Welcome to another episode. Today, I will make a handled butcher. If you don't know that means
I will tell you in just a moment. I am still on an axe forging
mission and for the simple axe I plan on forging I need
a way to cleanly separate the eye from the blade.
A butcher allows me to separate steel at a steep angle - as
shown on the picture here. I am starting off with a round bar of tough tool
steel - 4340 to be precise. The bar is 1 1/2 round and I am marking where I want to punch the eye.
The eye is where the wooden handle I am making later will attach. The blacksmithing method to
create the eye is to first use a slot punch to establish a slot and then open it up with a drift.
This removes very little steel and is much better than drilling or milling the eye. You will see.
My little slot punch is really too small for this project but
I did not want to spend extra time making a larger one. That said, you will notice that the tip gets
quite hot and that I need to occasionally dress it up. By the end of this project,
I lost an inch or so off the tool and will definitely need to make new one later.
Punching a slot to through the round bar is taking quite awhile.
One of the challenges with using a small tool is that the tip of the slot punch upsets quickly
and then it becomes very difficult to remove.
I am still working to punch a hole all the way through and the way to make sure
the slot comes out reasonably centered in the middle is to punch from both sides.
As you can see this takes quite a few heats. 4340
has a lot of nickel which makes it tough to work with as well.
Here is a good example where the slot punch got stuck and needed extra help to get out.
But the slot is finally punched and now I need to open up the hole with a drift.
The drift is evenly tapered and is easier to remove from the steel.
As you can see it gets quickly hot as well.
Once I have opened up the whole with this drift. I will switch over to a much larger
drift that allows me to make an eye that will be big enough for the handle.
The bigger drift if curtesy of Jim Austin who teaches
amazing axe forging classes in Oakland. If you are interested reach out to him
and subscribe to his announcement mailing list. See the email in the description.
Making the eye large enough is taking a few heats as well. The eye quickly cools down
as the drift is expanding it. Fortunately, the larger drift is also easy to remove.
Ocassionally, I forge on the sides of the eye. This makes the drift come out easier
and also slowly changes the round bar into the shape for the head of the butcher.
One of the challenges here is to keep the oval shape of the eye
centered pricisely in the middle. Unfortunately, I was off a little bit at the very beginning
and that error translates all the way into a the eye being slightly rotated.
If you watch closely, you can see how quickly the steel cools down around the drift.
As I am working over the hardy hole,
I move the steel from side to side to give it more support by the anvil.
I am happy for now with the size of the eye and will now start to establish the transition from
the eye to the business end of the butcher. My blacksmith helper allows me to pricely fuller.
My next step is separate the steel a little bit and then to forge in a chisel profile
where one side is flat and the other side angled at roughly 35% degrees or something like that.
Because one of the sides is going to remain flat, I am fullering only three sides and am
resting the side that will remain flat on the anvil as you are seeing here.
Now it's time to taper the butcher into the chisel profile I just mentioned.
All the work is impacting the shape of the eye even though I was trying to be careful.
I am quickly restablishing the right shape with the drift here.
I am drifting from two sides so that the middle of the eye will be a little
bit smaller inside and this allows me to attach the wooden handle using a wedge.
The wedge will expand the top of the wood and the butcher will then be securely attached.
I will show you all of this in a couple of minutes.
When I forged in the chisel profile, I create a little bit of a cold shut
that I am not grinding off. As you can see my metal dust
collector continues to work quite well. I had left the bar intentionally longer
so that I had something to grab with my tonges. Now, it's time to cut it off and
the remaining steel will be the back side of the butcher that will be hit by the hammer.
While not really necessary, I am going to forge the back side into an octagon
that is a little bit smaller than the eye. This is mostly for aesthetics
and only a slight functional improvement. However, given all the time invested in creating
this simple tool, I might as well spend a little bit more time to make it also look nice.
To separate the steel, I am using my blacksmith helper again.
While I did the forging by hand so far, this is something where the power hammer can quickly
establish the flat sides of the octagon. I am using a hot rasp to flatten the top of
the steel I just forged. When the steel is hot the rasp can quickly remove metal.
Before I take the butcher to the grinder, I want to normalize it by letting it cool down slowly.
I will spend a little bit of time on the grinder to clean
up the butcher and establish the chisel profile cleanly.
As you can see even when forging quite pricisely, the grinder can make the surface
much flatter. --------------
8:36 BLACK BLACK ---------------
The final clean up of the lines is done with hand files.
All of this is purely for aesthetics but as I mentioned before given the
time investment this seems like part of the necessary due diligence.
I am using a finer belt now and this wil be the last step before heat treating the butcher.
Heat treating of the butcher is going to be interesting. I want the side that parts the
steel to be quite hard but the end that will be hit by a hammer quite soft.
I am heating the whole piece up to critical temperature
but will only quench the parting side of the butcher.
I am now using the remaining heat where I didn't quench to temper the parting edge.
I am using a stone to reveal blank steel and then watch for tempering colors to move to the egde.
When it looks blue, I will cool it down again. This is a little bit difficult to see on the video
but if you look closely you will see the color front move down.
After I am happy with the temper of the edge,
it's time to make sure the back end is as soft as possible.
Alright, the butcher itself is now finished. It's time to put a wooden handle on it. This is
not something I would consider myself an expert in but you can see the process I am using.
I found a board of hard wood in the shop and am cutting off a handle sized piece.
The challenge when making a handle is really just to shape the size of the
wood that needs to fit into the eye. After cutting wood on the metal bandsaw,
it's also important to switch the speed of the blade back to steel.
I am drawing the rough dimensions of the eye onto the wood to cut out.
This will give me a good starting point to then closely match the wood to the size of the eye.
The initial shaping can happen on the belt sander where I just eye ball the dimensions.
I am using the butcher itself to confirm the fit and then check
where the steel is marring the wood to know where I need to remove more.
This is a pretty iterative process that takes some time.
Once I am close to the correct shape, I switch from the belt sander to files.
As you can see I am only working on the eye right now and am leaving the rest of
the handle very thick. The reason for that is that as I had mentioned earlier the eye
itself is slightly rotated. I will establish flat sides on the wood
based on the actual fit in relation to the buthcher as you can see here.
A spoke shave is another tool that's very helpful for shaping handles. I
am using it here to remove a lot of wood in a controlled fashion quite quickly.
My goal for the handle is to fit comfortably in my hand
and to give me a very clear orientation of the tool.
I am using the slack belt with a fine grit to smooth the handle out.
That's basically it. I am now cutting off the excess part and will then fit
a small wedge into the wood to secure the butcher tightly.
The wedge comes from a piece of hardwood that I had cut off earlier from the same board.
I am not using any glue here but a little bit of linseed oil instead which may slow the wood
drying out. No matter what you do, at some point, the fit will need to be re-adjusted again.
Driving the wedge into the wood is going to expand the wood at the top and secure the head
of the butcher. As you may recall from earlier, I drifted from both sides of the eye, so the middle
of the eye is narrower overall and that's what secures the butcher to the wooden handle.
I'll cut the extra wood of again and take the butcher briefly to the belt
sander to further refine the edge of the tool.
All right, it's time to see the butcher in action.
I am taking a bar of steel and will cleanly forge a very sharp transition.
These kind of transitions really require a tool like a butcher to look clean.
After separating the material, I am using a big set hammer to forge the separated steel flat.
And there you have it, a sharp 90 degree corner established
with the new butcher tool I just made.
I hope you found this video useful and picked up some new tricks. Whether you liked it or not,
leave me some feedback and if you want to see future videos, please subscribe to my channel.
As always thanks to everyone who is sticking it out with me on Patreon.
I appreciate the support. See you next time.