This epsiode continues in the quest of making a sword fit for the ChronoBlade game by nWay.
In the previous episode, I showed how the sword was forged and heat treated and I am
picking up right where we left off.
Here, I am putting the sword in the kiln to be tempered.
This reduces the hardness but increases the toughness.
I am also using the tempering process to help straightend some warps that showed up after
heat treating.
I accomplish this by clamping the sword to straight and very thick piece of steel.
Unfortunately, that step was not sufficient to take out all the warps and I am left with
one particularly tenacious warp in the middle of the sword.
Here you see a series of steps, I am trying to rectify the problem.
The hydraulic press was probably a stupid idea.
It's definitely not a safe thing to do.
The problem is that after hardening the steel does not want to move into a different configuration.
Here I am hammering the sword while it is about 500F hot.
Eventually, I was able to get it straight enough.
Now, it's time to work on the guards.
I am using mild steel and mark the dimensions where the sword is going to rest with a center
punch.
Oops.
The center punch just flew away and the guard is off to an ominious start.
I need to taper both ends which helps draw the guard out in length.
The center punch marks show me where to step tapering.
Once the rough shape has been finished, I will mark where the slot is going to go.
Normally, I would use a slot punch to split the steel in the middle.
However, in this case, I want to ensure that the slot is in the middle and will drill guide
holes.
The slot punch is now going to follow the holes and the slot is going to be perfectly
centered.
The flip side is that I will have less material to work with but in this case that should
work out just fine.
That at least was my hope.
The file allows me to clean up the holes from the drill and then it's time to create the
transition from the blade to the tang in the guard.
I made a special punch for this that roughly follows the shape of the sword blade.
The challenge here is to keep everything perfectly aligned.
In the video you can see me make multiple corrections until I am happy with the shape.
The final step is to bend the guard into a semi circle with the slot for the tang at
its base.
Unfortunately, even though I spent a fair bit of time on this and tried to be careful,
I was not diligent enough.
I am not happy with the shape, and don't have enough material left to correct it.
The upper guard will have to be done over again.
Fortunately, the other pieces did not give me as much trouble.
Let's take a look at how I created the pommel.
I am using a lathe and here you see me squaring off the end of the pommel.
The inner circle will have a diameter of 3/4in or about 19mm.
I am slowly creating a concave transition from the raised button to the center part
of the pommel.
The step that I did not capture on video involved drilling a pilot hole through the middle of
the disk and then drifting it via a rectangular drift with the goal of making one side of
the drilled hole larger.
The challenge with creating the concave surface is to back off on the x and y axis proportionally.