My ugly bar

J

JohnnyMayhem

Joined
Aug 6, 2006
Messages
1,360
I made it out of an old section of leaf spring. It started becuase we got into a discussion on ZombieSquad regarding some E-Tools and I decided to make my own as an experiement.

I quenched it in a bucket of motor oil, and heat treated it with a cutting torch.

It's 9 inches long and 15/16ths of an inch thick, and chisle ground. (Heavy heavy bugger)

P1000654.jpg
 
Does it cut? Have you tried prying with it? Are you planning on cord wrapping the handle or putting on real scales?

I like the "this is for working, not for show" look.
 
Wow, almost an inch thick!!! That's pretty extreme but I doubt anyone will be able to break it
 
He obviously wants a literal sharpened prybar. I suspect cracking open zombie skulls is also a motivating factor.
 
Like Keith said earlier, why in the world did you make it this thick ? It's cool though, I like it. It's something that I'll take along in my camping trip. I think I can use it as an axe...
 
I can't believe I didn't notice that i typed 15/16ths.

It's 5/16ths of an inch.

I gave it a cord wrapped handle, and I'm going to tinker with the grinding a little bit here and there, because I noticed that I didn't get it down all the way. I'm sure that I can cut with it though.

I'm going to really test it out this weekend and see how well it works out.
 
That's inspiring!:thumbup: Did you anneal the piece before grinding on it? If so, how? I thought chucking the steel in a hot campfire might work. I have some leaf spring that is much thinner that I want to do something similar with.
 
New member here. Can you give a new guy some more detail on the beginning to end fabrication? Neat, neat idea that I'd like to do as a first effort! Looks like just the thing to keep in the console of the car, in the garage, on the bike. Utilitarian and no nonsense!
 
I annealed it before I even touched it with my grinder. I cut the handle shape out with my cutting torch. I did the rest of the shaping, including doing the edge with my angle grinder, plus a little bit of polishing here and there with little handheld belt sander.


From beginning to end here goes.

1) get into arguement on "teh intarweb" regarding E-Tools (heh)

But the real number 1 is.

1) Find yourself a suitable chunk of spring steel (I found a section of leaf spring in my welding shop from a different project) (we were trying to retrofit a leafspring suspension on the rear of my friends motorcycle becuase it would look cool)

2) heat up that bugger nice and red hot, also make sure to take the bend out of it if there is one.

3) draw the desired shape, and cut it out when it is cooled

4) cleanup and bevel grinding and drill holes to attach handle scales or cord wrappings.

5) heat treat by heating it up red hot, quenching in motor oil, clean off the scales and temper it with the torch.

6)touch up grinding/final edge grinding.

7) post pictures on the net.

That's about it, I really only have maby an hour's worth of work on it.


I'm really not sure on how well it would hold up, but for an utlity beater emergency tool, it should work out just fine.
 
Can you give me some details on the tempering process used? I'm getting more stoked to go "looking for leaf springs"!
 
Also, can someone point me to an FAQ on basic annealing, heat treating, tempering on this site. Ya gotta start somewhere!
 
I totally agree with Maguahuitl. I have spent countless dollars on various knife making books, and the Goddard book is definatly the best one to get IMHO.

I just got some broken sawblades in and a broken disk off of a disk plow that I might just wind up playing with this weekend.
 
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