Alan Longmire

Thanks so much Gary! I suspected that's what you did, but was not sure.

I like yours better because you filed the buttcap to fit the stag, but I think the choil-less look of the original is ever so slightly more sleek on the blade end...you still win, though. Very nice tribute! Sir Craft, I think you can get a repro .50-120 Sharps for around $2K. Is that the right caliber? It's been around 25 years and I just remember it was a seriously long-range buffalo gun. edit: just looked it up and it's .45-110, $3533 from the guys who made the movie gun.

I do like the look of the domed pins! I know you showed pictures once of how you did it, but it's still not clear to me. I get that the heads and the pins are three different pieces, but how are the heads attached?

I like the patina on the blade!

I'll be the third to suggest not using 5160 in pattern-weld. It's an excellent steel on its own, but it does not play well with others. If you want high contrast, use 1084. If you like a more subtle look use 1095 or 1075. Finally, you'd be surprised how little the thickness of the 15n20 matters by the time you have a 100-layer billet, especially if you do a fair amount of grinding on the bevels.

I approve! Watching with interest.

It will make setting the handle scales much easier and better-looking, in my opinion. It's up to you of course!

I think so as well. Interesting texture!

A surface grinder is a machine that makes parts flat. You can do the same thing much more slowly by rubbing it on sandpaper taped to a flat surface like a granite countertop or sheet of plate glass.

It can be difficult to carve scales to fit something like that. It would look good if it works, though! If you have access to a surface grinder that's another option.

What I mean by normalizing is heating to just above critical, in this case 1425-1450 degrees F, or a medium reddish-orange in the dark, then allow to cool to black in still air without setting it down on anything. Once there's no color showing in dim light you can put it on a firebrick or something to cool down completely. 1095 doesn't need a long soak at heat, a minute or less is fine, and I don't soak it at all. Soak times are based on inches of thickness, and files are not thick, so there you go. Sand is not the best thing to put stuff in, it's not really an insulator. Ashes or lime are much better, if you're using a steel that responds to that kind of anneal like 5160.

Normalizing gives a better structure for drilling than annealing does on 1095. Slow cooling it in a bucket of ashes gives a laminar anneal in which you get plates of carbides. I use Irwin cobalts, they last well for me. You may also be spot hardening the steel if your drill press is running too fast. Set it as slow as it will go, and if you aren't making chips stop at once and hit it with a torch to a low red and let cool in still air. If you didn't dull the bit it should work.

It's a pinned topic in Tools and Toolmaking.

Yep, that's what I meant!

Ouch! Poor thing... Bob is correct on the weight. Dudley is a town (now a suburb of Sheffield) in the black country of the English midlands where a great many anvil makers were located, including Peter Wright, Mousehole, and Wilkinson among others. It doesn't really look like any of those, though. Anyway, all of these were made by forge-welding a steel plate to a wrought iron body. That means it's really hard to build up the edges because arc welding and wrought iron don't mix well, and it also means that if you have the face milled you might be removing the only hardened surface on the anvil. I'd just clean up the face with a flap wheel and use it as-is until something better comes along.