Ruben Delanghe

It's beautiful!

especially if the name of the knife or sword usually is just "knife" or "sword" in the local tongue (which is usually the case). "Son, bring me my Oakshott Sub-Type XVa please" "Your wot?" "Oh sod it, just get my sword!"

Thanks Niels!

This is one of those: "Off course! It's so blinking obvious! Why didn't I think of that!" moments. You use your body mass for pressure and arm/hand muscles for control. Duh! I understand the top crossbar is fixed on the jig and you slide the blade across that top crossbar? Suppose you fixed the top crossbar so it could move, but only only slide side to side. Would you reckon it would give you even more control if you would clamp the blade to that top crossbar and slide the whole top crossbar left to right?

Indeed, very remarkable. @Daniel: Thanks for sharing. I overlooked this as well

Do you know what the original French text mentioned? 'White' might be a 'bad' translation.

so when do we close this poll? When X have praticipated? When X time has passed? When we've all come to an agreement?...

Not a fan of LOTR knives, but I do like the Leuku suggestion

you just made my day

When my katana came out of the quench last summer, it had a beautiful curve. Well, actually, it had two. On two different axes. However you lay it on a flat surface, you could always move your hand underneath So what my teacher did was take a small hammer with a very sharp point and gently tap along the curve on one of the sides only. This will leave small indents on one side and as a result slightly stretch the steel and slowly straighten it at the same time. Once straightened you will have to polish these indents out again, but this is quite doable. Now if a partially repolish is out

Thanks a bunch Owen, for organizing this. I'm already looking forward to the next edition Lectures and demo's were superb, food was great, mead was plentiful, the crowd was super nice, talented and friendly... I found it a very inspiring and enriching experience.

The thing I don't get is: what about scale formation when the billet leaves the forge? I understand you prevent scale by cutting off the oxygen so as long as the billet is in the reducing atmosphere it's safe, but as soon as it leaves and finds oxygen, then what happens? Isn't scale building up at that point anyway? I always thought that was the real strength of flux: not as much protecting the billet in the forge, but rather removing the scale when the billet is hammered upon outside of the forge. Question to people who are using this method: are you using a press to set the welds, or

I would be I live in Temse and my workshop is in Antwerp as well, but that's not really accommodated for smelting

Is there a cyberbeard for that?

Don't despair guy! The first also got lost in the mail(also ordered 27th of march ), but Mark sent me another one in April and it arrived last week. And it's awesome (even though I watched all clips here already). I do understand the hassle of the whole DVD thing and if I were Dave I would indeed limit it to download only. The thing is, I'm not Dave and I just love having the physically DVD's and wouldn't want it any other way . Digital download seems cumbersome to me.