Lukasz

Basicly it is the same. Deep bowl shaped hearth with air hole about 5 cm above bottom. I even tried it in regular smithing hearth buy using four flat soap stones to create shaft and it worked just fine. You are going to have lots of fun with P Iron Alan

I have to say that I stopped drinking while forging after (confession) cutting edge became soft back and soft back became cutting edge

That's a beauty! Fabulous leather work Matthew!

Hey Darrell, great that you ask. Gladly we had in Poland one man Jerzy Piaskowski, who had done fantastic research on many findings by cutting of examples from swords, knives, iron blooms, bars etc. Some were saying that what he did was wrong. Truth is that it was the best that could be done. Because of all this research I could study some very important aspects of working bloomery iron. About iron blooms From what I know there is almost no evidence of steel blooms with significant carbon content in Poland and if there are it would not be enough to produce good cutting edge after hammering out all impurities. Most of blooms is rather with low carbon content or different P variations. I don't know much about Scandinavian steel blooms. Many knives show non oxygen case carbonizing and very uneven carbon content throughout the blade. Skip's Aristotele furnace is as I remember described in one of Piaskowski's books Archeology of Gdansk vol. II as Norwegian method from Xth century. It looked almost the same just with small difference. Instead of using furnace, deep clay fireplace was used. That is how I produce steel for cutting edges. All kinds of iron ore I worked with were incapable of producing steel in straight reduction. Personally I think that slag content is to high against content of iron oxides. I had similar problem with carbonizing in Aristotele furnace. Every time I used raw bloom I got nice, solid but low carbon iron. After cleaning bloom by welding it few times before and than carbonizing finall effect was high carbon steel. About pattern welding bloomery iron Modern pattern welding associates with welding low carbon steel with high carbon steel, nickle, nickle steel etc. Examples on findings show in some cases using P iron to create sharp contrast. Bloomery iron with P content of not more than 2% combined even with very low carbon P free bloomery iron will give good contrast and will be strong enough to withstand daily use. Pattern on blade above was forge welded out of P bloomery iron and hematite boomery iron

Looks fantastic! Different from findings but really inspiring

Beautiful knife you came up with! Looks perfectly balanced I was laughing while reading about forging it the wrong way. I have done several times as well Wrought iron can be very tricky when you combine it with high carbon steel. cheers!

Thank you so much for your reply gentleman I would like to share photo of one more crazy blade. My intention was to do some triple twist with different steel variations. That's what I came up with. Dion, I combine even up to six different kinds of iron and steel to create patterns.

Hi everyone! I would like to share with you few photos of my latest pattern welded knifes. I had been playing with different steel combinations to get some new, interesting patterns. Hope you like it

Took me long time to get back here lots of work to do lately. Id love to shear some other photos. Different examples of fire strikers Battle ready inlaid an axe head Eastern style axe head with pattern welded cutting edge Iron age spearhead based on Danish findings Przeworsk culture belt buckle and belt end. 10th century folding sickle If it comes to stamps, I am using them since some time on everything I forge. I think that you have to be very good in what you do before you mark your work. I also didn't pay attention to it before interest in my work grew bigger. It was also difficult to find mark that would be simple, content your initials ( Polish in this case ) and remind of something from interesting me historical period. My mark

Xray eyes are cose What is fascinating about ancient items? Everything! every tiny aspect. It feels like going back in time and experiencing process of creating individual artifact. I can't agree that I make only copies or straight replicas. Sometimes you have to do what people want you to do for them. Also during creaction of individual item you add yourself intoI am working with multiple thing at the moment, trying out some new patterns. I just finished two blades for Edvin. He makes replicas of sheaths from places like Birka. Really nice work! One of blades for Edvins project Couple of pictures of blades I was working on not long time ago. I also started with bloomery iron pattern welded long sax which i intend to hilt with filigree fittings inspired by Staffordshire hoard findings and on a smaller knife kept in similar style. I must say that it was quite challenging to do it in forging fireplace but, it went well in the end.

I just purchased my Xray eyes on E-bay, quite useful item To be serious, I love to look at artifact closely. Once I spent two hours drooling over pattern welded sword on an exhibition in Copenhagen's national museum. Someone dumped it under pile of other artifacts, leaving only five centimeters sticking out. What is fascinating about ancient items? Everything! every tiny aspect. It feels like going back in time and experiencing process of creating individual artifact. I can't agree that I make only copies or straight replicas. Sometimes you have to do what people want you to do for them. Viking markets also have some kind of frame. You can't go there with for example mighty Xenas sword, it would look quite weird. Anyway, when I have time to do what I really want I combine different styles and try to create my own style. Lately I am fascinated by Filigree technique and trying to make knife sheath fittings even there is no findings that I know of being used for this purpose.

Great topic! Here you have few examples from Poland. I bet none of you gentleman have ever seen them before. Bronze alloy fittings represent hunting scene, two dogs and a hunter. Two knives showing similar scene were found in different places. Looks like it was quite common expression.

This is all truth Jens! After getting some basic knowledge I started o search for materials that could allow me to smelt on my own. Didn't really have to look for long time, bog iron ore was lying on my neighbors field, hundred fifty meters from my parents house. Clay was never a problem, had it all over the place. Sounds like it was meant to be this way. I even dug up picture of one of my first blooms. Not so big but, very dense. How did it feel when i held first bloom? It felt like being a wizard, like one of your ancestors ages before you, plus goose-flash and tear in my eye, pure magic! My first knife? You know very well that I forged it where we met! It was happened during one of Biskupin markets. When I look at it today it makes me laugh, but it looked like this. It was a small wood carving blade for my friend Greg. Talking about problems... My personal opinion about problems is that they push you forward, it would be to easy without them and plus, you would overgrow your ego. Solving problems is the best thing about all of that. My biggest problem with raw bog iron blooms was that they were hard to work out, much P. If taking them on anvil they would just crash. They felt sandy and didn't want to hold. After some time I found out that it would be nice to build deeper fireplace and try to reduce some more slag before forging, after Jense's conclusion. What really helped it was combine to reduce slag and squeeze bloom with tongs at the same time. All that made it more compact and easy to forge afterwords. After more practice I started to forge more and more advanced bloomery iron blades like one on the picture bellow.

Before I answer your question Id like to share one more thing, more spiritual. It was at Wolin market 2008 in Poland. One of my friends asked me about being a part of a night show called Slavic Myth- Creation Of The World. I was supposed to forge a world out of glowing iron. It seemed to boring just to go out there and hit the red hot iron, nothing special. We thought that It should be something more spectacular than just that. I had this brilliant idea, to fold huge billet out of several plates and forge weld it during the show. I started. Public sat down, may by ten meters from me. Only thought that i had in my head was, they will all run away when... well, you know what I mean. Billet was cooking inside the fire for more than ten minutes ant then BOOM! BOOOM! Bright light illuminated all over, I could hear people shouting WOOOW! and running at the same time, than some Russians saying, it couldn't be just iron! One of the best memories ever! Back to the subject. Basically i learned a lot by myself. I never liked when someone was telling me that I should do it this way or another. Of course, someone can have an influence on you, show you how they make it, inspire you, may by teach you some things. But, everyone must have his own space to be creative. It allowed you to be recognizable, be one of a kind. That is my personal opinion. I remember many other blacksmiths telling me that i should fix longer handles for some of my hammers, i didn't give a damn about that. I had a lot of help from books, internet and chatting with other blacksmiths. Then I met Jens, crazy iron maker from Denmark. He had huge influence in smelting matter for me. At that time there was no one smelting iron with in Poland that could show any positive results. The only people i knew were burning tons of charcoal and resulting in huge lake of slag. Jens also introduced me to Skip's carbonizing furnace.

I strarted like many others, with old vacuum cleaner, BBQ set and crapy industrial anvil from scrapyard. I spent weeks trying to forge arrowheads, surfing for materials, reading books and watching LOTR movies. Then in 2003 I joined a viking re-enactment group. I also found out that there are people interested in buing my some of my works, so I decided to build a real workshop, collect more tools and start forging more difficoult things. I had to invest in a new anvil. I found it on an internet auction for around 150 dollars. It has fascinating story. Man who dug it up said that he found it in the woods neear by old military base wraped in linen cloth covered with grease. It was 39kg Swedish anvil from 1928 in perfect shape. Till this day I didn't find anything better than that. My primary interest was always historical replicas and items inspired by historical artifacts from different periods. From year 2007 I started to visit more re-enactment markets to meet new people, find inspiration. Viking way...