Joshua States

I will never get over how cool and unique your random patterns are! That's lovely.

That one came out great. You should be very proud of that one. When I took a class on the leather wrapped handle, we were told the top edge was not made straight. It was purposely jagged and very thin. Adding the dye makes it disappear.

I really like that one. Nice work sir

Frank Christensen turned me on to these at a demo in Camp Verde a while back and I bought a pair of them. I finally got some forge time and tried them out. Far better than heavy leather gloves. Highly recommendable.

I took some time on Wednesday for some forge therapy and added a few buttons and folds for more consolidation. Here is the process I developed. Cut the bar in preparation for folding and place a button on the bar. When it starts to melt, remove from the fire, smear with a piece of cold mild, and fold. Weld it. Draw out, and repeat as desired. I think I've added about 3 or 4 more buttons.. I decided to try a little manipulation and forged it on the bias. Then I reflattend it and let it cool.

Time for a little thread necromancy. Life has been really hectic lately and there hasn't been much shop time other than this complex commission I've been working on. Work has been rediculously crazy and I needed some forge therapy. So, I grabbed a hunk of this and went to town. The starting hunk. This has asome voids and pockets that need to be closed up with forge welding. It gets drawn out into a bar about 1 inch thick and 1.5 inches wide. This I hot cut and fold in three. Weld, draw out and normalize. Then

All true for all tool steels.

That's pretty cool. Cannister?

Follow Jeroen's advice on profile and typology. I'm no expert on the form, but my memory is these are fairly narrow fullers. My own experience has been to grind fullers in after full profile and HT. I have done this with a rotary tool and a little guide I rigged up. You can see the technique here on page 2.

Each one gets better.

I think you might have shown the other two back when you originally cast and finished them. This one looks great. Must feel good to have completed that.

I use electro etching. Deep & crisp marks.

Getting there slowly. This has been a very challenging project.

Nice one Matt.

The iron is also contributing to the sparks. High iron and some carbon are both required.

This is why experienced smiths will go on about choosing the right steel for the application. My guess is you are using a piece of steel that is simply not suitable for the intended use. If the striker steel has the right composition, hardening shouldn't be the thing that really makes it work. What does matter is mostly the iron and partially the carbon contents. None of us can say for certain what that coil spring is, and what the composition is. Choose a different piece of steel. Preferably one that is a simple steel with carbon content at or above .7% and you should have a rocking fire stee

Speaking from experience, an ice-climbing/mountaineering axe is nothing like a hatchet, and when i think "close combat axe" one of Alan's tomahawks comes to mind. There is the Shepard's axe, which is sort of a utilitarian tool used for hiking staff, mountaineering axe, and general self defense weapon and sheep smacking implement. J A Loose is making a few of these as of late. Not a full tang design though

I have a septic system. If there's fish in there, I don't wanna know about it.

For disposal, can we just flush this stuff down the toilet?

Impressive.

I've been following a couple of these projects. Some very cool ideas. I like this one Matt, nice work.

Very nice work Alan. Always a pleasure to watch this happen.

Impressive work.

That's just cool

For some strange reason, I just got the idea to redo the "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch as "Four Archeologists".