- Joined
- Feb 28, 2002
- Messages
- 13,348
Be warned, if you dislike verbose and picture laden work-in-progress threads featuring an overdose of my ugly mug, flee while you can.
The modem-challenged can find an album of the photos here:
http://www.fototime.com/inv/C091951C46AEDFA
Still here? Okay, on with the story… Part 1 of 3
The e-mail read like this: “Hey Roger, want to come down next weekend and forge out a knife?” Since the sender was Dan Farr, and I the weekend happened to be of the three-day variety for us Canucks, the answer was a very quick “Yes!”. Which was then tempered by the realization that I am basically useless with tools. Oh well, I figured it would be fun no matter how pathetic my efforts proved to be. Plus I would get to see Dan forge out a couple of knives which would be worth the short 2 hour drive from Oakville to Rochester.
We left Dan’s home in Rochester for his cabin in the quaint little village of Dansville (no, I’m not making that up, I’m not nearly that creative) where his forge is located. Talk about an ideal setting – beautiful piece of land, heavily treed, overlooking a running stream.
Dan went first, forging out a small hunter and explaining the steps as he went. It was quite a revelation – I had no idea that a bar of steel could be moved into something very close to the shape of a knife so quickly. At least, it can be done quickly when a talented and experienced bladesmith is holding the hammer. Making the most of the short period of time when the steel is hot enough to move easily under the hammer is key. Big hits, by and large, are not needed. Just hitting where it needs to be hit, when it needs to be hit is what gets the job done. And if that sounds easier to say than to put into practice, well, you would be right.
It was my turn to go and I would also be starting with a hunter, progressing to a mid-size knife, and then, depending on how things went, maybe to a bowie. At least, that was the plan, but more on that later.
Okay. Keep it simple. Take a bar of 5160. Get it hot….
… and hit it hard.
It took WAY more heats and hits for me to get to something resembling a knife, but get there I eventually did.
Then Dan decided to demonstrate the power hammer…
Which I would use to forge out the “midsize” knife from a bar of 1084.. I would discover the joys and sorrows of the power hammer. The joys – well, you can draw out a tang faster than it takes me to type “you can draw out a tang”. The sorrows – well, when you mis-hit holding a hammer, you don’t smack it four more times consecutively at or near that spot. But the power hammer can really magnify your mistakes by doing just that.
There was still a fair bit of hand-hammering on the “midsize” knife, which I had so much fun hitting that it somehow ended up being a big honkin’ blade. It was more of a straight-backed camp-knife type shape, but – and here’s one of the cool things about forging – I decided to bring down the tip and go for more of a bowie profile.
Dan makes sure I have the darn thing straight – as in straight spine and centered edge.
It’s not real easy (for me, anyway) to keep the edge centered in that long blade. But once you get the spine straight, you just heat it up, clamp the spine in a vise and tweek the edge toward the center with the tongs. One of the more gratifying moments would come when we scribed the center line for the edge before final shaping on the grinder and the thing was dead-centered.
Here, the big blade is removed from the Dansville forge for the last time:
I am smiling because, although this thing barely looks like a knife, it sure feels like one already. Dan is smiling because he is real happy that I did not in fact burn his barn to the ground.
After annealing, a final visit to the anvil for a photo-op, Dan officially named the blade “Canadian Bushwhacker”:
As we drove back to Rochester, I felt pretty hot, tired, but happy. Dan casually mentioned that the easy part was behind us. He was smiling, so I assumed he was joking. Brother, I could not have been more wrong. We had barely begun.
Next we would grind off the scale:
The surface-grinder would come in handy as well, at least once I got used to the rub-your-head-while-patting-your-tummy operation of the controls:
End of Part 1
The modem-challenged can find an album of the photos here:
http://www.fototime.com/inv/C091951C46AEDFA
Still here? Okay, on with the story… Part 1 of 3
The e-mail read like this: “Hey Roger, want to come down next weekend and forge out a knife?” Since the sender was Dan Farr, and I the weekend happened to be of the three-day variety for us Canucks, the answer was a very quick “Yes!”. Which was then tempered by the realization that I am basically useless with tools. Oh well, I figured it would be fun no matter how pathetic my efforts proved to be. Plus I would get to see Dan forge out a couple of knives which would be worth the short 2 hour drive from Oakville to Rochester.
We left Dan’s home in Rochester for his cabin in the quaint little village of Dansville (no, I’m not making that up, I’m not nearly that creative) where his forge is located. Talk about an ideal setting – beautiful piece of land, heavily treed, overlooking a running stream.
Dan went first, forging out a small hunter and explaining the steps as he went. It was quite a revelation – I had no idea that a bar of steel could be moved into something very close to the shape of a knife so quickly. At least, it can be done quickly when a talented and experienced bladesmith is holding the hammer. Making the most of the short period of time when the steel is hot enough to move easily under the hammer is key. Big hits, by and large, are not needed. Just hitting where it needs to be hit, when it needs to be hit is what gets the job done. And if that sounds easier to say than to put into practice, well, you would be right.
It was my turn to go and I would also be starting with a hunter, progressing to a mid-size knife, and then, depending on how things went, maybe to a bowie. At least, that was the plan, but more on that later.
Okay. Keep it simple. Take a bar of 5160. Get it hot….
… and hit it hard.
It took WAY more heats and hits for me to get to something resembling a knife, but get there I eventually did.
Then Dan decided to demonstrate the power hammer…
Which I would use to forge out the “midsize” knife from a bar of 1084.. I would discover the joys and sorrows of the power hammer. The joys – well, you can draw out a tang faster than it takes me to type “you can draw out a tang”. The sorrows – well, when you mis-hit holding a hammer, you don’t smack it four more times consecutively at or near that spot. But the power hammer can really magnify your mistakes by doing just that.
There was still a fair bit of hand-hammering on the “midsize” knife, which I had so much fun hitting that it somehow ended up being a big honkin’ blade. It was more of a straight-backed camp-knife type shape, but – and here’s one of the cool things about forging – I decided to bring down the tip and go for more of a bowie profile.
Dan makes sure I have the darn thing straight – as in straight spine and centered edge.
It’s not real easy (for me, anyway) to keep the edge centered in that long blade. But once you get the spine straight, you just heat it up, clamp the spine in a vise and tweek the edge toward the center with the tongs. One of the more gratifying moments would come when we scribed the center line for the edge before final shaping on the grinder and the thing was dead-centered.
Here, the big blade is removed from the Dansville forge for the last time:
I am smiling because, although this thing barely looks like a knife, it sure feels like one already. Dan is smiling because he is real happy that I did not in fact burn his barn to the ground.
After annealing, a final visit to the anvil for a photo-op, Dan officially named the blade “Canadian Bushwhacker”:
As we drove back to Rochester, I felt pretty hot, tired, but happy. Dan casually mentioned that the easy part was behind us. He was smiling, so I assumed he was joking. Brother, I could not have been more wrong. We had barely begun.
Next we would grind off the scale:
The surface-grinder would come in handy as well, at least once I got used to the rub-your-head-while-patting-your-tummy operation of the controls:
End of Part 1
