Intro to Bladesmithing at NESM 3/2-3/13 WIP

I promise I'm not done with this thread yet. I simply ran out of time over the weekend due to my LONG drive back home to Florida (22 hours straight). I've got videos uploading as we speak so there is a lot more to come in content, as well as 2 days I still need to post about (thankfully during each day I took notes so I can easily go back to what happened and what I learned) and once those are posted, I'll post a final recap of everything.

Thank you Nick for those pictures! It is kind of funny to think at the start I had no idea what I was doing and near the end I was pretty well on my own and just trying to refine the skills!

Thank you to those who commented, glad to know my efforts have not been in vein!
 
This day started in the classroom, but it wasn't review! Since everyone had finally passed the test, it meant we could all take a collective sigh of relief and discuss other aspects of knife making for which we had questions. I'm not sure what the actual question began as, but soon Jim was drawing a bowie style knife with a buttcap and he was demonstrating how he assembled the tang which would allow it to be a take down knife. He effectively ground the tang end to about half thickness in order to match it with another piece that he'd thread, and would pin the two pieces together. Since the threaded portion would be rounded where it met the tang, it could pivot, allowing much greater success for being able to pass through the handle and buttcap in order to be screwed on and held together. I thought it was ingenious and very simple!

A few other tricks were shared as well, such as coating pieces with vaseline in order to easily be able to remove epoxy excess when attaching scales or pins, or anything else which might require it. Jim also shared some of his opinions on certain aesthetic trends and gave us all food for thought in how our knives might look. He also drew out a few different knives in order to give us an idea of a variety of different styles which would help us put our best foot forward when having our 5 judged when attempting to reach the journeyman level. It was fascinating information and truly a great help to us all. Finally, we headed over to the shop.

Once we went to the shop, this day had a completely different feel to me than any previously. 2 full days remained and everyone had passed their test, so it meant we could focus on whatever we wanted. Some folks (myself included) decided to forge something we'd designed in our heads while others decided to grind on knives they'd finished forging. I personally have always been fond of bowies, and decided I would start to forge something inspired by Jim but I'm sure in the end will look NOTHING like what I had in my head! The atmosphere in the shop was relaxed, everyone was walking around during their heats checking out what others were doing and offering encouragement. After a few hours, we were treated to a demo by Jim in how he grinds his false edges.

The video is currently uploading, but here are a few pictures of the knife he ground to tie everyone over ;)
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Video finished loading, so here it is!
[video=youtube_share;Vq8gd3wOtcQ]http://youtu.be/Vq8gd3wOtcQ[/video]


This day was really a lot of fun. Not that the previous days weren't, they were an absolute blast, but somehow by all of us passing the test, it seemed to relax us and we felt more confident in our abilities. I watched some of my fellow classmates who'd been seemingly worried to proceed to the next step in any path (forging or grinding or heat treating) without the explicit OK from Jim, start to find their own way and confidence in what they were creating. I personally could take advice from Nick or Jim about blade design and make changes to it while forging with only small tidbits of direction. For example, my false edge was not quite long enough for the design I was forging, so Jim simply said 'Try moving that clip back to around here' (here being a point on the back of the blade he pointed to) and I was able to move it myself and then straighten the blade. Though I admit....the pinch and straightening are STILL the most difficult and frustrating aspects for me. I think they always will be though, since Jim told me a story about a conversation he had with Bill Moran....which basically confirmed those were the two hardest parts for even him!

Day 10 recap coming soon!
 
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Great Job Eric, I really enjoyed reading your day to day experiences. I did not make as many notes , pics, or videos but truly enjoyed the course as I am sure we all did
 
Ok, life has finally settled back down, time to finish up with Day 10...and then I'll post a conclusion with my thoughts of the class overall, plus a few more videos as I can get them posted to Youtube.

The final Friday was a day a little different than all the rest. Different folks were at different points with their knives. I will call them projects at this point because we were not limited to the knives we had seen demonstrated by Jim. We were now free to interpret and create however we wanted. Some folks were far faster at forging and so they created 2 if not 3 knives between the last 2 days. This was good and bad, sure they had a few extra knives to build, but it became a race for them in order to use the grinders and the heat treating kiln/quenchant since they didn't have those at home. I have a grinder and belts, as well as my Evenheat kiln and Parks 50 I'd just received a month or so before, so I decided to focus my efforts on really trying to reinforce my understanding of the steps and skills, taking my time to do my best to execute and also try to teach my eyes how to 'see'. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but Jim and Nick could look at a forged blade (or even a roughly ground one) and see things that were our of wack, perhaps a blade wasn't straight or perhaps there was an optical illusion because of a thinner section which was straight, but fooled us beginners. My final project I didn't let either Nick nor Jim work on themselves, beacuse I wanted to try to learn to see what they saw....and practice fixing my own mistakes, especially since Lord knows I will be making a TON of them in the future!

I guess I hit a limit of pictures or outside links, so I had to break them up. Hopefully the admins won't smack me down too hard for this, I was trying to post a lot of info that hopefully folks will enjoy!
 
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This was also a day where we were asking any relevant questions we could think of in order to pick the brain of a master smith before we went home! I had questions about forging a kitchen knife, which Jim deferred to Nick who had more experience. I was able to watch Nick give guidance to another student as he had asked about the kitchen knife forging process before I. At some point, enough folks asked that we were treated to the process from start to finish by Nick.

Here is the sample board, with the different steps that Nick Demonstrates.
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Here are the 3 videos (broken up due to a battery swap as well as an accidental button push!). Please pardon the sound, not much I can do since the forge was blowing as well as the exhaust system was running too, so the roar is loud no matter where I could stand. I've found that turning your volume perhaps somewhat lower than you'd prefer seems to allow Nick's comments to come through better than when you raise the volume (which just increases the roar).

[video=youtube;RrzcdMATIaU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrzcdMATIaU[/video]

[video=youtube;g18xDV8T-U4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g18xDV8T-U4[/video]

[video=youtube;DWJMARFw6Zg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWJMARFw6Zg[/video]

After the kitchen knife demo, I asked Jim how he peens a pin. I figured it couldn't hurt to watch him do it! I thought I had a video of it, but it turns out a bump from folks around me made me hit the button, so it stopped part way through and is kind of useless, but here is a picture of the pin after he had worked it for a minute. He uses a 1 pound ballpein hammer and said to just NOT hit anything but the pin. LOL, really simple right?
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There were quite a few demonstrations of how Jim heat treats his knives in order to get that awesome temper line going through them. I admit, I had him do it to my 'project' blade which was definitely inspired by the bowie he brought with him at the start of the class. This is NOT my knife he is treating, but the principle is the same. Maybe I'll upload mine since I have a different view, and it is also closer since some folks had decided to leave the are after seeing him treat 3 knives before mine. This is definitely NOT as easy as you'd think even for a few folks who had used torches quite a lot. For me who'd never handled one...it was about impossible!
[video=youtube;v1xOiCUf6zw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1xOiCUf6zw[/video]

Here is my project knife, sanded to only 120 grit and not completely at that...but if you can look along the length of it in spots you can see the temper line! (quick note, if you look at the group shot of all the knives I created in this class down below, you can see in the 2nd knife from the top, the line is a bit more evenly shown in that light and angle)
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I visited a lot through out this day, checking on fellow classmates and their work, asking questions of Nick and Jim as I thought of them and just relaxed overall. I felt that if I tried to rush through anything else, I'd simply wind up screwing up worse than if I could take my time and not be pressured. So around 1pm I was done with my knives, I refused to do anything else to them. It was really nice to watch and learn from Jim's interaction and instruction to others however, so I wasn't bored or doing nothing by any means.

We knocked off the work around 4pm in order to clean (we did this both Fridays) and then went over to the meeting room/cafeteria area in order to take group photos and get our gear and say goodbyes!
Here is one we took outside the 'shop' building..
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Despite not all taking place on the last day, I hope you all won't mind a few additional photos I thought I should include, as well as videos of demonstrations!


Here is one Nick took of me doing the bend test on my 2nd knife....
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And despite my look of awe (mouth agape) I was actually yelling a question to Jim as he guided me on the power hammer....
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Here is a good video of Jim drawing back the temper of the spine in his test knife
[video=youtube_share;y_UWEIuRVmQ]http://youtu.be/y_UWEIuRVmQ[/video]

These are all the knives I made during the class (the one missing is the test knife which broke)
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Characters to the end, I had asked to get a photo of Jim and Nick together.
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Here are a the videos I have of Jim showing us how he sharpens his blades which I thought was pretty darn cool since he was a winner many times back when the ABS did cutting competitions...
[video=youtube;kwfTk0l764E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwfTk0l764E[/video]

[video=youtube;csZhr5ZZo4E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csZhr5ZZo4E[/video]

[video=youtube;w2c7xjTQWek]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2c7xjTQWek[/video]

Ok, I've wasted a TON of time trying to get this info to post...so now I'm beat and I will have to post my final thoughts tomorrow or Sunday. Hope everyone enjoys!
 
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