Mark Williams
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Dont feed the trolls please.
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The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details: https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is$300$250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
making swords out of leaf springs
- Thread starter joemamma12
- Start date
- Status
TO THE BEGINNER
As you try to learn the basic methods to make armour and or swords you will run into several major hurdles. Not the least of which is an organized cadre of professional smiths that operate from several chat rooms and forums. These underhanded business men are in the business of discouraging you from competing with their products. These folks will get together and fill a forum with information that leads you to believe that you need huge furnaces and expensive tools to make armour and swords. Many people leave these forums thinking that they cannot make the things they want to because they cannot set up a four foot forge in their garage. This cannot be farther from the truth. You can easily set up and make quality armour and swords that can compete with any professionally made product and you can do it for a few hundred dollars. If your neighbors are cool you can do it in a trailer park or apartment. The large forges and furnaces that the chat room historians try to make you believe that you need are not necessary for you! Though there will be a dozen well paid men insisting so. We have assembled here several essays that are intended for the beginner with limited resources. We will keep adding to them till a complete description is published here. Every step from flat sheet metal to finished piece. Or from junk yard freebie to a sword you can cut down trees with. We at Blankenshield have several large forges and furnaces. They are useful for specific purposes but we use them far less than we used to. Our biggest forge has mostly been used to cook whole pigs actually. Years ago we did a lot more heat treatment than we do now but detailed testing proved that Rockwell hardness and crush resistance could be increased by significantly reducing our use of heat. Most professional armoursmiths use heat to anneal the metal making it much much easier to shape just like we used to. Then they heat the piece and quench it just like we used to. They call it good just like we used to. This is cheating and creates a cheap product that is easily polished bright but it cannot be as strong as a piece that has never been annealed in the first place. We found that a work hardening process could produce a harder piece than a heat treatment process. After making armour for thirty years we tested and tested and tried every method known and proved this beyond doubt. The chat room historians will insist that all armour was, historically, worked hot. Even though every pictorial representation of armoursmiths existing shows them holding the armour being worked in their bare hands. No pictorial representation exists of a piece of formed sixteenth century armour being formed in a fire. No written description exists. The only reason the modern smiths work that way is that it is a lot cheaper for them to work with heat. The reason the chat room armoursmiths unite to try to suppress information related to working cold metal is that it can enable any amateur to produce a far stronger piece with no major equipment. In a like manner the chat room sword smiths will unite to keep people from making swords from leaf springs. Because that enables anyone with a sledge hammer and a file to make a sword that can chop most hand forged reproductions in half. Simple economics require the majority of smiths to rise up and try to prevent you from getting to this information. The professional must produce a product in a short period of time. As an amateur you can devote a lot more time to any given piece. Cold work on steel takes a lot more time. But if you carefully follow all the instructions here you can make super hard, super strong, super flexible armour for your self. If you stubbornly follow the instructions here you can make a sword that can chop houses down. At Blankenshield we do not regard you as a threat. As a beginner you have a long long way to go before you can compete in the market we have for our products and when you get here there is plenty of business for many more quality smiths than are out there now. As you learn, be responsible. Do not take safety shortcuts. The pressure will be constantly there to not roll this edge or that, or to anneal to make depth easier to achieve. These short cuts compromise the basic function of armour. To protect. If you are reading these essays the one you are probably protecting is yourself!
As you try to learn the basic methods to make armour and or swords you will run into several major hurdles. Not the least of which is an organized cadre of professional smiths that operate from several chat rooms and forums. These underhanded business men are in the business of discouraging you from competing with their products. These folks will get together and fill a forum with information that leads you to believe that you need huge furnaces and expensive tools to make armour and swords. Many people leave these forums thinking that they cannot make the things they want to because they cannot set up a four foot forge in their garage. This cannot be farther from the truth. You can easily set up and make quality armour and swords that can compete with any professionally made product and you can do it for a few hundred dollars. If your neighbors are cool you can do it in a trailer park or apartment. The large forges and furnaces that the chat room historians try to make you believe that you need are not necessary for you! Though there will be a dozen well paid men insisting so. We have assembled here several essays that are intended for the beginner with limited resources. We will keep adding to them till a complete description is published here. Every step from flat sheet metal to finished piece. Or from junk yard freebie to a sword you can cut down trees with. We at Blankenshield have several large forges and furnaces. They are useful for specific purposes but we use them far less than we used to. Our biggest forge has mostly been used to cook whole pigs actually. Years ago we did a lot more heat treatment than we do now but detailed testing proved that Rockwell hardness and crush resistance could be increased by significantly reducing our use of heat. Most professional armoursmiths use heat to anneal the metal making it much much easier to shape just like we used to. Then they heat the piece and quench it just like we used to. They call it good just like we used to. This is cheating and creates a cheap product that is easily polished bright but it cannot be as strong as a piece that has never been annealed in the first place. We found that a work hardening process could produce a harder piece than a heat treatment process. After making armour for thirty years we tested and tested and tried every method known and proved this beyond doubt. The chat room historians will insist that all armour was, historically, worked hot. Even though every pictorial representation of armoursmiths existing shows them holding the armour being worked in their bare hands. No pictorial representation exists of a piece of formed sixteenth century armour being formed in a fire. No written description exists. The only reason the modern smiths work that way is that it is a lot cheaper for them to work with heat. The reason the chat room armoursmiths unite to try to suppress information related to working cold metal is that it can enable any amateur to produce a far stronger piece with no major equipment. In a like manner the chat room sword smiths will unite to keep people from making swords from leaf springs. Because that enables anyone with a sledge hammer and a file to make a sword that can chop most hand forged reproductions in half. Simple economics require the majority of smiths to rise up and try to prevent you from getting to this information. The professional must produce a product in a short period of time. As an amateur you can devote a lot more time to any given piece. Cold work on steel takes a lot more time. But if you carefully follow all the instructions here you can make super hard, super strong, super flexible armour for your self. If you stubbornly follow the instructions here you can make a sword that can chop houses down. At Blankenshield we do not regard you as a threat. As a beginner you have a long long way to go before you can compete in the market we have for our products and when you get here there is plenty of business for many more quality smiths than are out there now. As you learn, be responsible. Do not take safety shortcuts. The pressure will be constantly there to not roll this edge or that, or to anneal to make depth easier to achieve. These short cuts compromise the basic function of armour. To protect. If you are reading these essays the one you are probably protecting is yourself!
Cougar Allen
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