Welcome to Episode 7 of Spear Born of Fire.
In this episode, I will finish forging, grinding and heat treating the spear; culminating in
a polish that reveals the beautiful pattern.
After etching the spearhead in ferric chloride in the last episode, I noticed that the pattern
was a little bit distorted and am now forging the bevels a little bit more to correct the
overall appearance.
Forging with water on the anvil, helps with reducing scale since when the water gets trapped
underneath the hot metal it evaporates and blows the scale off.
As before if you like these videos and want to see more, please share them on your social
networks; wide and far.
thank you.
As you may notice, I am making only very slight correction and frequently check the shape
of the spear.
Another area that requires final corrections is the socket.
If you look closely you will also notice that it did not completely weld at the very end
of it.
That's unfortunate, but there is nothing I can do about it at this point.
Finally, all forging has been completed.
The next step is to remove scale with the wire brush and then it's off to the grinder.
The slack portion of the belt makes grinding round sections a little bit easier.
The socket material is not very thick, so I also need to be careful to not remove too
much material.
However, it is pretty exciting that the spearhead has progressed to this stage.
Now, the one step where I might still be able to really screw everything up is during heat
treating.
You may notice that I am grinding the blade on the platen.
I need to be careful to not remove too much thicknes from the spine and probably would
be better off grinding a concave profile on a big grinding wheel.
Whenever I heat treat, I am trying to remove any vertical grinder marks since they might
lead to cracks when quenching.
Another moment of truth has arrived.
I have prepared my quench tank of high-speed quenching oil and will normalize the spear
once before quenching it.
Look closely and Watch the recalescence!
Did you notice the visible rise in temperature when the crystal structure changed?
If not, watch again.
It's pretty cool.
Without further adue, let's quench and harden the spear!
After heat treating, the pattern including the wolf teeth are clearly visible.
This is a great reward for all the work done so far.
Now, it's time to create the final profile on the grinder.
I will do this with progressively finer belts.
If you have followed me on my journey to create this spear, I hope the wait has been worth
it.
There is still a fair bit of work left such as creating a shaft and fitting the shaft
to the spearhead and you will see all of that in the next video.
Since the spearhead has been hardened, I need to frequently cool it down to maintain the
temper.
I find a slowly rocking motion of my whole body the easiest way to maintain an even grind.
When you closely look at the profile of a spear, you will notice that there are both
concave and convex sections.
How to really get that perfect is something I need to get much better at.
Alright, everything looks pretty good so far.
Before, I can place the spear in ferric chloride to bring out all the patterns, I need to clean
it and remove any oils that might interfere with etching.
I usually leave my blades in the ferric chloride solution for about 10 minutes but let's just
skip that wait.
What follows is my usualy routine after etching.
It involves some metal polish and some iron oxides.
This is what works mostly fine for me but that very much depends on the materials.
For this spear, I was using a wrought iron from a different source and it does not stand
out as much against the high carbon steel as I would have liked.
The metal polish helps with removing oxides left over from the ferric chloride treatment.
Alright, here is the polished pattern.
In the next and final episode, I will add a shaft to the spear and complete it.
If you enjoyed this, don't forget to subscribe to my channel and spread the word.
See you next time.