I did something amazing yesterday!

K

Kevin R. Cashen

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Sep 9, 2003
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Yesterday, I took what looked liked a knife blade, (it had the shape of a bowie however it was only 16.5 HRC so it was not a real blade only a piece of soft steel that looked exactly like a blade) and turned it into a knife blade. I didn’t change its shape or affect it appearance hardly at all, I didn’t even disturb it’s 400X hand rubbed finish, but in minutes I multiplied its hardness and strength by four times what it was! I did this by making its very atoms do my bidding, with heat alone I rearranged them until the blade was capable of easily cutting an identical blade made from the very same bar in it original 16.5 HRC state.

We all do it very often, but how much do we take it for granted? This thing we do with steel is nothing short of magic if you really stop to contemplate it! Every time I feel bored with having the same heat treating discussion for third time in one week, I just stop and think about these points and the wonder of it refreshes me.

Have any of you pattern welders ever stopped to contemplate the original state of the blade you hold in your hands? Several bars of steel stacked up in a block that no more resembles a blade than a fencepost. Not only do we command the separate bars to share atoms and become one, but we then double its length and to fold and repeat the process numerous times. This is steel folks! The material that’s name is synonymous in our language with indestructibility and unyielding strength, yet we take for granted that we can stretch and fold it like taffy. Most folks would look at a two inch by six inch block of steel and think of any item less than six inches that could be cut from it, but not bladesmiths. Without a second thought the bladesmith can think in terms of volume and ignore the actual dimensions before stretching and reshaping that block into any form he desires.

smelter.jpg


Behold gentlemen, the very womb of our civilization! To apathetic modern eyes it may seem to just be a column of mud behind my shop but just try to imagine our world today without the material that blade makers first pulled out of that wonderful machine not too much more than 2 millennia ago. With that simple mud column I can take dirt and rocks and transform them into a sword! What a fantastic machine! No engineer, no scientist, no explorer can claim to have taken our civilization to the levels that those smiths who swore to make a better blade while feeding such a column of mud! The atomic age, the information age, none of it would be possible had it not been for the Iron Age.

Whenever you get bored with any of this. When you find blade making conversations tedious or we begin bickering over the small stuff, think about all this. David Copperfield, Penn and Teller and others are just actors putting on a show. We, gentlemen, are the real magicians! We are the living successors of men whose skills made or toppled empires. We are mere curiosities today but the world once recognized that its very existence could depend upon our ability to make metal atoms march on our command!

If that isn’t a good enough reason to want to be a bladesmith, nothing is!

So did you ever really think about what we do?
 
Not just a mere forge but an even more fantastic machine. Forges just get things hot enough for us to do our thing. This device, the bloomery smelter, may be one of the most important tools in the history mankind. Not just a heat maker, but a complex engine of chemical reactions that strip oxygen atoms from iron atoms to turn rocks and dirt into iron and steel. Feed iron ore and charcoal into the top at the right rate and it will give you iron and steel out the bottom. If the thing is so wonderful to ponder today, just imagine the reverent awe it inspired when the world first saw this new black metal totally defeat the best bronze weapons. This thing was the particle accelerator of its day and its product was more powerful than the atomic bomb for forever changing the world.
 
Huh. Mine has a pipe in it and is fed by gas, but otherwise it looks like a pile of mud. :)

awesome essay, needs to get a webpage and be linked so I can reread it every month!
 
Yes, Kevin, I have thought about it.
No one is more amazed at what I do than me!
When I walk out of my shop with a beautiful example of what is one of Man's oldest tools, that just previously was nothing more than a blcok of this and a chunk of that, that can then perform its duties as well as can be expected, I am speechless.
I can't believe I just did that.
 
koyote said:
Huh. Mine has a pipe in it and is fed by gas, but otherwise it looks like a pile of mud. :)

awesome essay, needs to get a webpage and be linked so I can reread it every month!
Click to expand...

The tuyere and blower assembly is packed away for the winter, I had to take the tarp off it to snap a pitcure and then found it to be a kind of soggy column of mud. It needs fire to stay healthy, it hungers and soon I will feed it:D
 
It's without question the greatest driving force for me... the pursuit of how all of this works is the reason I make knives. I don't need to make it 'magic', nor does it need further BS to make it romantic. The simple facts that you outlined above, Kevin, are the reason you won't be able to rid yourself of me too easily! There is so much wonder in the reality of it all that I'm obsessed by it.
 
I have a 6 page Word doc. comprised of Cashen Communiques. When I put this at the top of the doc. I now have a 7 page collection
WELL SAID Mr. Cashen
 
I took a stack of seven 6X2X1/2 bars of steel to a club I was addressing as a speaker. No one could imagine that I would eventually hammer,weld ,twist, and manipulate it into dozens of knives.

This is exactly what I was talking about in the poem I wrote. It is the reason forging will survive as long as there are those who can imagine.
Stacy
 
Kevin R. Cashen said:
We, gentlemen, are the real magicians! We are the living successors of men whose skills made or toppled empires. We are mere curiosities today but the world once recognized that its very existence could depend upon our ability to make metal atoms march on our command!QUOTE]

There's a poet in the heart of every engineer, every scientist. Most don't show it, some won't admit it. Yet it is very true -- our simple, childlike wonder at the nature of reality drives us all on.

It certainly isn't the paycheck or the cool slide-rule (sorry -- my old school sensibilities just slipped out there!).:)

My own area is semiconductors and optics. I feel the same way when I watch dirty sand turned into gleaming mirrors, lenses, and complex electronics. I certainly admit this would never have come to pass without those early engineers and their bloomery smelters. [Heat treating is just as important to electronic materials as it is to steel.]

I bow to those who combine engineering excellence with artistic inspiration and hard work. Knife-makers.
Click to expand...
 
A very good read. Thank you Kevin for reminding us of what we do. After many years of manipulating steel and iron, one tends to forget.

OldPhysics, and more well spoken words.
 
I read Kevin's great post, then went outside it being one of the first sunny, warm days we've had in a week. I decide I would start cultivating my garden spot and maybe plant some seeds. As I started digging, I ran into some of the leavings of the former residents that lived on my land, chert flakes. My cultivating then took on the nature of an archaeological dig as I dug deeper and deeper. I finally ended up with a 2' deep trench, a broken lithic drill, a crooked arrowhead and numerous flake scrapers, the white chert turned dark pink from the maker's heating it. I thought again of Kevin's post, then thought 'Right idea, wrong rock.' The tens of thousand's of years man struggled with stone tools before they finally got the right rock into the fire. We've come a long way.
 
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