My first dagger

[Kevin Powers]

I've begun working on my first dagger and thought I'd share some of the process I've been doing.
The blank was cut out using the waterjet so atleast I know that is symmetrical. Probably where the symmetry stops in this build haha.
The blade material is w2. I decided to hollow grind the center of the blade with the 2" lower wheel on my platen. This is a first for me. I got them even from side to side. The bevels are flat ground. There is still a lot of cleaning up to do on the plunges for the fuller and the bevels. I don't know if there is a hamon on the blade. It's etched in the pictures to help remove decarb from heat treating. The blade grinds made it difficult to see the decarb without etching. I hope there is a hamon as I fear I don't have enough material in the fuller to re-heat treat and remove decarb.

I have wrought iron anchor chain and wrought iron wagon wheel pieces that I've decided to use for pommel and guard. This is what I first came up with but the guard needs to be redone. It's more narrow than the handle and I think the transition from guard to handle would be weird.
I am debating on turning and fluting another piece of the anchor chain to be a fitting under the guard.

 

[Kevin Powers]

For the handle I wanted to do a spiral fluted and wire inlayed piece. This is all a first for me. There is a very surprising lack of information on the web about all this. The only real info I found was Steve Culver's tutorial which was posted on here years ago. A big thank you goes to Steve for keeping this info on his site so I could follow it during the forum shut down.
I went with an ironwood block that was given to me by Josh Rider. This is my first time doing this so I didn't want it to be on a piece of ivory or other expensive material. Plus I love ironwood and I think it will look good with the wrought.
I first turned the block on my lathe to put a 1/4" hole down the center for all thread to reside the rest of the process. Once I got a taper and profile that somewhat resembled what I was going for I used the hex points of the nuts on each end of the all thread to be my index marks for the twist pattern. I put the all thread in the vise and used a 3 corner file to give myself more permanent marks. Once I had these grooves I grabbed my wax string out of my leather tools and wrapped the top of the all thread and proceeded to tightly wrap my spirals. First I tried(failed miserably) to mark each one on its own while holding the string tight. No matter how tight I got it the string moved and the pencil line looked like my 3 year old drew it. Thinking about it some more I decided a pencil is going to move the string no matter what I do. So I wrapped the string incredibly tight on all the marks and then I grabbed a can of flat black spray paint and very lightly painted the handle.

Now that I had marks I could follow it was time to make the tool to cut the wire grooves. My tool is very similar to Mr.Culvers with the exception of the blade. The blade I used came out of my harbor freight jigsaw and needed very little work on the tang to fit into my x-acto knife.
I surface ground the blade to .037". Then cut the blade shorter and used the cutoff to be my depth guide. I super glued it to the blade. I have 5 minutes into the tool and it worked great. I plan to make another in the future that has smaller teeth for the initial cuts. With this one I was slipping all over the place until the groove was established.

Not wanting to stop the good morning I was having in the shop I decided to start on the fluting. This was a bad idea as I'm lacking in files and sanding drums. The lack of proper tools in addition to me being a big chicken doing this for the first time made the fluting process agonizing to my hands, wrists, and shoulders. I cut the flutes with a rat tail file down the center(ish) of the grooves I cut for the wires. After I established the groove I opened it up with a sanding drum chucked into my file handle that is like a pin vise. Then I switched to finer grit paper wrapped around my 1/2" transfer punch(yay carpal tunnel). There is still cleaning up to be done, ends of the flutes to be shaped, and final sanding but I'm pretty happy with what I've done so far. This handle, just the wood work took 9 hours so far. Yes the lesson was hard but I think it's coming out nicely. I have ordered nickel silver wire and sheet to do coined spacers and the wire inlay. This is where I currently am in the build. Today I'm redoing the guard and making the wrought spacer.

 

[tryppyr]

Nice work!

 

[Josh Rider]

This is really cool! Looking forward to seeing the rest of the build.

 

[Willie71]

Well done so far. Daggers are challenging but rewarding. I've only done four so far, the fourth not completed yet.

 

[john april]

looks like its going to be nice !

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Very nice so far.
I try to no have much of any flat on the sides of the twisted wire. In the short video, it looks like the groove is in the center of a flat area. Optimally, the groove will be on the ridge with no shoulders.