Einar

Thanks for the kind words everyone Already thinking about my next project. Miles, thank you, I'll try the vice trick next time. It took a scary amount of force to correct the bend by hand. Randal, are there pics of your first one online? Would be fun to see it

This is my first hardened and sharpened blade. I've made a few practice blades of mild steel before, but I recently bought a gas forge so this is the first time I've been able to harden and make a sharp one. I wanted to make a sword of some kind, and I decided to go as simple as possible, just a short saber with a simple hilt. There is no profile taper or distal taper, again to keep things simple for my first time. Its all stock removal, just using a 5" angle grinder, files and sandpaper. Blade crossection is flat ground V shape with a secondary bevel for the edge, though I tried to blend the edge to an appleseed shape. Triple normalised and quenched in warm water. The blade was completely straight before the quench and took on a mild curve as expected. Very happy and relieved that it didnt crack. Read a lot of threads about heat treating on this forum before attempting to harden it, so thanks to all the people who share their knowledge here, its a huge help for a beginner like me. It took a set to the right after quenching but I was able to bend it back during the tempering cycles, which was nerve wracking. Its not completely straight, there is still a very mild "S" shaped bend in the blade that can be seen if you squint down the back of the blade, but I thought I had pushed my luck far enough and didnt want to bend the blade any more. Its made from unknown spring steel. Total length is 65 cm. The blade itself is 49 cm. 25 mm wide and 5 mm thick. Balance point about 4 inches from the "guard". I dont have any scales so i dont know what the weight is. The hilt has two simple steel plates at each end of a birch core, with a thin leather grip glued over it. I tried following Peter Johnssons tutorial on grip wrapping, which was a great help. The grip looks completely round in some of the pics, but thats a trick of the light. It is oval and a bit thinner at the bottom than the top.

In March of 2010, construction began on what will be the largest Viking ship ever built in modern times. Named after Harald Fairhair, the king who unified Norway into one kingdom, the great dragon ship is coming together in the town of Haugesund in Western Norway. At a hundred and fourteen feet of crafted oak, twenty-seven feet on the beam, displacing seventy tons, and with a thirty-two hundred square foot sail of pure silk, this magnificent ship will indeed be worthy of a king. The Dragon Harald Fairhair will have 25 pairs of oars. It is necessary to have at least two people on each oar to row the ship efficiently. That will give a crew of at least 100 persons, yet the craft should be able to be sailed by only twelve. *snip* The Dragon will be what the Sagas call a "25-sesse", which means a ship with 50 oars. Two men are needed for each oar. We therefore need 100 crew to row the ship, 12 crew to sail it. The Dragon Harald Fairhair will be the largest ship built in modern times, but many such ships were built in the Viking Age. At that time this would have been a fairly common Norwegian leidangsskip. The old Norse laws say that both the county of Rogaland and the county of Hordaland had to contribute 24 ships at the size of a "25-sesse" when the Norwegian defense fleet, the "leiðangr", was called out. English Link