Andrew W

Indeed! Brian's been so helpful over the years--we've mostly chatted about spears (what I studied in grad school), so I've enjoyed going back to the swords and reading all the parts I'd skimmed before.

The edge bars are a stack like this (apologies for the ugly sketch). This sort of composite edge is common in early medieval swords. The wrought I used etches up with some wild textures, so I'm hoping this will look fun when it's finished.

I've never made a sword before or done any pattern welding, so this is me feeling my way in the dark. I'm having fun! I went with a simple 2-bar herringbone core. The core bars are 7 layers (1084 and 15N20). For the edges, I built a 7-layer stack alternating wrought, 15N20, wrought, and 1084 (etc). Welded up my core bars... Twisted them with my buddy's torch... And then moved and forgot about this project for 12 months So now that I'm shut in on quarantine--

Success! All up and running—and safely wired and properly grounded. Thank you for your help! I’m really excited to put this through its paces now

Now that I've replaced my outlet and it has a proper grounding wire, I can just splice a 10ga copper wire from my grinder frame onto the green grounding wire in the power cord--is that correct? No need for a separate grouding rod on the frame?

Update: I flipped the breaker off and opened my 3-pronged dryer outlet. Turned out whoever built the house used a grounded cable for the circuit—they just didn’t connect the ground wire to anything. So I replaced the outlet with a 4-pronged 14-30 plug, checked everything with a multimeter, and now I have a grounded circuit to plug my grinder into (and my dryer’s safer too, an unexpected bonus). I wired a 20A fused air conditioning disconnect box to a plug (for the dryer socket) and a length of SJOOW cord, so I can run only as much power as I need out the window to the g

And my NEMA 10-30 outlet is nongrounded, is that right? What would I need to do to ground the VFD running off that socket?

Question for folks who know about electricity: I want to run a 2hp VFD from my drier’s 240V outlet. But the outlet is 75’ from my shed. How stupid would it be to plug a splitter into the socket and run a 75’ extension cord to my shed? Some more info: - The outlet is wired with the old style 3-prong 10-30 plugs (ungrounded) - The VFD would draw just under 10A - The drier’s circuit is 30A. I have no intention of running the grinder and the drier at the same time, I think both together might trip the breaker - I’d

This is Asian buffalo. There's a horn seller on Etsy who will do custom sizes, and I talked him into listing 13cm long x 3cm diameter rolls. He should turn up if you do a search, I can't remember his shop name off-hand. Crazy Crow sells 4" lengths, which is where I usually get it for normal-sized knives.

I'm also not on twitter, so I shared the video to the 122,000-member Bladesmithing for Beginners facebook group:

To celebrate my Christmas time off, I forged two seaxes from bloom (iron and steel). I smelted the steel (right, in the photo above) back in March from powdered hematite ore ("Spanish Red"). I helped Mark Green and Daniel Cauble make the iron (left, above) at an SCA event in October, using Mark's "easy ore" (NC limonite). Mark and I, feeding charcoal and ore into the smelting furnace: First, I had to compact the iron bloom into a bar: After doing the same to the steel, I forge welded the two together into a billet

Here's a helpful article about Ole Evenstad's method (referenced by Will Urban, above): https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/def_en/articles/ancient_carburisation/ancient_carburisation.html

To usher in the new solar year and drive away the Winterdark, I smelted some iron today. My ore was 55lb (25kg) of “Spanish red” (ground hematite rocks, from a pottery studio). I mixed this with 7lb of sand (for better slag) and 7lb of whole wheat flour (to bind it all together, and maybe to add a bit of P to the metal too? I’m not sure if that worked yet). We burned 96lb (44kg) of Royal Oak charcoal. And we got a 13lb (6kg) bloom! Ea

Alan recommended the burners from anvilfire.com ( https://www.anvilfire.com/21centbs/products/P-75/ ) the last time this thread came up, and I have only good things to say about them. They've made forge welding effortless, and they're relatively inexpensive. I lined my forge with 2" of inswool and 1/4" of kastolite, with some extra bubble alumina on the floor since I tend to throw a lot of corrosive things into my forge (lots of borax and slag from bloomery iron). I bought all these from hightemptools.com ; not the absolute cheapest supplier, but they had everything I wanted in one place an

Thanks! It's 475mm long and 286g.