All the forge welding for the sword was shown in my previous video.
This is part 2 of the making of the serpent in the sword.
In this video, I show how to draw out the bevels, establish the fuller and edge profile,
and heat treating of the sword.
Initially, I start working the bevels by hand starting at the tip of the sword.
Once the tip has been beveled, I switch over to a spring tool on the power hammer which
helps with speeding up the process.
While forging in the bevels, the sword tends to bend away from the bevel that I am working
on since the steel is being spread out.
To keep the whole sword mostly straight during the process, it is important to work both
sides of the blade at the same time.
If this is done right, no further straightening is required.
However, as you will see, I occasionally straighten the sword on the anvil.
As with all steps in forging the sword, drawing out the bevels is quite time consuming, too.
For this sword, it took a little bit more than hours to do all the forging.
Since the core of the sword consists of pattern-welded rods, I need to be careful to draw out only
the edge steel since otherwise the pattern is being distorted.
This is mostly important for the serpent core and during the forging process, I widened
the twisted bars a little bit but this needs to be done fairly evenly on both sides.
At the transition from the blade to the tang I am aiming for a width of about 2 inches
that slowly tapers down to about 1 1/2 in at the tip.
While the power hammer saves a lot of time, the final adjustments of the bevels still
need to be done by hand.
Creating a blade that is absolutely straight and has completely even bevels solely by forging
is near impossible especially as the blade gets longer.
Here I am trying to keep it mostly straight but will have to do fine tune once the forging
is done.
This fine tuning is a nerve wracking process and can take many different forms.
I work the blade on the anvil with the hammer, use a three poing jig in the vise and make
a lot of use of an arbor press to get the sword and the bevels as straight as possible.
Eventually, there needs to be one straight line that can be revealed with grining.
Before switching to the belt grinder, I remove the scale as much as possible.
I use the belt grinder to create an even taper, the fuller and the cutting edge as I will
show in the following few sequences.
Before starting on the fuller, I establish a flat surface in the middle of the blade.
This surface can be etched to reveal the pattern which helps with determining where the fuller
should be established.
For this sword I want a wider fuller which is flat in the middle rather than radiused.
To do this, I grind two channels with a 6in contact wheel.
As I establish the fuller by hand, I need to be very careful where I grind.
This is a skill that I am still learning to do and I made a few mistakes with this sword.
Fortunately, they could all be corrected, but the process still takes a lot of concentration
and time.
Since I require multiple passes with the contact wheel, I using layout fluid to keep track
of where the fuller needs to be ground.
And again back to the belt grinder for the final pass of creating the fuller.
As you can see, this step takes a lot of time and frequent checking to make sure that the
lines stay even.
Once I am happy with the fuller, I switch over to grinding the cutting edges.
With a sword of this length - remember the blade is about 30 inches long - grinding a
straight and even line with the same angle on both sides of the cutting edge is a very
challening task.
I am far from perfect at this but still try to stay as even as possible.
This is how the sword looks so far.
The lines are reasonable but not perfect.
At this point, I am measuring the weight again and then take an etch in acid to see if the
pattern matches the fuller that I created.
To get a good etch, I first degreased the sword with denature alchohol and then place
it in my new tube of acid - my old one was not wide enough for this sword.
I am using HCl which is not terribly aggressive, but after about 30 minutes the pattern can
be easily seen.
As I was creating a wider fuller by grinding two channels with the contact wheel, I now
need to remove the ridge in the middle by hand.
Once I am done with that, I using a file to remove all vertical grinder marks and clean
up the profile before heat treating.
Heat treating is the step that makes or breaks the sword.
It can be a very tense moment.
However, before quenching, I normalize the sword a couple times by heating it up to 1500
Fahrenheit and then letting it cool in the air.
This relieves any stress in the steel that might have built up.
It is also a good practice for grabbbing the sword with the tongs and removing it from
the oven since there can be no hesitation right before quenching the sword.
I wait till the steel is completely black before putting it back in the oven for the
next step.
Now comes the moment of truth.
The sword is 1500 Fahrenheit hot and glowing orange.
I will rapidly cool it down by putting it in a container filled with Parks 50 quenching
fluid.
I use an interrupted quench which cools the sword down fast enough for martensite to form
but without completely cooling it down.
At that point, the martensite transformation is not complete and any warping in the sword
can be correct without danger.
However, I did not see any obvious warping and just put the sword back to cool it down
completely.
Here is the result.
The quench reveals the serpent pattern in a quite remarkable way.
More progress in the next video.