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Haven't been there for a long time. Wanted to show some of my axes. Design is inspired by francisca and viking styles, mix between two. Material is spring steel with elm handle.

How to Forge a Railroad Spike Axe (by thepxsmith) Smash the point into the shaft. Keep smashing. Try to keep it from bending while smashing. When you get to 4”-4.5” you can stop smashing (Your forearms will be super tight and your fingers curled permanently around your hammer by now). Make a slit in the top side. I use a slot punch, usually takes 3-4 heat cycles for me to get it through. Drift the hole out just a wee bit. No need to get crazy here, we will come back and refine this later. Flip it back to the side and hammer the “ears” down a little. This will also open the drift hole more so be subtle. Work the inside over the horn or some other smaller round bar to create the starting indentation for the beard. Continue to heat and work that beard. Use the cross-peen hammer to start fanning out the edge shape. Before the edge is thinned all the way beat that beard down in from the top to curl it inward. Keep the inside shape cleaned up over the horn. Once you have your blade/edge shape 95% finished go back into the eye and spread it the remainder of the way. Clean up the ears and then align the edge over the center using your final drift and a vice. Grind it, sand it, polish and buff to your hearts content. Remember: Whatever you do to one side of the axe you must do to the other. I even keep track of my hammer blows so I know what to replicate on the other side. Keep things aligned as you go. It takes time and patience but keeping it where you want it will help you finish it balanced and symmetrical. Use the proper tongs/tools. I use three different tongs to make mine: Gooseneck V-Bit Tongs Railroad Spike Tongs Bent Long Reach Pliers

I found a 700gr hatchet in a market that had an elongated and teardrop "eye" for the handle with a beatiful shape. I took it with the idea of modifying it and obtaining a bearded one with the addition of a steel beard obtained from the leafspring of a truck thick enough to be forged. then I cut away a piece of the bevel of the purchased axe and welded the leafspring. then I forged the new bevel, reshape the profile, heat treated and sharpened it. with a nice piece of walnut I made the curved handle and with a piece of lthick leather a sheath to protect the edge (and myself). for those who want more details I also made a video of the various steps:

Hey guys, I thought I would share my latest project. I bought this axe for $5 at the local flea market and really wanted to make it stand out. I decided to construct it more like a knife where I put a steel tang throughout the entire handle. For the handle, I used Walnut and Maple pieces to give a good color contrast. This was my first time trying metal etching. I love how the etch worked, however I wish I would have etched it even longer to get a deeper depression in the metal. To get an even deeper etch, and add a little more design, I took a rotary tool and bored it out even further. I then put some super blue on to darken the depression. After that I needed to test the weapon in slow motion of course! Overall, I am happy with how this axe turned out and I would love to hear your what you guys think / what you would have done differently. Full Timelapse Video- Thanks!

Some time ago I came back to a model of an axe found in Lipowiec (Southern Poland). I took some pictures during work and I'd like to show the tools I used to forge it. You can see them on the picture at the vice. Another picture shows an anvil, power hammer and coke forge and the mentioned vice on the right side. I also used mig welder and belt grinder plus angle grinder. Axes were forged of wrought iron and a strap of 80CrV2 on the cutting adges. They came out slightly different despite I tried to make them same One weights 402g (0.886 lb) another one weights 462g (1,018 lb). One was made for my cousin another just in case something went wrong. Luckily both are fine, so the heavier one will be put for sale soon. I showed on photos the momnets of upseting the bar for the beard - to make the nice flow of the wrought fibres.

So. I've been interested in blacksmithing for a very long time, but it's only this year that I've taken a good and proper, hard look at the mechanics and science behind it. How blades where made, hardening and tempering, that sort of thing. That coupled with my writing hobby, I was bound to think up a few fantasy blades. Most I scrapped almost immediately because they looked really cool and was about as useful as a toothpick, but I've been stewing about this one design for a long while now, and I'm willing to take the plunge to see what you guys think about it It's... A lot. XD You'll have to forgive my lack of artistic skill, but that's the idea I had. A sort of billhook-pick-hammer....thing. A sawbacked billhook-pick-hammer....thing. Two kinds of grinds in the blade, the chisel grind for the "knife" bit with a V bevel for the axe bit because it'd be easier to sharpen. THe handle I planned on simply being twisted metal, with a hook at the end to stop the blade from slipping out. I won't bore you with the details, but I tried to make a non-folding swiss army knife. If anyone has any design input, please tell me. It's why I put it there in the beginning

Engraving a couple of new steel tags for another Roger Bergh and SaraMi axe. And noticed that this part of the forum has been quiet for a while.. Hope this will liven it up a bit

Hello all! It's been quite some time since I had the chance to get on here, and I must say that I've missed the company. Over the last year or so I've been in and out of the states and working out of a historic shop in the CA state parks district when I can. For the better part of that time, I've been working my way through forging a collection of tools to process and frame timber (so far a few axes, an adze, froe, a few large slicks, and others) which I will post sometime soon. The next project of the lot is a broad axe, and although I will use this thread as a WIP, I have a few questions regarding starting stock size. Looking around at historic examples, the weight ranges from around 3,5-5 pounds and an edge up to 12+ inches. Because I'm working solely by hand, I wanted to start with stock vaguely close to the final dimensions, making it out of three pieces. One for the eye, folded and welded to the second piece which comprises the larger body, and a third for the edge. Looking at a period 1850s axe in the shop, the poll is roughly ,75" thick, so I will use either that or 1" thick by 3" wide stock for the eye, forging the cheeks out of it and leaving shoulders on the blade side to transition into the body. For the body, I have a 3" by 3/8" bar (and another 1/4" thick if that works better) to cut a piece off of, probably in the range of 9-10" or so to account for the shape change from forging bevels and blending welds. My question for those of you with more experience than me is- does this make sense? The weights don't seem right in spite of the material dimensions. I won't be losing much weight from grinding because, with the exception of the edge, it will be all hammer finished. Or maybe my weight estimate is off? I think that with the size of material I would be starting with it would come out closer to 8 pounds, which seems excessive. All the best, John

Some of you who attended the Swords through the centuries event last weekend got to see most of these. I've since replaced all my containers with archival safe foam and materials thanks to Mr. Shea donating some scraps of ethafoam he had. It's nothing like Jeff Pringle's collection, but it's my own =) A fellow nearby me who is conserving a viking sword and scabbard pieces recently unearthed let me onto the fact that there's some fairly reasonable priced authentic viking pieces coming out of Estonia and Latvia on ebay right now, and so I've got another couple axe heads coming my way after bidding on them in the last few weeks as well =) http://www.tharkis.com/images/viking/thumbs.py Here's everything in it's new home (the dark foam next to it is a softer foam which goes on top to keep stuff from moving when the box is closed and not sitting down) Here's one axe head, not in that great shape, and like most of my artifacts, not yet stabilized. This is my spear head, which was stabilized with electrolysis , which unfortunately makes it hard to tell, but there's evidence that it has a pattern welded core, but it's very hard to tell if its' patern welding or if it's very long strands of impurities. The parallel nature and the length of the lines makes me believe it's not just a grain ala wrought however. the most prevelant modern conservation techniques tend to mask / eliminate evidence of pattern welding. Here's a pair of small blades. A small axe head in very bad shape Some bronze belt hardware. Several tongue ends, one set with very nice knotwork engraving, two with very distinctive Viking triangles with 3 dots inside. There are some leather remnants still attached to a few pieces, importantly the join plate in the top right corner clearly shows how, as suspected with many Viking belts, it was created from shorter pieces of leather joined with plates. The leather between the plates is still intact with very clean cut ends between the two halves. The iron tongue has rotted away on the belt buckle, but next to it are some fairly rare hangars , which would have been used to hang other equipment, fire starters, knife sheaths, etc, to the belt. As small as all the pieces are, the level of detal on them is great, with fine lines around all the edges. The buckle has nice stipple work on the face, the 2 hangars on the left have very nice octohedral botoms.

Hey guys I just made a slot punch and a drift (almond shaped) in order to use the punch and drift method to forge an axe. I was wondering if you guys could critique them and tell me if you would make any changes. The slotpunch is unfinished but will look like the handled punch up top I got from GSTongs. Obviously I still have some grinding to do but I still have time! I saw this video where a guy drilled 2 holes about the length of his slot punch and then punched through normally. What is the purpose/advantage of this? Does it make it easier to keep the hole straight? Any other general tips on forging an axe in this method will be greatly appreciated! Thanks a lot guys. -Jeff F

One of my latest ones, big boy blade

Recently finished uploading the final part of building my version of Ragnars axe from 'Vikings' Please excuse my bad english....i'm just a lil' kraut...!!!

Yesterday evening I finished and heat treated my mini tomahawk head made from an old rusted prybar, and it successfully hardened to my surprise. I just did some research on tempering and wish I knew to temper the blade sooner, or that I had time to do it after the quench, but now it's the next morning and I don't know if tempering would be safe. The steel is fine and did not crack overnight and everything seems to be okay, but can critial damage be done during a temper similar to that of a heat treat? I heard 400F for 3 hours, cooling it every hour is the way to go, but this late after a treat I'm not sure how dangerous that would be, any suggestions? Thanks!

So I finally finished my axe head and I was an idiot because I fit the handle (after multiple polyurethane coats), attached a leather handle too, but I just now noticed the wave in the hatchet edge, near the bottom (it has a slight Viking beard to it). Any way to straighten it without affecting the wood or leather handle? Again the wave is at the edge so my thought was to maybe buy a propane torch and heat up the edge, then lightly hammer it out to a better shape, then just re-treat it buy running the torch along the edge and heat treating it. Im open to any suggestions, but as a beginner who has never researched this topic I don't know what many things are so if you could explain I would greatly appreciate it! and again, the head is firmly epoxied and wedged into the handle by this point, and being a small handheld hatchet the edge can't be fit into the forge without ruining the handle completely! So that is not an option! thanks everyone! I spent days preparing to finally finish this axe and I'm super proud of it, now I just have this last hurdle to get over until I'm done

Hey everyone, just finished, or finished the rough finish on my "viking" axe, which now looks slightly more like a generic tomahawk sort of. As a beginner with only weeks of experience, I'd call this a major success and boosts my morale for gaining more and more experience. Obviously compared to most work on this forum this is in the range of bad to mediocre, but I'm pretty proud of it. Since I used a new hatchet head for the start, I had a lot of extra steel to work with for a smaller axe, and it was very hard to work out the shape I wanted from it since it needed a lot of modifying, might've honestly been easier to make one from scratch. Honestly I ground most of what's seen in the final product, but spent a few hours of forging beforehand to get a rough shape going. Please feel free to leave HONEST feedback! I know it isn't that great and I want to hear that! Honesty helps, criticism will make me better! As a beginner with very low experience, criticism and honesty will really make me better! Also suggestions on how I can modify it before I mount it on a handle, I plan on using epoxy so yes It might be "permanent"! The top picture is day 2 (earlier today) of my work, and the second is (obviously) my work at the end of day 2 (later today)

Hey guys, as a beginner, forging for only a few weeks with only a few finished knives, I decided to maybe do a modification rather than a knife from scratch. Can't say it's good so far but after about 30 minutes in day 1 I'd say it's a start! I'd love to hear some honest feedback, how to make it better, and if it's a good start! Please no nasty comments, I'm very new at this and would like critique and not harshness, thanks! I'll continue to post my progress, may take a while to complete! Also, if I sprinkle some borax on the axe before I decide to treat it, will it make it look cleaner? I've heard that

Ok so as I mentioned in my last post I screwed up making a handheld viking style hatchet, so I went to Lowes and picked up a pretty cheap wood handle hatchet. It's not a bad hatchet, but the handle is on there good and I don't really want to ruin the handle or make it unusable incase the other handle can't be fit on. So I was wondering if anybody had suggestions for how I could get this handle out, most likely epoxy used too. Epoxy I could just heat up and soften it, but I have to loosen the wood first. I'm fine with drilling into the handle and patching it up later with glue or something, but I don't really want to cut the handle off because I may use it again. Below I posted three pictures showing the unique wedge in the handle (That doesn't really look removable) as well as the shoulder that appears to have glue on it...any ideas? Thanks

So I was planning on turning an old, rusty, cheap camp axe into a shiny Viking style axe with a modified handle. All was going well but then I noticed that around the beard of the axe the steel got way too soft, like almost play-dough like soft, every strike would send it back super far and I got a lot of folds and the steel ultimately started deteriorating. When it cooled down it looked almost powder-y and I don't know why. Could it have gotten to that point because it was too hot? Or maybe it was just really cheap steel? Also, when I tried grinding it to shape (and failed), it produced a lot of sparks so it was definitely very high in carbon. My three guesses are it was either too hot and I overheated the steel or it was a very low quality steel that deteriorated over time

Good morrow, fellow smiths. I present for your consideration my first attempt at a small (one-handed) battle axe in the Viking mode. If I did my research right, this should be something like a Petersen type C axe, though I'm not going to try to claim historical accuracy on this one because the eye shape is a tomahawk-style teardrop, and because it's made of one solid chunk of steel. I documented the whole process so that those of you who know more than I do can critique it, and hopefully it will of value to those of you who are looking to get into axe-making. Anyway, without further ado, the pictures: Starting off. For the love of Weyland, get fresh steel bar stock if you can. Forging a jeep axle into a rectangular bar by hand is terrible. The blank. It weighs about a pound and a half, and is about 1x1.25x4.5" (don't quote me on that, I forgot to measure it). I've upset the lefthand end a bit to give me more flare for the beard. I also tried to keep the top side of the bar flat while upsetting, because I want a much greater curve on the bottom than on the top. Starting to punch the eye. In the past I have slit the eyes, but I have found that punching gives me tidier ends on the eye. This punch, as it turns out, is actually too big for my drift. I usually start punching/slitting on the top side of the bar, because for whatever reason the side of the hole that I punch first seems to get larger than the side I punch second. Hole and slug. Opening the hole. Usually right after this I will start using the drift to do most of the eye shaping, but I knew that my eye hole was too big and that it wasn't going to take much forging to size it, so I moved on to forging out the bit. After getting the bit profiled, I drew out the langets a bit on the horn of the anvil. You can use the drift to do this, too, but the drift cools the axe head very quickly and shortens your forging window. I try to do as little work as possible with the axe on the drift. Also, if you're not careful, you can get teh axe head stuck pretty solidly on the drift as it cools. It's bad, m'kay? Final sizing of the eye, and doing the last bit of tweaking to make sure the blade is square to the body and handle. Profiling with files. I wanted a sort of filed finish on this one, so the vast majority of shaping was done by hand. Also, my grinder is not set up in such a way as to allow me to grind the large flats of an axe like this. The axe head ready for heat-treatment. I eventually decided to trim a bit off the edge towards the toe to improve things aesthetically. The eye did get a little wonky because the drift wasn't quite big enough, but I managed to compensate with some creative filework. Stay tuned for part 2: Making and fitting the haft.

This is my attempt to make a reconstruction of the Mammen axe. The body of the axe is made from mild steel, with welded blade of 0,65% carbon steel The workpiece Еngraving and inlaying of side with "bird" ornamentation Inlaying of other side In compare with drawing of authentic axe

Hello, this axe is now going up for sale, i did a work in progress on it over in the edged tools subforum of bushcraftuk (http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=141510) This axe was forged entirely by hand, and the haft handcarved from a locally sourced piece of ash. Here are some specifications: Edge length is 100mm (4") - total length is 475mm (18,7") - weight is 885 grams (just under 2 pounds) The head is forged from a solid block of mild steel, with a slit and drifted eye. The edge has a laminated ck60 cutting edge. The price is 170£ / 200€/ 1500Dkk / 225$ + shipping If interested you can contact med at: visti.knifeworks@gmail.com or send me a PM Next to a GB sfa for reference Best regards Peder Visti

Hello, i recently finished my journeymans-test, and so have a bit of time to focus on axes again. So here is another one: Edge length is 100mm (4") - total length is 475mm (18,7") - weight is 885 grams (just under 2 pounds) The head is forged from a solid block of mild steel, with a slit and drifted eye. The edge has a laminated ck60 cutting edge. The haft is ash from the local sawmill. As forged: A bit of grinding later: and finished: a comparison with the well-known GB sfa: Best regards Peder Visti

Hey guys here is a small Viking axe I just finished. It's made from 1018/W2. This was my first time making an axe and forge welding so it isn't perfect. I have a few delaminations but overall I like it. Tell me what you think and I would appreciate critiques and advice. Thanks!

3 Fighting axes inspired by the Viking style. Mild steel bodies with bearing race edges forge-welded in. $175 each. Email adriaang66@gmail.com

I found myself in the need of a broad axe, because I want to hew some oak logs into beams. But I can´t decide what kind of Wood is best suited for axe handles, I have the following in stock : Juniper, oak, beech Wood, Birch, plum, cherry, ironbark, Willow and Aspen(populus). It isn´t about the aesthetics since I like all of them and think they all make beautiful handles, but which one is best suited for axe-handles ?