Road side find

kuraki

kuraki

Fimbulvetr Knifeworks
Joined
Jun 17, 2016
Messages
4,679
A buddy of mine called me up because he had found this axe head on the side of the road out in the county forest. He wanted to clean it up and hadn't been having much luck with his bench grinder. So I had him come out to my shop to use my equipment. Right away I could tell it had a forge welded edge, but didn't think much of it. So he ground it clean and was asking about buffing it when I had the idea to etch it to show off the edge. I did not expect to find this:IMG_20171112_11457.jpg IMG_20171112_21907.jpg IMG_20171112_33863.jpg IMG_20171112_43196.jpg
 

Attachments

  • IMG_20171112_43196.jpg
    IMG_20171112_43196.jpg
    36.9 KB · Views: 3
  • IMG_20171112_50620.jpg
    IMG_20171112_50620.jpg
    48.8 KB · Views: 3
IMG_20171112_1261.jpg IMG_20171112_50620.jpg IMG_20171112_11995.jpg

In that last image it said MLW in the top left corner, on the right I could make out "..st steel" before he ground it.

Any idea what he's got here? I don't know much about historical axes but I've never heard of a pattern welded one.
 
It's an old axe, likely dating to about the beginning 20th century (1900 +/-), maybe even earlier. The inlayed bit is an older style of manufacture. 'Cast steel' refers to the inlayed bit. The body of the axe looks like wrought iron, hence the early date.
Great find!
 
This looks amazing, even the body looks almost pattern welded.

Wow what a beaut!

If life were a video game this would be an extremely rare low chance enemy will drop magical axe.
 
Okay, here's a theory:

It's an old axe (guesstimated around 1900 or earlier). The inserted bit is the premium quality (for those days) "cast steel" aka "crucible steel". The rest of the head is the lower quality "shear steel", which was made using forge-welded stacks of "blister steel" (produced by cementation, with alternating layers of steel and iron) which was not homogeneous like "cast steel". The etch shows the non-homogeneous layered composition of the "shear steel".

Reference:
"Previous to Huntsman [and his crucible steel process], the most common method of producing steel was the manufacture of shear steel. In this method, blister steel produced by cementation was used, which consisted of a core of wrought iron surrounded by a shell of very high-carbon steel, typically ranging from 1.5 to 2.0% carbon. To help homogenize the steel, it was pounded into flat plates, which were stacked and forge welded together. This produced steel with alternating layers of steel and iron. The resulting billet could then be hammered flat, cut into plates, which were stacked and welded again, thinning and compounding the layers, and evening out the carbon more as it slowly diffused out of the high-carbon steel into the lower-carbon iron. However, the more the steel was heated and worked; the more it tended to decarburize, and this outward diffusion occurs much faster than the inward diffusion between layers. Thus, further attempts to homogenize the steel resulted in a carbon content too low for use in items like springs, cutlery, swords, or tools. Therefore, steel intended for use in such items, especially tools, was still being made primarily by the slow and arduous bloomery process in very small amounts and at high cost, which, albeit better, had to be manually separated from the wrought iron and was still impossible to fully homogenize in the solid state. Huntsman's process [for crucible steel] was the first to produce a fully homogeneous steel."

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_steel

[Edited to add: I posted this before seeing what Square_peg wrote.]
 
Etched "shear steel" from 1850-60's:
real-mccoy-3.jpg

photo by Wild Rose
https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/shear-steel.341564/page-2#post-3010066
 
Excellent! Thanks guys, that's great info.

Shear steel would be quite soft? The poll was badly peened.
 
Square_peg said:
It's an old axe, likely dating to about the beginning 20th century (1900 +/-), maybe even earlier. The inlayed bit is an older style of manufacture. 'Cast steel' refers to the inlayed bit. The body of the axe looks like wrought iron, hence the early date.
Great find!
Click to expand...

Definitely looks old to me, it's just a shame it was ground on... ect.
It looks nice in it's current state though, deserves a special handle.
 
kuraki said:
Shear steel would be quite soft? The poll was badly peened.
Click to expand...

Shear steel (IF that is what it is,vs some type of WI,really wish i knew more),"would be" neither soft nor hard,but it's hardness would depend on it's heat-treatment.
Normally a +/- medium-carbon steel(between say 0.30+ and somewhat bless than 0.70%C),it could be heat-treated to a high degree of hardness,possibly even in the 60-ies of Rc3 scale...

Sorry for such a seemingly obscure point,but it's worth it,to realise that any "steel" can only be judged taking it's present state into consideration,as in annealed(and there're several kinds of even annealing alone,such as say the spheroidising anneal used for milling parts),or hardened to whatever hardness,or a number of other variants.Never just the "steel=...".
 
Last edited:
Stellar find. Looks like it's seen some use, too. Personally I'm a fan of the clean up job, looks great.
 
Beautiful ax! Wrought iron body, cast steel edge, as has been said above. Blister steel and shear steel was labor intensive to produce and therefore expensive. They would not have likely made the body out of it.

In the days before the Bessemer process, when steel production was much more difficult, they would even build most of a pair of scissors from wrought iron, with just the edges of the blades made from steel.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top