A day at the forge is my escape from a busy week at work.
It's what I do on most Saturday mornings and feels almost like a ritual.
Today, I am continuing to work on a complex pattern-welded sword I started a few months
ago; the sword is slowly emerging at a cadence of roughly 4 hours every weekend.
Just like any other ritual, there are steps that need to be performed.
They do not need to be in a prescribed order but are certainly in a rythm and pattern that
have become familiar to me.
It starts with putting on the leather apron to prevent holes in my cloth and skin, making
sure I have a ruler and marker in my pocket and protecting my ears from the loud hammering
noises.
Afterwards, the glides in the power hammer need to be lubricated with motor oil and the
forge turned on.
Today I will turn weeks of work into something that is starting to resemble a sword.
This means I am welding multiple pieces of steel in the forge fire.
As I continue following through with the ritual of getting the shop prepared, I mentally review
everything I need to do today.
My forge is heated by propane and air forced through a heavy duty blower.
When I start the forge, the atmosphere in the shop changes noticeably.
The deep rumble of the burning propane and the resulting heat has been likened to dragon's
breath.
Over the last few months, I forged welded and twisted 8 bars of pattern-welded stock.
The core of the sword will show different patterns on front and back side of the blade.
Each consists of four of the pattern-welded bars.
The next step in creating this majestic sword is forge welding the two sides together so
that they form a solid core.
The sides need to have matching surfaces that align almost perfectly with each other.
To be mated and welded in the forge, they need to be clean and free of any rust.
To create a sword that consists out of so many different parts, it is important to conduct
each step with patience and a sense of serenity.
Rushing the process leads to mistakes and mistakes often lead to failure.
As I am preparing the core of what will be a sword, the sun is shining hot outside and
the forge is warming up the shop to a sweltering heat.
By now my little propane forge will have attained temperatures high enough to allow forge-welding.
Forge welding is a creative and a destructive process.
The heat in the forge is so high that it will slowly eat away at any exposed surface.
Ideally, I succeed in welding the first time.
There is a limit to have often it can be redone and any misstep here may resulting in losing
weeks of work.
The borax I use to protect and coat the steel will form little bubbles telling me that the
steel is hot enough to start hammering it into a single piece.
At this point the liquid borax will be squeezed out in a spray that quickly burns holes into
my cloth and if it gets stuck into my skin.
#When working at the forge and hammering the steel, hot scale frequently flies through
the air, depositing heat where ever it lands.
As the sword is going to be fairly long, welding needs to happen in multiple passes.
In between welding, I like to clean up scale with a wire brush and apply borax to the next
section that I plan on welding.
The repetetive strikes of the power hammer, the constant roar of the forge and the ever
present heat create a space in which the outside world retreats and I focus solely on the moment.
Although the spot welds tore off in the heat induced expansion of the steel, the sword
core is completely welded now.
It is a solid piece with different patterns running through its surface.
Before I can weld on the high-carbon steel edges that will form the cutting part of the
sword blade, I need to straighten the sword core as much as possible.
A wire brush on an angle grinder allows me to remove some of thick scale that is obscuring
the interrupted twists and straight lines of the pattern welded core.
As far as I can tell everything looks good and the steel goes back into the forge so
that I can straighten it on the anvil.
Getting it straight in both dimensions will help with the next step.
In general, even beyond blacksmithing, if the work is prepared well, it saves time and
headaches later.
That is a lesson learned by me mostly due to experiencing these headaches first.
Taking short cuts can be incredibly tempting.
While the work speaks for itself even without narration, I hope you enjoy some of the beautiful
visuals created by the glowing steel and curling smoke that never cease to amaze me.
At this point, the core is as straight as I can make and I am letting it cool down slowly.
This helps with refining the grain of the steel and is required before I can join the
core with its cutting edges.
Since working under high heat creates scale on the steel, I need to spend some time with
the belt sander to remove the scale and expose clean steel.
As before, I need clean surfaces to successfully weld in the forge.
For my cutting edges, I use W1 tool steel which contains roughly 1% carbon and can be
hardened in water.
This welding operation is going to be slightly more challenging since I only have a small
area of support.
This makes it even more important that everything is square and joined well.
The MIG welder helps with holding the steel together while it heats up in the forge.
None of the welds will make it into the final piece but in the mean time it saves me a lot
of time and hassle.
As the sword is going to be very long - at the top end of what one usually finds for
Viking-era swords, I also need a little bit of support in the middle.
I am using very light tag welds for that.
For this forge welding step, I am trying to be very careful with how hard and precise
the power hammer hits.
It would be very easy to tear the bars apart with a misplaced blow.
As the sword is very heavy at this point, creating bends on the power hammer by not
working completely flat to the dies is common.
While the steel is hot, I correct these bends as I go.
It is a little bit frustrating but really not unexpected at all.
As a day or in my case four hours is not really all that long, there is a limit to what I
can accomplish in one session.
For today, I am hoping to get all the material welded together and perhaps start establishing
the tang.
If you have paid close attention, you may have noticed that several of my tag welds
popped while in the forge.
Fortunately, enough of the sword was welded already so that this did not pose a problem.
I find the best way to creating the tang transition is by using a blacksmith's helper.
This allows me to be quite precise on how much material I want to separate.
The power hammer can draw it out very quickly afterwards.
I am quite happy with what I accomplished today and am looking forward to my next weekend
to continue creating this sword.
If you would like to find out what is going to happen with this project, I encourage you
to subscribe on Youtube, and follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
While producing videos is time consuming and challenging, I frequently end up posting in
progress pictures and am perfectly happy to answer questions you may have.
In fact if you have anything you would like to know right now, don't hesitate to post
a question below.
In the mean time, I am getting ready for call it a day and for finishing my day at the forge.
As at the beginning, so the end, a ritual needs to be follow here, too.
All machinery needs to be turned off and stored safely.
I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you next time.