complicated for leather, but I wanted to see if I could do it.  It came out fairly well, but I think the details are just a bit to small.  The beast on the handle section is really about the level of detail that is right for leather.  It has nice, clear delineation of the details.

The metal work on the sheath is all hand-stamped 20ga bronze, except for the rings which I carved & cast.  I made sure on this seax that I used the same alloy of bronze for all the metal parts 90% copper/ 10% tin.  That way the parts should all age to the same patina.

It's finished with a braided leather tassle & bone beads.

Christmas Presents

Holidays were busy.  In addition to a bunch of jewelry orders I had presents to make:

I wanted to try carving a very delicate ring in wax, so I made this moonstone ring for my daughter.  It all one piece of silver I cast.  The center is a 6mm moonstone and the two side stones are 4mm. I learned a lot making it and ended up making 3 more rings to develop my technique & knowledge.

These are two more I made for my wife.  The one on the left has amethysts, and the right one turquoise.   My daughter also got a turquoise one while I was at it.

I also had an idea pop into my head for a pendant, and i know my sister wanted one.  So I ended up making this one.  Again, solid cast sterling silver, this time with a 12mm moonstone in the center.

And last but not least is the biggest Christmas present - for me!  This is my new 24' x 30' shop in the backyard.  The barn and the interior are being done by contractors, and hopefully in the next week or two it will be my turn: painting, building benches, crafting cabinets, hauling anvils, etc.  No longer will I be a cellar troll!  I'll get actual sunlight to work by!