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So all of my fun projects have been on hold while some commissioned work took all my time. Then I was travelling alot and shop time was scarce. Now I have agreed to produce a special knife for a benefit auction (why? please don't ask). So I am trying to make a seax based on the Nijmegen Seax. It seemed somewhat popular around here lately and I happened to have a piece of PW steel that fit the size requirements. This has to be done and shipped by the end of December. The target form. Being that this is a PW blade, it is not a reproduction of the original seax. It's not even historically accuate for period PW design. I'm really focusing on the shape and fittings. Here is the rough forging with some additional grinding needed to complete the patterning. Here is the rough grinding so far. It still needs a litte profiling, but the blade length is right at 33cm. Width at the base is 3,5cm Wednesday will be layout and drawing the finished design.

Hello, I would like to introduce myself and especially my work here. My name is Jiri and I come from Czech Republic and I am interested in forging and other related crafts for a long time (maybe since i was 12 years old…now i am 25 :D). My work became presentable (I hope) since covid times, when i had plenty of time to practice. I enjoy making knives/ other things inspired by history and fantasy stories (mostly Lord of the rings). First thing i want to introduce, is my Rohirrim set which consists of small utility knife and bigger broken-back seax. The small one is the first knife where i have used forge welding and it is made of old wrought iron nail which i took from my family´s countryside house roof and the edge is made of my grandfather´s broken drawknife. So this knife has a nice family story. Also, It has brass ferrulle with stylized horse heads ( I slightly improved my engraving skills during a time but it is not as good as i would like) and plum wood handle. The big one is little bit younger and it was a big challenge for me, because i wanted something big and patternwelded and I don´t have any forging machinery so i had to make it just by a hammer. This one is a second attempt because i broke the first one after bad HT. For a blade i have used K720, mild steel and wrought iron from old Theresian fortress. Fittings are casted from broken cymbals (it is also a recycling project a bit ) . The handle itself is made of ash wooden core, tighten up with linen thread and covered with cow leather. Sheaths of both knives are made of tooled leather with bronze and brass fittings. I applied some Rohirrim symbols on the knives and their sheaths, on the pommel of seax is stylized rising sun, which is also on buckles of sheath and there are also horse heads on the small knife and seax sheaths chape. I hope you will enjoy my work and I am looking forward to some critics. And sorry for my english, I haven´t use it for a while.

Hi everyone! Hope you've all survived the Holiday feasting without too much abdominal pain! (and yet we have New-Year eve right around the corner! ) Anyhow, I've been working on this Seax inspired blade... It is not exactly historically correct - but I weighed my need for self expression higher than historically accuracy in this project. Below is a preview of the blade itself. Currently I am working on the handle - more specifically the rear bolster. Engraving is a time consuming process I'm afraid... The blade length from where the tang meets the blade and to the tip is approx. 38 cm. All inlay is 24k gold wire, with the exception of the wolf's tongue - which is in copper. It is engraved like this on both sides of the blades, with the verse 40 of the Voluspá. English: Side A: 40. In the east sat the old in Ironwood and there gave birth to Fenris children; Side B: Just one of these of all of them becomes the moon-thief in troll's guise. Old Norse: Side A: 40. Austr sat in aldna í Járnviði ok fœddi þar Fenris kindir; Side B: verðr af þeim öllum einna nökkurr tungls tjúgari í trolls hami. And here's the pics: And that's it for now. Enjoy the New-Year festivities everyone, and wish you all good health and prosperity in the year to come! Sincerely, Alveprins.

Update: SOLD This is a piece built around undulation, from the waves of the twin serpents in the blade steel and sheath, to the bursting stars of the twists and the wavy grain of the maple in the handle. The blade is made with a W1 edge, 1095/15n20 pattern welding, and mild steel in parts of the serpent. The handle is made from curly maple stained to bring out the figure and the sheath is leather with hand textured brass fittings. The front side of the sheath has a serpent tooled onto it to match the steel of the blade. I should mention that on the rear side of the sheath, there is a small irregularity in the riveting but it is not a structural problem. Blade length: 8.75" (222 mm) Handle length: 6.5" (165 mm) The price for the knife and sheath is SOLD plus shipping If you are interested, you can send me a private message or go to the knife's etsy listing here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/464942116/pattern-welded-serpent-broken-back-seax Thanks for looking! Aiden Carley-Clopton

This year I decided to ramp up my knife production and with the help of my blacksmith friend Michael Bergstrom also try my hand at some commission work. I'm currently beating my usual blade production of 1 knife every few months to about 1 blade a month with room for improvement . The Seax was inspired by anglo saxon broken backs and is comprised of a body of wrought iron I had bought that came from a civil war era ship link. The edge was a flat bar of 1095. The blade measures around 7" with a tang just under 4" and has been shipped off to the customer for hilting. The Birka was a twist cutoff piece from my first multi bar seax I had forged, with a little more twisting to help show the pattern better. That blade ended up at 4" with a 3" tang and was sent to Michael to put on a handle. Hope you'll like the blades! Any comments or critiques are also greatly appreciated!

I've always wanted to make a seax similar to this and hadn't seen many examples. I based it off of the find which is mostly gone. The blade is about 16" and the handle it just large enough for two hands. I used wrought iron for the fittings and a piece of camphor burl for the handle. It's getting close.. still need to go over everything again and peen the tang. Afterwards is the long process of making a sheath. If you've ever made a traditional sheath for a seax.. it's a bugger bear. Hope you enjoy and thanks for looking! More to come as I tackle the sheath!

So if a traditional seax does not have a riccasso, how is the joint between blade and tang setup so you can make a good connection to the handle without showing the gap? The blade will be tapered down to the edge in crossection (say a triangle with a flat spine and full flat grind). If the tang is larger in thickness, for strength, and rectangular in crossection, per usual design, the top of it will show when you look down at the handle. If the tang is smaller in thickness, and rectangular in section, it won't show, but the size change will make the knife weaker at that critical point. If the tang is essentially flush with the blade, and tapered in crossection, you have to deal with broaching and/or filing a trapezoidal hole for it to fit into the handle. Is there a trick here I'm missing?

I wanted to make a very traditional folder, something as traditional as quaffing mead, boar hunting, getting into a long boat and raiding the coastlines of Europe. So I designed and made a pocket seax. This is the second one, the first had the thicker, more rounded handle of a fixed blade seax, so I decided to trim the handle down while retaining a bit of a rise towards the end. This one is 4" long from bolster to the end of the lanyard loop. I am thinking of doing a smaller, 3 1/2" version as well. SAE1070 blade and spring, Brass bolsters and liners, pink ivory scales. I did the carving on the bolsters. Questions and comments welcome!

Dear Brethren, I made this seax a while back but havent posted it until now as it was a secret present for the honourable Mr Ecroyd for his upcoming trip to the other side of the world. This is meant as an every day carry knife while he works on a farm over there. I havent had any of my knives apart from kitchen knives see any serious work yet so hopefully he can give it a good field test! Blade: 5", 15N20/EN42J Handle: Lost wax cast bronze bolster with stabilised coolibah burl. As always let me know what you think! Cheers, James

Dear All, These Anglo Saxon inspired seaxes are finally finished for my wedding two months hence! Some of the WIP (before I broke my camera and had to push onwards) is on this thread: Enjoy! Comments and Criticism gratefully received. I have learnt a heck of a lot on this build, if I were to be making just one I am sure I could have done a much better job of it. However, since there were ten.... yes ten.... with a definite deadline I struggled to spend the extra hundred hours on the sheath required per piece! All in all, I'm happy with them and I'm sure their new owners will be too. A huge amount of thanks must go to Sam Ecroyd, without whom this would not have been possible! Cheers, James P.S. Sorry about the bits of stuff on the blades, didn't realise there was dust on them until I was editing!

It's a frequent discussed topic, but I thought I'd open a tread specificially dealing with evidence for broken back style sax sheaths, in particular aimed at the fittings, suspension. Anyone who has looked for information on this subject will find that the archeological evidence is unsatisfactory incomplete. There are quite a lot of leather sheaths found in rubbish pits in the UK and Ireland, but they are nearly always completely stripped of any metalwork. First a summary of the examples that still have metalwork remaining: The famous hunting knife of Charlemagne, which so far has the most intact sheath known: Not a lot of describing text is available about the sheath (to me). The exact dating is unknown, as is the material of the fittings. It could be gold filligree and glass inlay. The total length of the seax is 52cm. Worth noting is that the shape of the scabbard does not match the blade: the length of the tip beyond the angle is shorter on the sheath as well as the entire blade portion of the sheath. This could mean that the sheath. This could indicate that the sheath was not made for this particular seax.

I present to you my rendition of the seax found at Little Bealings, housed in the British museum. The 26 5/8 inch blade is forged from 80crv2 steel. The handle is dark stained hard maple, wrapped with nickel silver and brass wire. The sheath is speculative, as there are no Saxon langsax sheaths that have survived, and very few langsax sheaths at all. I wanted it to be true to the artifacts yet distinctly Saxon in character. The fittings are bronze and include a baldric for carry. The chape was cast by Matthew Berry of Hopkins Forge. This is the largest seax I have finished.

Hi All! Haven't been here for some time... I've been learning, and improving skills Here there is a scramasax forged out of 5 bars: 3 x twisted rods (45/68/45 layers) + spine and cutting edge of 80CrV2. The handle is made with bronze spacers, deer antler, pear wood and black leather spacer. The "eye" on the butt is brass riveted and soldered from beneath. Overall len.: 515mm/20,27" Blade len.: 323mm/12,71" Handle len.: 184mm/7,24" Width: at handle: 33,5mm/1,32", at widst point: 35mm/1,38" Thickness: 5,5mm/0,22" Weight: 483g/17oz Let's save the words, pictures show some stages of work

Dear Blade Brethren, Mr Ecroyd and I have been working on a project now for some time and we have finally got to the stage that we have something to show you for our toil, blood and tears. I am getting married next year (Mr Loose is making my ring ) and I decided all the best men, ushers and fathers needed wedding knives. We sat down and, true to form, we decided to attempt something ridiculous. This is obviously very similar to the flame edge patterning Dave Stevens showed on Arctic fire and Mick Maxen's explosion mosaics. The plan: Blades: Serpented two bar interrupted twist spine, Flame edge with 'Brownian motion' smoke above it Fittings: Cast bronze chape and pommel, celtic/norse love-themed knotwork Handles: Choice of wood made by the receiver of the knife (Likely wild mango/bubinga/cocobolo/coolibah burr) Sheathes: Veg tan leather with electroetched makers mark and bronze/brass fittings This was the plan for the blade patterning: I have made a few videos of the process thus far which will be linked at the bottom of this post. I started with 18 layers of 15N20 and 1095, then a massive block of 20 layers of 1095 with a strip of EN42J in the middle, welded on top of the stack. This was welded and elongated, resulting in this pattern on the end of the bar: This was then stacked at 90 degrees to the original orientation and re-welded, resulting in this pattern on the end of the bar: This was then again stacked and welded, resulting in much tighter flames: Finally, this was stacked three times and welded. After this, the billet was allowed to cool very slowly from critical temperature to make it as soft as possible, allowing it to be cut into slices. Another billet was then prepared, 18 layers of 15N20 and 1095, welded and elongated, then twisted alternately one way and then the next. This was split into two and then welded together inside two bars of EN8 plain carbon steel. The resulting bar was cut into a zig-zag and forged back to bar stock, causing undulation of the central two alternating twist bars. The slices of the flame edge bar were then forged into 1cm thick bars: These were then married up to their serpent bar and welded, then drawn out to the correct thickness for forging the knives. It was attempted to elongate them as little as possible, to avoid elongating the twist too far, however the flame edge bar needed elongating to unbunch the pattern. A compromise had to be made. These bars were then forged into two knives each and normalised before grinding. After a huge amount of grinding, normalising, quenching, grinding again and then polishing, the knives were etched and taken to a final polish at 1200 grit. I made a machine I named the 'Hand-sand-o-matic 2000' to assist with polishing but I think it will be more useful when time is not such an issue as most of these were polished with A45 trizact belts, as there was no plunge line. Thank you for looking, any comments and criticisms are as always welcomed. Video links to follow to some horrifically amateurishly edited videos! I will post more as we progress with the casting, handling and sheathing. Cheers, James and Sam

Decided to take a crack at making a seax after seeing so many great examples. Got some really good quality high carbon steel lawnmower blades from the local power equipment dealer who was cleaning out his old inventory. Great guy gave me more blades than I can use in a year... lots of material. My 13-year-old son got excited about it so I got him involved in the initial shaping. Great to have a second set of arms swinging the hammer when trying to take a 4-inch wide piece of steel down by about half. Took a while to get the blade right and then a lot of file work to get the fuller in right. Had to switch to a vertical quench tube because by normal knife trough was not long enough... also this seax stretched the limits of my little forge. Guess its time to build a bigger one. Anyway, used reclaimed copper from an old broken extension cord to make the disks for the guard and pommel and used black walnut trimmed from two logs my friend at the power equipment shop donated to my cause. Peening went much better this time... although I'm going to go out and get a peening hammer now. A while back I decided to try making sheaths for my knives and had made two so far, so I figured the Seax needed one also. After scrounging around and finding that I did in fact have a piece of leather large enough, I boiled, shaped and stitched away... and here it is: Sewing is still not my thing and I really need to plan out better where I'm using my clamps so I don't get all those extra marks, but... it's only #3. Still have to put grommets in the two tabs and forge some rings to connect with a belt. Still have to do the final sharpening and I'm considering carving a pattern into the handle as it feel like it could twist a bit in the hand.

Hi all ! It's my first post on this forum so I wanted to say hello and show you my pattern welded seax which I finished few days ago. Total length 47cm, blade 32cm Width 3,2 cm Maciej Leszczyński - Kuźnia Wilkowo

I finally got another blade out the door. This one was a commission for a very patient customer (Thorvaldr). I guess I'd call it a heavily historical fantasy seax. The blade is Aldo's 1084. It's 10" long, flat grind, 1/4" spine. It does taper ever so slightly from the peak of the spine back to the handle, but it's barely noticeable. The blade has younger futhark runes inlaid in nu gold (15% zinc, 80% copper). On the right side they say "Thorvaldr owns me" and on the left "MHB made me". The customer had his previous seax stolen so maybe have his name inlaid in the blade will deter theft / aid recovery. The handle consists of a cast bronze front plate I soldered on, a section of moose antler I carved with a dremel and dyed with potassium permanganate, a bronze spacer, carved cherry with burned edges, another spacer, more moose, and another cast plate. I unfortunately took only a couple WIP pics. These are all the handle components before assembly. The tang is thick all the way back to 1/3 way through the second moose antler section. After that I threaded it for a washer and nut. Everything fit fairly tightly dry, and then I coated everything with a tin layer of acraglass and assembled. You can kinda see it in the pic above, but the assembly is finished by putting the washer and nut on after the end moose antler and tightening them. This hold the whole thing together tightly even without the acraglass. With the acraglass filling in the little spaces and then filling up the space around the nut it should hold together for a long time. The end piece is nailed in place with 4 bronze nails and some acraglass. i drilled the holes exactly the diameter of the nails so they got good friction but didn't risk splitting the antler. The sheath is 8oz cowhide wet-formed to the seax, embossed, and dyed. All the fittings are hand stamped from bronze sheet except for the ring, which I carved and cast. Yeah, it took me a long freakin' time to finish this puppy. There are mistakes I'm not happy with (notice how the plates on the sheath don't line up right?), but overall I'm very pleased with it, and so is the new owner.

A simple design yet proven over the time! Steel: O1 tool steel Overall lenght: 30 cm - 11.81 inches Blade lenght: 17 cm - 6.69 inches Blade height: 3 cm - 1.18 inches Thickness: 6mm - 0.236 inches Heat treated using clay at the spine of the knife to achieve a differential heat treatment. The handle is made with brass pommel and guard. Oak wood with leather spacers and deer antler. The pommel and the guard have a textured satin finish. The handle is secured with epoxy and pinned at the end of the tang. It comes with a simple leather sheath. I ship world wide. FREE SHIPPING! Asking price: SOLD Payment via paypal.

This seax speaks to the past with it's style based on millennia old originals as well as the wrought iron it its pattern from a 150 year old window bar. In addition to a wrought iron spine, the blade also has a central bar of twisted 15n20 and 1095 and an edge bar of W1 tool steel, sharpened to a working edge. There is also the shadow of an auto-hamon reveled by the etch. The handle is made from a beautiful piece of curly maple stained and burnished to bring out the figure. The knife comes with a leather sheath with brass fittings configured for edge up carry as it is believed may have been the case on originals. Dimensions are: -Blade: 7” (178mm) long, 1 1/4” (32mm) wide, 5/16” (8mm) thick. -Overall length: 12 3/4” Price is SOLD plus shipping, if you're interested you can send me a PM here or check it out on my Etsy shop here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/574263574/pattern-welded-broken-back-seax-knife

I've been quiet lately, I haven't had as much time to bladesmith as I'd like between job and weather. I'm trying very hard to get caught up on commissions. Here we have a pair of wolfstooth seaxes with ash handles. Both have wrought iron spines and w1 edges. The larger one is just over 2 ft long, silver wire wrap, and the handle stained with aqua fortis. The fittings on the sheath are nickle silver.. we'd wanted to use silver but it just wasn't in budget. The smaller one is just over 10" long, with an oil finish on the handle and bronze sheath fittings.

Hey, I'm Mike and I'm new to the forums. I've been making knives off and on for about a year. My focus is on historical pieces from the migration period through the viking age. Here are the blades I've made so far as well as a couple Mjolnir pendants I forged in order of completion.

Greetings everyone, I’ve got a commission that has started me down the multi-bar road, so I thought I’d try and do a WIP. The commission is for an anglo-taxon style broken back seax with an 18” or so blade. I decided to do a basic 3 bar blade with wrought iron on the top, a twist in the middle, and high layer count on the bottom: I made my 3 bars, the middle being 36 layers of 15N20 and 1095, and the edge was 432 layer of the same. I tried using hose clamps to hold the bar together and I thought it worked really well. I forged out the blade about 70% of the way and realized I had been forging upside down - d’oh! Nice wrought iron edge. I did what I could to recover something from the mess, and ended up with these two blades: The smaller one is 6 1/4” (158mm), and the larger one is... well, larger (I forgot to measure it). I'm very happy with the pattern, thought I wanted tighter twists. Learned Lesson #1 - make sure you clearly mark which way side is the edge and which is the spine. Attempt #2: So I started again, same plan. As I was forging I realized I had a gap opening up between the edge bar and the twist in a particular area of the bar. I realized that was where the bar had not been square, but had gone diamond shaped on me. I tried rewelding it a couple times with mixed success. One spot just wouldn’t stick even after soaking overnight in vinegar and then fluxing heavily. So I had to shorten the blade to 14” (355mm) to put that spot in the tang: I hit the split with the TIG welder in the tang. A tiny bit goes into the blade, but it’s only on one side, and there is another small weld flaw a bit farther up, but again it was only on one side, so I left it. BTW, thanks to Emilliano Carrillo for coaching me through all these problems via text :-) Learned Lesson #2 - square-up your bars before welding them together. So, attempt # 3. Third time was a charm: I made sure my bars were square, cleaned the sides to be welded carefully, And hammered gently when forging until the billet had enough time/heat for the welds to really set. I did my best to normalize the blade, but I had to do it in sections because it was so long. Then it soaked overnight in vinegar to remove the scale and on to grinding. It took me about 4 hours of grinding to get it down to where I wanted it. I forged it a bit thick on purpose so I could grind past all the surface wrinkles and such caused by the patterns & welds. I ended up with this: The tang had to be cut because I can only fit 23” in my heat treat kiln. This has very light etch on it to show the pattern because the next step was a wire inlay of runes. The customer happens to be an expert in Old English, so I trade him the pattern welding of the blade for a low volume of his translation services in perpetuity. His last name happens to be Bishop, and we decided this blade would be named “Bishop’s Boar”, which he translated into “bisceopes eofor”. I printed out the runes on the computer so the spacing would be correct, and taped them to the place i wanted them on the blade. I then cut through the paper with a utility knife to mark them on the blade. It works surprisingly well, and doesn’t rub off. I cut the runes with a Gravermax engraver. They are pricey, but are pretty much the equivalent of a power hammer for engraving. You can do so much more work so much faster. My technique is pretty basic. I’m inlaying 22ga wire which is about 1mm in diameter, so I cut the grooves 1mm wide and half mm deep. As wide as the wire and half as deep seems to be a goodformula no matter what width the wire is. This is essentially how I cut the grooves. I always try to cut to another groove if I can, and i take 2-3 passes to get down the half millimeter. You have to be gentle when engraving or you snap points Once you have the grooves cut you need to make them into a dovetail to hold the wire. I’ve tried a number of techniques, but the one that seems to work the best for me is Matt Parkinson’s - just come in from the opposite side at a 45 degree angle with a chisel directed into the bottom corner of the groove. It’s nice because the metal tends to raise up when you do it so you get visual confirmation that you’ve done it. It also holds the wire the tightest according to my yank-on-it tests. I hammer the wire in with a hammer made of graver stock. Just like a regular hammer it needs a smooth face with no sharp corners. This is what I end up with. You should be able to tug on the wire and have it not pop out. If it does, clip it off, recut your dovetails, and start again. Super short piece will pull out easier than long ones, so be gentler with them. The most important detail here is that that i leave the wire proud of the grooves. After heat treat the wire will be dead soft from quenching, and you can do another round of hammering to get it just a little farther and tighter into the grooves. Here it is completed. And here are the tools I used: Channel cutting graver on the bottom right, chisel for setting the dovetails on the bottom left, hammer on the top, and flush cut jewelers snips for cutting the wire off. Heat treat was done in a kiln with an argon atmosphere. The argon prevents decarburizing and eliminates most of the scale. Here’s the inlay after heat treat and a second round of hammering the wire. This inlay took a total of 5 hours even with a Gravermax and some experience. I machine sanded the whole blade to 240grit, then started at 220 by hand and went down to 600. Etched it for 4 10 minutes sessions in ferric chloride, then hit it with a 1000grit stone and then 1500grit sandpaper. Up next is the handle, which will be cast bronze with an attempt at faux-garnet inlay and carved bog wood. We'll see how that goes...

Here's a little thing I restored actually - recently. The blade was made quite a few years ago - but had been collecting dust'n rust. So - I shined it up and made a brand new handle and sheath for it. The runes on the blade reads "Smar Haukr" - old Norse for Little Hawk. Steel: Don't remember. Hardness at edge: 58 HRC (differential hardened) Handle: Russian Bog Oak (2800 years old) + maple, green vulcanized fiber and 925 silver. This will be my daily beater in the mountains and forests whenever I travel. Sincerely, Alveprins.

This is the seax blade I welded up and forged out in my demo at Grizzy Iron works in Phoenix AZ last Feb, Totally welded with out flux or oil under Grizz's chambersburg 300 utility hammer. The bolster is moose antler and the handle is stabilized sycamore

I used 1095, L6, and 15n20. I ended up making 2 smaller knives out of the material because I had an inclusion in the middle that there was no getting around. I have not cast the guards or pommels yet, one will be inlayed with Lapis Lazuli and the other with malachite.