Welcome to a new video that covers yet another basic blacksmithing
project - suitable for beginners as well. If you want to enrich your day with
high quality videos, go ahead and subscribe. You will not regret it.
Today, I will show you how to make a flatter for the power hammer using the bottom swage I
forged in the last video. I am using 4340 which
is a medium carbon tool steel. The round bar is 1 1/2 in in diameter
and I am cutting off a 3 1/2in long piece. As you saw right at the beginning the flatter
has a business end where the flattening happens and then a handle to comfortably hold on to.
I am marking where I want to separate out the steel for the handle.
A blacksmith helper with fullering dies makes it easy to separate the material
for the handle from the material for the business end. This steel even when hot
is a little bit tough to work and I have to hit hard with the hammer multiple times.
One challenge here is that after each hit,
my work piece jumps a little bit and I need to reposition the dies.
After many hard strikes with the hammer,
I have enough material isolated to do the rest of the work on the power hammer.
This was surprisingly time consuming and I am just showing you a time lapse here.
As you may see from the video, the power hammer has a split set of dies. One is completely flat
but the other is for quickly drawing out steel which is what I need for forging a long handle.
I also placed a spacer so that I can draw everything to an even thickness.
I don't quite remember what size I used but it's probably a quarter of an inch.
I am forging the very end of the handle thinner to because I will
bend it into a broader loop for my hand to hold on to.
As you will see in a moment, I am not forming a cirle but more of a rectangle. This whole project
was heavily inspired by a similar video from Torbjörn Åhman. He has excellent content.
I am using the horn of my anvil to form my initial bends but then will need
to heavily adjust as I am not getting the appropriate angles immediately.
After many adjustments and going back and forth, I am happy with the handle I created.
It's time to weld it and then fine tune one more time.
I am careful to not forge directly on the weld as it is at least initially
brittle and might break open. Alright that's enough. I feel like
I spent more time on this than on anything else in this project.
Now, it's time to finally forge the business end of the flatter and do that I am using the
bottom swage I forged in my previous video. The mechanics of a flatter are quite simple,
I need a raised spot that I can hit with a heavy hammer or the power hammer
and a flat surface on the other end. The height of the raised part of the tool
determines the maximum angle at which I can flatten. I'll show you what I mean at the end.
Before heat treating the flatter, I want to clean up some of the transitions I
forged under the power hammer. I am using a hand held fuller to help with that.
After I am happy with the rough shape,
I am going to the grinder to grind the back side of the flatter completely flat.
I will also spend a fair bit of time to grind in very smooth transitions
so that when using the flatter I am not marking the piece I am working on.
As you can see the back is flat now but the edges are still very sharp.
That's what I will fix now.
My metal dust collector help with catching most of
the grinding sparks which hopefully results in a much cleaner shop.
This is looking quite nice now and it's time to heat treat and harden the flatter.
I will heat it up to critical temperature where the steel is no longer magnetic and then will
quickly quench it in high speed quenching oil. The quenching oil quickly cools down to the steel
and will lock the carbon atoms in a configuration where the steel is much harder than before.
The one draw back with this approach is that the transition to the handle and
the handle itself is now also quite hard. That is not what I want.
Before fixing that, let's test with a file whether the heat treating really worked.
You can hear that the file not biting and just skates over the steel.
To make the handle less hard and brittle I will just heat it back up
and let it slowly cool down.
By resting the flatter in the water, it will stay hard and the hardness in the transition
area will be reduced and the handle is hopefully going to be quite soft.
As a final step, I will place the flatter in my heat treating oven to
control the reduction in hardness by temperature.
In this case, I am heating it quite high to 600 Fahrenheit for about an hour.
On video, this hour is over quite quickly. So, let's take a look.
While not impacting the function, there are ugly marks on my flatter. That happens when you forge
scale into the steel. Usually, you remove that with a brush but that assumes a functional brush.
Probably time to change it. Before I close out the video,
let's look at an extreme example. Flatness at a very steep angle.
It you stuck around this long, you might as well subscribe. You know you want to.
There we go. A flatter for the power hammer added to my tool aresenal.
Thanks to everyone who is sticking around with me on Patreon. If you join there,
you get to see my infrequent videos, a little bit earlier.
I hope you enjoyed this video. And with that, I will see you next time.