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Been working on this Elforyn synthetic ivory handle. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy this material is to work with. It's slightly chippy though. Still some fitting to do before the polish to darken the white and make the Schreger lines pop. I believe it's going to be a nice chef.

Whew. I can't believe how long it has been. I had some life circumstances that got in the way, job change, family, personal... Anyway, I finally got back to it today. I made the metal base, I cut out the CFB base and then cut the walls into two pieces and took out 2" to put in support for the shelf. I also assembled the first leg of the walls. I still have some more sealing to do, but I ran out of time. Here are some pics of the progress. Next step is to finish sealing it, run the wire on the first half and then "glue" in the shelf supports and the top section of the walls and finish out the wire lay.

First one is finished :-). In my opinion the chevron pattern is a mosaic. It is possible to forge it using only basic tools. Now when I know how to forge it i am going to forge another one using bloomery iron.

Finally finished that 18th century-style folder with the checkered bone scales. The pin isn't disappearing as much as I'd like it to, but the action is nice. I also domed the spring pins, a first for me. I usually leave them flush. This time I didn't want to mess up the checkering. AEB-L blade and spring, nickel silver liners, bolsters, and pins. Bone scales cut from a cow femur section sold as a chew toy for dogs. Next time I'm just going to buy bone slabs, it's not worth the extra work to prepare the raw bone. Just for fun, here it is next to the first one of this style I made a few years ago. The older one used the same bone, but left thicker. And that nickel silver butt-end bolster adds a full ounce to the weight! The long clip blade is not a shape one sees on 18th century folders either, it just seemed to fit better at the time. Both are 4" / 105mm closed, 7 3/8" / 190mm open. The new one weighs 3.4 ounces / 96.5g, the one with the rear bolster weighs 4.4 ounces / 124.7 g. Down in the "what did you do in your shop today" thread in The Way there's a few WIP shots of the checkering process. Thanks for looking!

Wow. A lot happens around here when you take a week off-grid!

Just the jet engine noise. No popping or sputtering; as You say, that usually tends to be more of an issue at low pressures, particularly at higher forge temperatures. I tend to run in the 2-30(ish) PSI range to keep between the risk of burning back down the burner tube and being too loud to concentrate. Others will have different ranges, depending on their equipment and tolerance of noise. NPT is an American 60-degree thread form. BSP is a 55-degree Whitworth thread form. BSP certainly has tapered and parallel forms: BSPT and BSPP. The pipe od is the same for BSP and NPT and some, but only some, of the sizes have the same thread pitch: 1/2 and 3/4 from memory. At very low pressures, like those seen on burners downstream of the gas jet, these will usually screw together and seal with an anaerobic pipe seal. Most of the world uses BSP, with the US being the main exception.

Whoever made that sheath did a great job. I'm trying to think back on the Mexican loop sheath that I made and trying to remember how I hid the flesh side of the leather. Doug

It wasn't truly raw, it was just unmodified. It had been steam cleaned and bleached, all I did was use a bandsaw and disk sander to turn it into flat slabs 3mm thick. Had it been fresh, I would have simmered it in water until all the grease was gone and let it dry slowly. Some people soak it in solvents to remove the grease. That's faster, but I think it leads to a more fragile bone. Whichever way you degrease it, once it's fully dry you can soak it in strong hydrogen peroxide, the kind they bleach hair with, for a couple of weeks to make it blindingly white.

Finally got around to working a bit on a sheath. Rayskin inlay and first time using some artificial sinew thread which was an absolutely brilliant idea on a black background the thread is wide and very flat so it's a bit difficult to get it to lay down nice and evenly but oh well, at least the color of it matches the ray and horn. Going with a frog suspension as even though at first I'm just going to make a simple belt looped one it gives me the opportunity at some later date to make a underarm shoulder harness for it

Any error repeated is a feature/pattern

I'd follow Timgunns advice of copying ur friends. U know it works. The 45 degree diffuser is needed on top fed ribbon burners to ensure fuel distribution. I made my Frosty style Rb with a side fuel entrance and it doesnt need a 45. I don't have a automatic fuel shut that some recommend as the when power goes out it acts like a Naturally aspirated burner albeit smaller flames. Never had the flame go out. As to jet size I'm using the .35 mig tip that came with my NA burner from High speed tool and refractory., took his burner, added a drop pipe with ball valve and blower like urs, tied in my ribbon burner, works fine so far.

There are two different approaches to achieving the same objective: progressive and repeatable control over the amount of gas being fed to the burner. You can either use a fixed gas jet (restriction) and vary the pressure fed to its upstream side, or you can feed a fixed pressure to the upstream side off a variable restriction (needle valve in this case). Both systems work. If you really want to make things awkward, you even can combine the two systems. Naturally-Aspirated burners tend to use fixed gas jets because they need the gas speed out of the jet to entrain air. Blown burners don't need to use the speed (I "think" it's actually the momentum of the gas that is conserved during an inelastic collision with the air, but it's a long time since I studied any Physics). Blown burners don't need the gas speed so can use much bigger gas "jets": so big that the term "jet" is barely applicable. If the needle valve is unavailable, you can copy what your mate has done. I'm guessing he has a fixed jet in the tee, pointing along the horizontal tube. It might be a drilled hole. It might be a mig tip. It might be something else. Whatever it is, it will have an area that means there is a measurable pressure upstream that is the output pressure of the regulator. He can vary the regulator pressure to vary the amount of gas flowing through the jet. Note that the flow through the jet will vary as the square root of the pressure difference across the jet. The pressure change on the downstream side of the jet will be small enough to ignore, so you only really need to consider the regulator pressure. If we say that maximum gas flow is at 32 PSI (I've picked easy numbers here), Half maximum gas flow will be at one-quarter pressure (flow varies as the square root of the pressure): 8 PSI. One-quarter-maximum gas flow will be at 1/4 x 1/4 = 1/16 maximum gas pressure: 2 PSI. As far as I can tell, Propane flow becomes "choked" somewhere around 35 PSI (-ish): the gas speed through the jet reaches the speed of sound and the pressure:flow relationship changes. NA burners tend to be used with regulators that give up to 30 PSI, 2 bar. If your mate's forge works well and you can copy it, it would be daft not to. If your forge is a wildly different size to his, I'd pick a gas "jet" size that would suit a Naturally Aspirated burner/forge of similar size to yours and otherwise copy his system.

Repeating myself, but see above for my attitude regarding needle valves. Basically an adjustable regulator is a better metering valve for gas IMHO. Typically more expensive that a needle valve, but should give you more reliable flowrate control.

On these I've found this method to work really well. First I pick out the straightest 2x4 I can find and then fixture the blade blank in the dead centre of it so it's easy to switch sides to grind. Then it's just a question of grinding away. On this type I loke to grind the fullers straight past the tip and have them relatively even in depth as then, when I begin on the bevels the distal taper comes in almost by itself and it makes the fullers fade out in a way I like

It's taken me almost a week to post this, but I recently wrapped up this partizan for my father-in-law. This is the first spear of any kind I've done, and I certainly learned a lot about how to do the sockets. I also learned a lot about compound planes and transitioning from one cross-section to a drastically different one It's a welded socket, and there is a plug at the end of it that is welded to the blade. I now know to make the plug and blade out of one piece and then weld the socket on, but live and learn. There is also a weld flaw in the socket that I heavily debated closing up with the arc welder, but I opted to wire brush it clean and leave it because it added some character. The socket is 1018 and the blade 6150, hardened to 54-56 HRC. The haft (which I did not make myself) is laminated ash and I did a basic leather sheath to accompany it. The overall length including haft is 72". I will have to take more detailed measurements of the blade and weight later, but the whole head is around 25.5", with an 18" or 19" blade. More or less it's a sword at the end of a pole, though it's actually on the short side for historical partizans. Overall it came out better than expected and is a LOT of fun to handle. Originally I wasn't planning on doing another spear any time soon, but knowing what I know now, I may do another. Let me know your thoughts. -A.J.

I was trying the way Maciej does it in his videos. I think my issue was the point on the core was too obtuse and the weld in the edge material to sharp. I think the next one I will try welding point down. Thanks for your suggestions. I have to say, this was way too much fun,,,

Checkered the other scale, and took process pics this time. First, cut your guide lines that all other cuts will be indexed off of. You can do that with a saw, a file, or anything that will cut straight. Then switch to the Dem-Bart 22 line per inch checkering cutters and add a few more lines. The main cutter has a blank follower that rides in the guideline on the left and a sharp cutter like a little file on the right. It's visible at the top of the previous pic. That's as far as I can go in that direction without getting into the tight spots, so let's go the other way... There it is! There's also an equaling cutter that's just a double cutter. They make a three-line equaling cutter that really evens up the grooves, I just don't have one. Yet. Modern checkering from around 1880 to the present tends to be at a 25 to 30 degree crossing angle. That wouldn't look right on this 18th century style knife, so I used a much more open angle. 90 degrees is common, this looks like about 70 degrees or so. I didn't measure. Go all the way you can on that end... Then do the other direction. Fill in the little blind cuts on the ends, then drawfile the edges to remove the little scratches, and there you go. A pair of checkered and fileworked bone scales on nickel silver liners. You can definitely tell which one I did first. Next weekend, assembly! Maybe.

Did a little more filework and added checkering to the bone scales... hand checkering is not as easy as it looks in tight spaces on brittle materials. Those are temporary assembly pins for the pivot and spring. The high-domed tack head is a rivet for decoration.

Just finished two small EDC's. And then decided to try increase my skill base. Big shout out to @Maciek Tomaszczyk for his videos. I have watched all his spear videos about 4 times each. He makes it look so easy... FIrst attempt: Starting material (yes I "cheated" with DOM. but when you find a 36 inch tube of 1 inch diameter for $8.00 in the drops bin you go for it). The "decorative" stuff is two bars of cable damascus that I've had laying about for years. Didn't want to waste good stuff on an unknown success as this is the first time I've done a LOT of these procedures. But wanted something interesting if I got it to work. No access to wrought so I used 1018 as the core. The stacked material is 1084 for the edge. Had to weld up a billet to get the size of material I was going to need. Progress pictures. And what I ended up with 8 hours later. There was more hand setting of welds than I have ever done. Not pretty, follows no historical pattern (was an attempt to see if I could do it), but all the welds are completely SOLID, and I have the spear bug bad right now...