Fox Creek

I feel your pain J. Loose. Bang Head I have had a consistent problem with hardening dirk blades that taper to a triangular cross section. Hardening in oil I have gotten a pronounced downward tip warp. Working on the variables, I find that slowing the quench down almost, but not quite, eliminates the problem. (along with very careful multiple lower temp normalizations.) I went from a hot oil quench at full critical, to a cold oil quench from a lower temp with longer soak. Â 'blade still gets hard so it's enough. I tend to think that it is the difference in the time of transformation between the

Very nice, Mon Ami. Elegantly simple and functional in form. From your comments on the steel selection I am confident that it is razor sharp and very useful as well a pleasing. There are many smiths working at a very high level with pattern welded material, but I feel thre is still work to be done with the San Mai type construction. I would like to see a "Silver steel" core clad with Wrought iron with the welded inlay of inscriptions as in the old Norse work.

That sounds pretty darn good Mr Prisco. I am sure your clients appreciate the careful hand work . If it were me, I'd also add a normaliziung cycle just prior to hardening just to make there are no residual stresses from forging , or enlarged grain. Â (especially since this is done off site, I gather) With a 'hawk about the only thing I would worry about is getting it too hard; better to have the body normalized with a hardened cutting edge, say half way up the blade, than to risk a crack through the cheek if some one is breaking banding with one. In hardening I would immerse half the blade and

I havent had such a good experience with my Sony Mavica that uses the floppys. About 50% of the discs that you try in the camera wont work. Often times once you record an image on a disc, you get error messages when you try to use the disc again, or try to access the images in your PC, etc. Very noisy Disc drive in the camera. Plus I havent had much luck getting good pics. always seem fuzzy and low resolution, even at the largest file size, which when reduced to Web size files are very poor quality. One of the other cameras that are a newer design generation would be better in my opinion.

Yes it is. IF it is good coal. All coal is not the same. For forging you need a low sulpher, low volatile, high BTU coal that cokes well. Most coal sold for home heating, used for coal burning electrical power generating plants, etc will not work well. If you have access to a local source of good blacksmithing coal, then you are fortunate. It is getting harder to find good blacksmithing coal, and many people have gone to propane forges because of this.