My new project

scottishsmith24

scottishsmith24

Joined
Sep 4, 2012
Messages
416
Hello all, I thought I would share my upcoming project and preface this by saying that this will be a fairly long time coming. I wanted to share this project on this fine forum because I feel that it has some of the highest quality makers and collectors all in one place and I would like to finally contribute something I feel is worthy of this forum and its members. Recently I have had a lot of projects that were much more neo tribal or medieval in style and I finally have a chance to go back to my roots and push my skill levels up three or four notches. I have always loved the classic American fighter/bowie and haven't really been able to quite grasp its essence. I have always drawn inspiration from Nick Wheeler's work and yesterday decided that enough was enough. So I sat down and pulled up pictures of Nick's and many other makers' work for inspiration and go to designing. I still draw on paper for my designs so I ended up having to tape two pieces of my largest sketch book paper together just to accommodate this beastly bowie. I hope that my poor pictures can convey my ideas and I welcome input about adjustments. I will be gone most of the summer teaching courses in blacksmithing so I won't have much time to work on the knife until August but I will keep everyone posted on any updates that do happen to come along. Now all of that being said here are my ideas.



The next photo gives a better close up of the full concepts but it became really humid here and my paper became all warped and crinkled....made me pretty frustrated.






The blade would be about 9 1/4 inch long and 1 3/4 wide with a 500 layer ladder pattern blade made from 1095 and 15N20. The guard would be nickel silver with file work ( vine pattern), followed by carbon fiber spacers and then brass or bronze with diagonal fluting, followed by another carbon fiber spacer. I found a nice piece of desert ironwood that I have blanked out for this knife. and the a 1/8 inch stainless steel pin.





I'm meeting up with my friend Kim Thomas in Ohio on Thursday to do some pattern welding and hope to get the billet done then, aside from that I'm afraid that the project will be rather slow going. But to those of you who take the time to read my progress thank you for the support and suggestions along the way.

Robert Burns
 
Liking the profile drawing of the crinkled picture.
Shall follow this thread with interest.
Although I often come here hoping to see uk makers .
Thinking you were such I looked but will stay despite the disappointment your pond side .
;) nice looking blue prints .

Just a thought the diagonal fluting is the piece flat or spherical ?.
I find when flat fluting always looks better eg Ti military .
The fluting on a sphere bolster/spacer can look diss proportioned if not pin point.
And the fluting measured identically , hope this makes sense.
 
That makes complete sense, and yes I am pond side but oh how I love UK one of my favorite countries. But that aside I was planning on having spherical fluting. I'm not to familiar flat fluting. Perhaps you could enlighten me a bit more?
 
Well here is a little bit of progress. I was able to start the billet on my last day in the shop. Thankfully I had a few cut offs from other billets to give me a head start on the layer count. In fact I had four cut offs that were each five layers that I trued up to the same size in addition to another eight layers. So as long as my memory serves correctly There should be between 28 and 34 layers in the original billet.


After welding a rebar handle on it went straight into the forge.


The billet was about 3 1/2 inches wide x 1 inch wide x 4 inches long and was eventually drawn out into a 15 inch long x 1 inch square bar.





and a quick etch to make sure I had the right side of the bar before re stacking. If you pay attention to your orientation you shouldn't need to etch but I don't want to just rely on my memory and take that chance to screw it up.



Then it is cut stacked and welded onto a new handle. I fond that the rebar I used on the last handle was too small and would "flop" under the weight of the billet and was frankly rather annoying to deal with so I increased the handle material to 3/4 inch mild steel round bar. With each bar being about 30 layers the next weld should give me approximately 120 layers. Now being in a rush I made a slight mistake in that I didn't take the time to square the ends of the bars and of course didn't notice the "nub" of metal that threw off my measurements. Because of the point I'm at in forge welding it really shouldn't matter for the pattern I'm doing but I will remember to square every single little piece before the last welding pass just to make sure of no mistakes. You can see what I mean in this picture. Not a big deal but it still bugged me and I had no time to fix it before leaving.


Well that is all so far and probably for a while. Thanks for looking.
 
Finally I have an update! Since my last post I have come back to Pittsburgh to teach for the summer and open the new blacksmithing school. We had a great open house yesterday and I have to say that the shop was looking pretty cool...too bad I couldn't get many pictures. :( But I was doing a demo on pattern welding for the prospective students and was able to make progress on the billet for this bowie. The billet has been brought up to 120ish layers at this point and it ready to be cut up, stacked, and re-welded for the last time; bringing the final count to nearly 500 layers. But here are some photos from the day.



What do you think of our shop totems? The mini viking''s name is Bjorn, don't anger him or you'll get a wallop from his hammer!



And the spring house not twenty feet from the shop door (where we get our quench water from).



The shop is almost 1,000 square feet right now and can accommodate 6 forging stations...should be lots of fun!



And the billet from the demonstration all drawn out.



Also another material acquisition; I found a lovely piece of black stick ray skin for the inlay in the sheath, I think a medium brown leather and the inlay of black stink ray should compliment the desert ironwood nicely, what do you think?
 
I love this thread and the black stingray and medium brown leather matches perfectly!

goahead¡
 
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