Jake's post:
jake pogg, post: 18537343, member: 442153"]Square_peg,thank you,sir.
Well,i've both good and bad news.The good news is that it was a (nearly)total failure!

...(it's a good thing as the pain and humiliation and other such niceties make the lesson Register).
The bad news is that as often is with weld failures i'll never know the reason,so the lesson is kinda incomplete...
Right off before even starting i noticed that the future composite is too long in the mid-section.Knowing that with welding it will only increase i Should've stopped and reforged the blade shorter,more compact.
So after the first couple welding heats it of course became starkly obvious:
But,we're not innit for looks this is Education in welding,and welds look fine.More than that they Feel fine(you Know when you got a weld,right through the hammer handle,it feels Solid).
Ok,cool.So now we must steepen the learning curve.
Many sockets of this sort are forged octagonal.Why?...Well,i didn't do my apprenticeship nor journeyed for a stated number of years,didn't find that perfect shop where the Master's daughter(who was of course gorgeous and kind)would marry me,and so did not inherit neither the shop,nor the tools,not even any basic idea of how and why things were done...(boo-hoo...

So there's one way to find out - it's to break those fragile fresh weld-seams trying something daft...And that's of course what i do.
The forging feels great,i'm drifting it very confidently,so attempt to forge it into octagon on the drift,and open some seams,and contaminate them hopelessly.
Now i can just pitch the whole thing,but first-forensics,to learn all we can.I cut and grind into all the suspect places,finding that i only screwed up the extending part,most other seams are plenty good.So i decide to risk further time and fuel to at least practice the welding on of that added poll-mass.
That last was the photo of the grinding,then i had company in the forge and neglected my picture-taking.However the poll welded on fine,and at least for now i'm even kinda liking the resulting rough forging...
I Did learn a great deal,all joking aside it's an important and productive process.Once my brain recuperates a bit i'll even understand a bit more of what happened,(and if i'm super lucky even a little of why,maybe...)
*Just wanted to read his travails with the pictures.
