I’m Matt
I’m Kerry
We are the Stagmer brothers of Baltimore Knife and Sword.
Our work can be seen on film, Broadway and at Renaissance Festivals around the country.
We’re gonna be building some of your favorite weapons, and some weapons you’ve never seen before.
This is Man At Arms: Reforged.
Matt and I were really excited to do a League of Legends build. We both play on a regular basis.
It took us a little while to decide which champion’s weapon to build.
Katarina won out.
The first thing we have to do is get Katarina’s blades drawn and cut out. The in game art
changes a little bit on Katarina. We had to do a lot of research between some of her other
skins and some fan art. We’re gonna make two of them. We’re gonna make them pretty
big. They’re called knives or daggers in the game but they’re basically a short sword.
We have John use the CNC plasma to cut out the blades for Katarina’s Sinister Steel attack.
John cleans and de-burrs the blades, they’ll have to have a fairly good finish
so that we can do the engraving and not have to do a lot of surface finishing afterwards.
I went ahead and laid out the engraving for the inside of the blade. You can see it’s
gonna be pretty gnarly. So what I need to give Kerry is delete the outside of the blade,
and just give him this file. It will give him his tool path and he’ll be able to put
that into the CNC mill and get it carved.
For Katarina’s daggers we’re actually gonna do some deeper carving, it’s not just
gonna be engraving. The CNC milling machine is gonna take four passes, we’re gonna go
about 40 thousandths deep. This will give us a basic layout and give us the definition
for where the edges are going to end.
So we’re gonna do a little side build on the Katarina swords, we’re gonna make three
throwing daggers that she carries. We’re gonna use 1075 steel cause it’s a great
all around tough steel for that kind of weapon.
Safety first!
Sam first cuts them on the saw, then de-burrs them, and goes outside to begin the forging.
I’ve been throwing knives since I was a kid and it’s just been always something I enjoyed.
Now I get the chance to make them. That’s one of the things that originally
got me into blacksmithing and knife making was learning how to make weapons cause I’ve
lost a lot of dime store knives throwing them around the woods and stuff over the years,
so now I get to make my own and as many as I need.
There’s an old bladesmith saying, ten minutes in the forge beats two hours at the grinder.
You can see taking time and care to forge these really close to finish, I only have
about a few minutes on the grinder.
He starts with the 24 grit, and moves all the way through the grits to 220.
After grinding, Sam heat treats and then tempers Katarina’s throwing darts.
Here are the three throwing knives that have come out of the temper oven where we tempered
them at 450 degrees.
Got the blade back from engraving, it looks awesome. Only thing we need to do is stick
it in the forge, draw out the edge a little bit. I just want to see a little more thickness
here, so I’m gonna go ahead and edge bevel it and prepare it for grinding.
In the game, all the edges, all the way around the blade are all beveled and sharp so I’m
gonna go ahead and get to grinding on that.
What I like to use is a pair of vice grips,
clamp those on the tang. Not only am I hooking my thumb in the wheel to get some leverage,
but I can also use this and twist and really add some torque. It gives me a lot more pressure
and makes me grind a whole lot faster.
This is getting to be pretty exciting. Looking really wicked. It’s gonna cause a lot of
damage in the demo.
It’s now time to move on to heat treat. I’m gonna pass them off
to Kerry to do that, and then Kerry’s gonna quench into water this time. Kerry is doing
an agitated quench, what that means is when he goes in he’s moving that blade side to
side and up and down to relieve any steam jacket that could be around that blade. If
you get a steam jacket around the blade that means the water’s not actually cooling the blade.
Using our CNC plasma table I’m going to cut out the guards for Katarina’s swords
from League of Legends.
After Kerry and I examined a lot of in game art and some fan art, we decided this guard
needs some overlays. John uses a plasma cutter to cut them out.
So I’m gonna use the fly press to do some of the ornamentation for the guards for Katarina.
I’m actually marking where we’re gonna be drilling for some rivets.
I’ll come in with a chisel and just lay in the four lines that you see on the opposite sides of her guard.
John lines up the guard and the overlay to drill the rivet holes.
Using a domed rivet set and the vice, Sam rivets the overlays to the guard base.
Now that the overlaying guard are already assembled, John is going to mount them, slot
them, and check the fit on the tang of the swords.
I left the edges a little thick for heat treat, but now that we have the blades hardened,
it’s time to hone those in. I do that on the 24 grit machine.
It’s now time to polish these beautiful blades. I start at 120, move to a 280, and then on to scotch brite for buffing.
John welds the guard and pommel onto the first blade. This gives us our first look at Katarina’s
deadly blades.
While researching these weapons I actually had to add Katarina as a champion, I’d only
played her in randoms. Now that I have more understanding of how these weapons work, I’ll
certainly be playing her more.