Welcome back to another episode of Spear Born of Fire where I am recreating a famous Finnish
spear head including its wolf tooth pattern.
This spear is currently in a museum in Helsinki and pretty much looks like the spear you saw
in my intro sequence just now.
In the previous episode, I consolidated wrought iron from old wagon tires and forged it into
a wide plate.
In this video, I am going to take that plate and form it into a spear socket.
If you did not watch the previous episode, there are two things you might want to do:
go back and watch episode as well as subscribe to this channel.
As I mentioned before, Tony and I created enough wrought iron plate for two spear sockets.
Right now, I am cutting it in half and will clean up the sides.
To review, the width of the material is roughtly 5 inches; that's about 12.5 cms; with a thickness
of 1/8 of an inch; that's about 3 mm.
The material needs to be somewhat thicker than you might expect to make it easier to
forge weld together.
The thinner the material, the quicker it is going to lose heat.
The next step is to determine the right taper.
Remember, we will form the socket as a cylinder and that means that the width needs to be
roughly the diameter times pi.
The finnish spear socket had a diameter of roughly an inch; 2.54 cm; at its base.
The other dimension does not matter quite as much now as we can taper it later.
Before, we form the socket, we need to clean up the material.
All the fullering left a bunch of grooves that we did not completely remove while forging.
In hind sight, I wish we had paid more attention to this while drawing out the material as
it would have saved a lot of grinding.
As you may know, good forge welding always requires a scarf.
that is a transition in thickness so that after forge welding all seams disappear.
That's what we have to do here as well.
I am grinding in the scarf on opposite sides so that when rolling they meet appropriately.
You might think that sounds great but what is he doing now?
Another piece of steel being cut?
How does that fit into the picture.
Let me explain.
To help with forming the socket but more importantly to help with the later forge-welding, I need
to make a mandrel that fits insight the socket.
So, what I am doing here is to take a bit of round stock and taper it into the appropriate
dimensions.
I start by forging the tip down to the final size and then slowly taper the rest of the
bar to match.
To help with that, I placed a spacer into the power hammer that restricts the travel
of the die.
While the final shape needs to be round, I first create a square taper that I will then
forge to ocatagon before finally rounding it.
The mandrel will have a limited live time since it will be heated up close to forge
welding temperatures.
So, I expect to perhaps get 5 - 6 sockets out of it before I need to make a new one.
As you see, the mandrel has a square taper now and I am forging the edges to get an octagon
shape.
The next step is to chase all the visible lines to make the mandrel rounder and rounder.
After a while I am happy with the dimensions and the only step remaining is to do some
clean up on the grinder.
Thinking about forge-welding, this clean up is actually a little bit counter intuitive.
We want a lot of scale on the final piece.
Alright, here is how it looks like.
The taper is reasonably smooth and we'll worry about the lack of scale later.
Right now, let's actually get to forming the socket.
I will use a swage to assist with the operation.
When forming a socket, the order of operation is quite important.
So, let's look at the mechanics a little bit.
As you can see I am trying to bend the plate by supporting it in two places on the swage
block and hitting it with the hammer in the air.
It is important to start bending from the outside to the inside because the more the
plate is being bent the less space the hammer will have.
Here I am following imaginary lines that are parallel to the outside of the plate.
The amount of bend required depends on the overall width in the place I am hitting.
In general, I want to bend the outer sides a little bit more aggressively as it is easier
to adjust the areas closer to the center as you will see.
Now, at the outsides are sufficiently bend, I am following my imaginary lines closer to
the center.
I am trying to keep the material clean by brushing off scale to not run into any challenges
when trying to forge weld later.
As you can see the travel of the hammer is already restricted and I need to be careful
that everything comes together roughly at the same time.
At this point, I am switching over to hit the socket on the outside and will slowly
bring the edges together.
As you may notice, there is some struggler to keep everything straight.
Ideally, I am going to get it perfect just using this method.
However, if that should fail, I can always use the mandrel and bring things back to shape
from the inside.
The important part is that the socket ends up with an even taper and that the edges have
enough overlap so that they can be welded.
The mandrel fits too losely and some more adjustment is needed.
At this point, I am working the socket on the swage block with the mandrel inside to
help adjust both the taper as well as the overlap.
After a lot of fine adjustment, I am finally happy and the socket is ready for forge welding.
However, forge-welding will have to wait for the next episode.
In the mean time, I hope you enjoyed this and will come back for more.
The most exciting parts are still ahead.
Before you go, there is one more thing.
It is important and you will have to do it.
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Just click the button.
Alright, see you next time.