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Hi all I've recently been making a Bowie fighter for a friend and its gone really smoothly and nice considering it's my most complex build to date... up until now. I'm having trouble with hardness, I've normalised three times and then went for a quench after getting up to temp. I get some hardness from the file doesn't quite bite as much but it definitely doesn't skate a file either. I tried the quench again but the same thing occurred. I then used a scrap of the same steel and tried a water quench which got it to the same hardness roughly of the oil quenched blade. I know I'm obviously working with an unknown steel as it's from a Landover leaf spring, the oil I used was veg oil which worked excellently for a file knife I forged up a while ago. Any help or in site at all would be much appreciated as I really want this knife to get hard after all the work that's gone into it. But I understand the nature of working with the beast of unknown steel. Many thanks for your time

I've been inspired by the current KITH and am wanting to join it. I just wanna make sure I can do something like a hawk before I join. Anyway, so here's my problem. I'm making a tomahawk in the same style as one posted a little while ago, (it was one of the firebeard guys I'm pretty sure) and I've done everything, including wrapping it around the rod, and placing the ends together. file://localhost/Users/neetjeapple/Pictures/Photo%20Booth%20Library/Pictures/Photo%20on%205-28-13%20at%208.34%20PM.jpg Then I tried welding. I got the steel (5160) yellow-hot, and tried pounding it together, AKA I tried to weld it together. They do not join. I realize it's probably a variety of problems, so I just want a little list on the things I could be doing wrong. P.S., I am using Borax for flux.