Welcome to another video.
In this series, I will forge a Viking Broad Seax.
A seax was a single edged sword primarily used in Anglo-Saxon times.
However, it also was still common in the early Viking era.
While many seaxes were of basic quality easily produced by many blacksmiths, I am aiming
for a high-quality pattern welded seax that would have been quite expensive.
As you follow me on this journey, there will be failures and painful set backs but hopefully
in the end there will be a beautiful sword as reward.
Before we get started there is one I would like your help with.
It pains me to say that Youtube has become a very difficult place to be successful with
these kind of videos.
If you like and enjoy watching these, I would appreciate your help by sharing links to my
videos on your social networks.
My hope continues to be that this will lead to more innocent viewers being lured to suscribe
to this channel.
Alright with that out of the way, let's talk about pattern welding.
So far I have cut a lot of 6 inch pieces of 1075 and 15n20 tool steel.
I will put alternating pieces of steel into 9 layers total.
That is 5 layers of 1075 and 4 layers of 15n20.
If this is all alien to you, let me explain more.
1075 is a reasonably plain carbon steel that will etch dark when put into ferric chloride.
15n20 on the other hand contains a lot of nickel will stay quite bright in comparison
to the 1075.
As a result, when forging out stuch a billet, you would see 9 alternating lines of different
color in the steel.
While this sometimes makes for an interesting pattern, in this case I will also twist the
steel to create a chevron pattern as you will discover if you keep watching this series.
Interestingly, as you watch me assemble this billets, the different layers of steel look
about the same.
This will continue to be the case until the very end.
However, the pattern will get revealed immediately when etching the seax; leading to an almost
magical moment.
To prevent the pieces from coming apart in the forge, I adding a quick weld line with
a MIG welder.
The welding material will not be part of the finished sword and so I do not have to worry
about it contaminating the pattern.
The steel here will be used for the middle of the seax.
For the cutting edge, I will be doing something different and the very back of the sword,
I usally construct with wrought iron or a mild steel.
One of the goals of my videos is to convey the beauty of the craft and I try to make
all parts look visually appealing.
This is especially true for welding where the dynamic range is incredibly large.
At this point, I have created three billets of 9 layer steel that need to be welded in
the forge fire.
In California, this is usually a hot and sweaty affair but the longed needed rain has finally
arrived and deserves a moment of attention.
Forge-welding is the activity in which the different layers of steel will be welded into
a single and solid piece.
This requires high temperatures, clean material and the right atmosphere in the propane forge.
All of these are important factors to take into consideration.
If the atmosphere is too rich in oxygen, more scale will get created and the welds may fail.
To prevent scale from interferring with the welds, I use anhydrous borax as flux.
The borax is liquid at these temperatures and coats all surfaces keeping oxygen away
from them.
The billets I assembled initially where 6 inches long and a couple inches high.
For those of you in metric countries, that's roughly 15 by 5 centimeters.
All the work on the power hammer is to draw the billets out until they are roughly 3/8
of an inch square; that's about 9 mms.
There is a lot of forging work that still needs to happen before the final dimension
is reached.
I usually first forge the bars to 3/4 of an inch and then to 1/2 inch before going for
the final dimension.
Since these bars will get stacked on top of each other to form the seax blade, it's important
that the surfaces are square.
It is easy to create a diamond shape which needs to be corrected.
The inbetween dimensions I just talked about are good intermediate points for which to
check squareness.
The bar is now at 3/4 of an inch square and occasional normalizing of the steel keeps
grain growth in check and may also help with creating stronger welds.
To give you some sense of time, it is another day and the forge needs to be relit and yet
more drawing out is about to happen.
A thousand years ago, this process would have required several helpers who would constantly
work the bar with heavy hammers.
This may also give you a sense for why swords were highly priced and only affordable by
a small part of the populace.
Since the seax I am creating here will be pattern-welded, it would have been even rarer
and probably affordable only by the nobility.
Let's switch to making the steel for the cutting edge.
Since back then all steel would have originated from a bloomery procees - perhaps with the
rare exception of imported crucible steel - I will try to emulate the look.
As I mentioned before to increase the success of forge-welding, I am coating the billet
with anhydrous borax.
Unlike pattern-welding, where I limit the layers to 9 or 11, for the cutting edge I
want a higher layer steel and in this case I am combining 1075 and 5160.
To increase the number of layers, I need to forge the billet out in a wide but thin strip
that I can then cut and restack.
You may now be saying: Hang on, you promised as a viking-style broad seax but so far you
are just showing us forging billets on the power hammer with no end in sight.
That's right but keep in mind that creating such a pattern-welded sword involves a lot
of work and I am already showing everything at an accelerated pace.
So, just have a little bit more patience and the reward will be so much sweeter.
Well, that's after we get over the inevitable heart break of failure but that is still in
the future.
At this point, I have forged the billet out to a wide but long strip that needs to be
thoroughly cleaned and then cut into pieces.
Removing any scale here is important because we need to weld everything back together without
any inclusions.
As you look at the scale, you can clearer see the different materials that will be visible
as a pattern in the final blade.
In terms of pattern manipulation, I am forging the resulting billet flat on the diamond.
This is also a good test for the quality of the welds.
When you take a close look at the power hammer, you can see that there are two dies.
One is a drawing die that makes drawing our material much quicker and the other is a flat
square die that is nice for getting things back into shape.
After having spend hours at the hot forge fire and the power hammer, the work enters
a certain rythm and becomes almost mediative.
It is a good break from every day life and completely disconnected from our busy schedules
and frequent interruptions.
To get more layers, I am just repeating the process.
Cleaning up the steel until no pitting or scale is left.
Recutting it into equal length pieces, stacking and forge welding it.
To avoid a lot of wasted material, it is important to forge the piece to equal width and cut
them at equal length.
I have now reached my final layer count and just need to draw the bar out in preparation
for assembling the sword blade.
Since I am working on a broad seax, the bar for the cutting edge will be twice as wide
as my usual bars.
At every step of the process, I am careful to keep the material clean of scale and ensure
the right welding heats.
Again, borax helps to keep oxygen away from the surfaces and also dissolves existing scale.
As you can see the bar has become signifiantly longer and will actually be long enough to
form the cutting edge for two seax blades.
Now that the material for the cutting edge is almost ready, I need to go back to my original
pattern-welded bars and forge them out to their final dimension.
I do this by cutting the larger stock in half and then forging out each of the bars.
They will then be twisted into different directions.
At this time, most of the prep work has been completely.
In the next video, the bars will be twisted to create the chevron pattern that will form
the visually appealing middle of the seax.
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