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One person who used to post here held that a commission is an agreement made in hell. Doug

Forged from 52100 / 15N20 stretched crushed W's. Maple handles one is stabilized spalted and the other is a stabilized maple burl with some fantastic natural color.

Got this funky nessmuk style finished up this week

I got to play silversmith for a bit, I cast, hammer, rolled, and textured a small ingot of fine silver. This stuff works so much easier than copper alloys! It’s also quite shiny.

of course! chase the crack out and make a smaller blade You wont feel satisfied, and will have to start again though!

If was forced to hand forge it, my starting billet would be 4" x 1.25 x .75 thick. With a bit of loss I would hope to get a decent sized blade from this stack.

that is very true! I accept commissions only if I get complete artistic freemdom around a theme.

This Wapiti Hunter has orange liners under the scolloped OD canvas micarta scales on the 1075 blade and is for a Serbian Hunter coming to NZ to hunt. Another country added to the list where my knives have thier home. And an AH EDC with this one having mild steel bolster and pomel and a nice set of rosewood scales on the 1084 blade in a closed top sheath with the A H logo

Good advice, John! I keep forgetting about that for these big welds, even though I do it on hawks after the final weld is set. Soaking lets the welded grains intermingle as they grow, evens out carbon, and lets that solid-state diffusion bond that is a forge weld truly become one piece, especially after normalizing to refine the grain. That will really let the weld boundary more or less disappear if you do it several times. BTW, great see you around! A friend just brought me some Didsbury gin, so I was thinking of you anyway.

Well, it is awesome. I would not even know where to begin to make something like that, what tools even to use to do that kind of work. Is this for a commission, or just for you?

Got these 3 done. Unfortunately that's all the time I have ro work on them. The maple handled one has a nice auto hamon I would've loved to have polished out.

I unwrapped the blade from it's tape the other day, and had an oportunity to test-fit the engraved guard on it: Photo quality is a bit poor, but it shows how the overall theme seems to fit quite well. My miling machine broke the other day, but I have replacement parts arriving by post tomorrow - so hopefully there will be some more progress during the upcoming week. Stones are not set in the flowers on the guard as I have yet to finish engraving on the other side. Chiao!

I've just finished a reproduction of one of my favorite early medieval swords, the sixth-century serpent-bladed spatha from the cemetery at West Heslerton (UK). West Heslerton is a weird and wonderful cemetery. It was discovered by a gravel mining company, and was subsequently excavated, analyzed, and published to a delightfully thorough extent. The cemetery is in the north of England, between York and Scarborough. Many of the burial practices are unusual compared to the rest of England. There are graves with unique types of amulets, at least one female-sexed person buried with weapons (next to a Bronze Age barrow), and a lot of other cool things. Most importantly for us, the iron artifacts were all analyzed in a lab and we have metallographic studies of many of the spearheads and, happily, the sword. The sword was made with a central serpentine twist, achieved by welding a low-phosphorus bar between two high-phosphorus strips. It had steel edges, which were slack quenched and had a bainite microstructure. The whole metallographic analysis, conducted by Brian Gilmour, is published in this wonderful book: ------------------ For my reproduction, I used bloomery iron and steel from 6 different smelts. Five of the smelts were mine, and the sixth was high-P iron I bought from Lee Sauder. One of the blooms: I welded up two edge bars from 16-layer high-carbon bloom sandwiched between bloomery iron. For the central core, I welded a single bar of 16-layer medium-carbon steel between two 4-layer bars of high-phosphorus iron. I then sandwiched that between two bars of folded low- and medium-carbon iron/steel. (In hindsight, I shouldn't have used medium-carbon steel; it kept wanting to burn at the high welding heats. Lesson learned for next time.) I twisted a zig-zag pattern into the bar... ...and forged it back to square, creating the central serpent twist. This is how the original was done (rather than the method of cutting out wedges with a chisel or bandsaw). Then I welded up the bars... ...and marked out the distal taper, in 1/5ths increments (6-5mm thick for the first 1/5, 5-4,mm for the next 2/5ths, and 4-2mm for the final 2/5ths)... ...and forged the profile. Some careful grinding to clean up the surface: The pattern is pretty shallow, so I tried not to take off too much--always a challenge with these surface-level patterns. It barely warped in the quench! I tempered in hot oil, bending out a few little warps between heats. --------------- The sword's hilt was made from cattle horn, none of which survived. We have a good idea what these hilts looked like, however, thanks to some lucky soil chemistry at a different cemetery (Snape, UK) which preserved many of the horn and wood artifacts. Here's the Snape hilt: And here's mine: Capping off its horn hilt, the West Heslerton sword had a small copper-alloy pommel. This would have been cast, and was hollow. I'm not up for that, so I ground mine from solid brass. Most early medieval British copper alloy was made from recycled Roman metal; mine was a recycled door pull. After this, I spent most of a day sanding the blade, wrapping up with a ferric chloride etch (5:1 water : FeCl, 4x15-min etches). I assembled the sword (with help from a bit of epoxy--cheating!), then carefully peened the tang. This part always makes me nervous! And: done! I like it. The serpent twist is, imo, too narrow. I'll spread the central bar more on my second attempt. But for a first try (and the third sword I've ever made), I'm happy.

Right; you all suck . Seriously though, it looks like it was an awesome event. I will have to look at trying to get over for one of these if I get a chance.

Here’s the scabbard! Scabbards are, of course, tricky things for archaeologists to study. They quickly decompose in archaeological sites; no sixth-century scabbard has survived complete. But tiny traces survive: the sheepskin lining and wooden core sometimes rust onto the sword blade, and occasionally that rust contains traces of the leather exterior and its decoration. Archaeologist Esther Cameron, in her wonderful book, Sheaths and Scabbards in England, has brought all this evidence together. I couldn’t have made this scabbard without her work. My scabbard is lined with sheepskin and has a wood core (poplar). It’s wrapped in leather and bound with a linen tablet-woven tape, and has a baldric to wear over the shoulder.

This is used for hardening/tempeing big blades, so you don't want half the blade 200 degrees hotter than the other half.

Ran the blade out to the grinder to clean it up a little bit before work this morning. Things look pretty good where the Damascus meets the wrought iron! But what doesn’t look good is the half inch long hairline crack that starts in the edge and runs towards the spine right in the middle of the blade!