Pieter-Paul Derks

I just finished building my version of this forge, lets hope it will last me 20 years as well. Browsing Don's site made me nostalgic, I remember finding it as a 13 year old and being astounded that there were still people forging knives in this world.

That looks really good!

That is a very pretty knife. I'm quite jealous of your shop, both for all the tools you have and how organized everything is.

I love it!

That is a real beauty! Now I want to play with crucible steel too

Ha! I love those toes, this is such a cool project again

I had the same problem so I have two different marks, my signature for modern knives, and a touchmark monogram for ancient work. I electro etch them. I also have a stamp of the monogram for forged to finish stuff. It really is a trade off between having a traceable legible mark and having something that looks good. As I understand it a touchmark has to be struck in, either hot or cold, while a makers mark can also be etched or engraved.

I like die makers stones for this.(sometimes called edm stones) I do use a foredom for most of the work, with many different bits and it still is a real pain, I think there is no real good way to do this quickly.

I just want to say that I really like reading this thread, This is going to be a very fancy hawk.

Fantastic bronze work! a real accomplishment to cast and finish one of these monster blades. I went to the exhibition with all six of these swords together and it was a magical display, I honestly think these are my favorite historical objects.

The blade that came with the saw was actually quite nice, better than the ones I have now even though they all are original milwaukee. I might look into getting a bi-metal one, probably won't be the same brand here in europe.

Those big lever shears are nice, they will cut annealed tool steel just fine up to a few mm. they are not great at cutting curves and will leave a bit of a burr usually. Normally they have a compound lever type of action and can be real powerful. I have a milwaukee portaband and I only use it for nonferrous metal, tool steel needs to be perfectly annealed and will eat blades way too quickly, and cutting anything with forge scale will also dull it. Fantastic for cutting bronze and copper though. A cheap but messy option is an angle grinder, they cut anything and with a bit of practise any shape.

Suberb!

This all sounds like a great experience! all things around the making of steel are magic to me and super interesting. I am always totally mesmerized by molten gold, almost an otherworldly metal. Fun fact, in Dutch and french goldsmithing the contaminated precious metal is called ''lavure'', a term also used for dishwater containing bits of food

Jep this sounds like decarb to me. I use a decent amount of 80crv2 and it really does develop a thicker decarb layer in my experience. I do a quick file test after hardening 90 degrees to the edge and really bite in, scraping a file against the flat of the blade will not tell you much. Side note, I've been using o1 for some integrals lately and that stuff gets crazy hard in comparison, it sounds like glass straight after the quench.