i'm Kerry Stagmer and we are the blacksmiths of Baltimore knife and sword
we're going to be building some of your favorite things and fantastic
objects you've never seen before this is man at arms reforged
today on man at arms we're going to be creating a historic dagger something you guys have asked
for pretty much all over the forums and the different youtubes we're going to be creating
a rondelle dagger it is truly a devastating weapon with a long spike that's used to penetrate armor
but why just make it simple decker's going to be making a big damascus blade
we're going to be able to go through and create large silver sections for the guard and the pommel
and then lauren will be here she'll be setting gemstones and finishing the work we'll be showing
you this fantastic weapon from tip to pommel from damascus to amethyst here on man at arms
now that decker has alternating layers of 1095 and 15 and 20 welded up into this billet
he's gonna have to take it and get it forge welded to do that
it's gonna go into the forge come up the temperature and he'll begin to hammer
decker brushes the surface of the billet off that's going to get the scale off the surface
he'll add a little bit of flux just to ensure that his weld is easier
now that he has the basic bar out to length he's gonna cut it and restack it
that'll increase the layer count and give us a much more desirable pattern
foreign
if you look at the side of the bottom die you'll notice a small bar there we call that a kiss block
that's locked in place and sets the height that the material can be after the forging
he goes back to the hammer and takes the corners off this is so
that when the material is twisted there's no overlapping corners to give us cold shunts
poured a couple of silver discs for me the billet of this material can still be a little
rough and a little grainy on the surface the way we eliminate that is we anneal and hammer these
they're forged to form and that will consolidate the material and make it much cleaner you'll see
it change as i go through this and we'll do a couple of annealing cycles so that we soften
it and it'll continue to clean the surface until we barely have to do any polish work
so what we're doing now we're actually going to
cut into the back side of the pommel where we're going to locate the bezels
there's no reason that you couldn't just set the bezels on the surface and go ahead and solder
but because this pommel is so thick we're going to be using a lot of heat coming in from the bottom
and the bezels can actually wander slightly as the solder becomes liquid we don't want them to move
so i'm going to cut them in with a milling machine there'll be a little seat and then each bezel for
each gemstone will have a location we put that in place and nothing will move while it's hot
all for idel and decker take this billet out and twist it
this is going to add pattern to the overall piece it'll take a couple of heats and a lot of twisting
but when we go through and create the blade it'll give us this really nice star pattern
now that the bar is consolidated he begins to forge down the blade he's able to strike
it much harder with the hammer this is breaking loose the scale or oxidized surface off the blade
decker now uses a tool we call a smithing tool which basically holds an upper and lower chisel
in place it's going to allow him to give kind of a perfect pinch top and bottom and then he'll
turn it left and right and that that's going to allow him to have a nice shoulder and then
material that's pushed away on the other side which will become the tang
so decker got done doing the rondelle and the rough forging on this so i'm going to take this
now and i'm actually going to clean it up and i'm going to grind the three sides for the rondelle
once i'm done roughing it out i'm going to hand it back to them so they can do the heat treat
so bill got all the grinding done on this rondelle and gave us this nice triangular cross section
after that i heat treated it and kerry put it through the temper you can see we've got a nice
straw color here which is kind of what we're looking for so now i'm going to do the finish
grinding get these surfaces nice and cleaned up get the tang down to dimension and get the
shoulders nice and square i've got a carbide face grinding guide that goes on there so i
can make sure everything's nice and even and flat so when carrying the crew fit
up the rest of the fittings it'll go well uh we'll get this polished up and etched
i've got this about down to size i've got my guide here with carbide faces
so i can take all of this down and make it nice and flat
so i'm making the bezel for the um pommel and i'm going to roll it around my bezel mandrel and then
i have to fit it to the stone so we fit it and then i'm going to cut it and then do fine fitting
lauren is painting a boric acid mixture over the surface of the silver it's going to kind
of lock everything together as it dries we dry it simply by letting it on fire but it's
going to create a surface over all of the silver which will prevent it from absorbing
oxygen so it's an oxygen blocker and essentially acts as a flux to a certain degree as well
now that we have the bezels soldered in place i'm going to set the stones in it
i'm doing it old school because that's the easiest thing to do on a piece this size
unlike the silver and the pommel which is sterling silver the silver that's used in the bezels
is fine silver or pure silver and the reason that we do that is it moves much easier as we
begin to shrink it around the top of each one of these cabochons of the gemstones
it'll be much easier to form and polish although it will look essentially the same when the piece
is fully finished after a brief hiatus it's really great to have lauren back in the shop
she's here and one of the main things is is that we want to create jeweled daggers on a regular
basis so one of the things that she's primarily here to do for us is exactly this type of work
so now that the finished grinding's been done i'm going to go take some sandpaper do a little
hand sanding on these surfaces to get them nice and clean and even before we etch this piece
so now that bill has got this rondelle ground cleaned up and looking really good uh we're
gonna etch it so that we get the damascus pattern out of it this is twist pattern so where we've got
these real deep reliefs in this triangular cross section should look really neat what i'm gonna
do is get it cleaned up i'll degrease it really well clean it up then i'll attach some wire so i
can hang it into the etching solution and we'll go into the edge and out and see what we get
so
rick pulls out a felt tip and just lays out the pattern that we're going to engrave
really doesn't take him very long he kind of designs as he goes he's got a great eye for this
i'm going to be doing the engraving today on the pommel and as you can see here ricky's just
finished up designing what we're going to engrave on this next we're going to prepare the gravers
for the engraving it's a pretty precise step these are very minuscule tools and the slightest angle
change can affect these in the most drastic of ways very precise angles very specific angles
and we are going to take this up to a very fine polish for a nice bright cut
i'm taking a highly polished planishing hammer and just going over the rims of these pieces of silver
it basically creates facets which act like jeweling and
kind of throw the light differently as the piece is rotated
all right so today we are here to cut an amethyst for the that's going into the nut of the back of
the sword and we are using this diamond pacific cabbing machine and it's pretty interesting
little process that we go through they all kind of start out like these rough crystals and within
about less than an hour you can get it pretty smooth looking like this and right now what
we're just trying to do is just kind of get off some of the inclusions and go for a better color
zach's got to go through and prepare the bezel he's going to clean it up and make
sure that it's fairly bright inside and there's no burrs that can crack the stone
this material while it looks like silver it's actually damascus it's a piece of the
blade so once the piece is fully set we'll take that to acid too and you'll see in the
final shots it's actually got the same pattern in it that you see in the blade
we've selected a really nice piece of hardwood that's been stabilized to make our rondelle handle
carrie's going to do the faceting on it i'm going to start by roughing it and getting it into shape
we really enjoy working with precious materials like this
it's not something we get to do all the time here at baltimore life and sword it's definitely
something we'll be doing more of in the future and we'll bring it to you here on man at arms
so
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