Bladesmiths, welcome to our strength test.
It's the dreaded antler chop.
I'm going to take these beautiful signature blades
that you did, and I'm gonna smash
them violently and repeatedly into these extremely
dense antlers.
I don't really care what your blades do to the antler.
I want to see what the antler's going to do to your blades.
It's going to be horrifying, and I'm going to love it.
Connor, you're up first.
You ready?
Yeah.
Go ahead and try and break it.
Let's see what we can do here.
I addressed the issues that the judges had with my blade,
other than the heat treatment.
If it's too brittle, then I could be sending a blade edge
into somebody's eye.
[chopping]
Nice.
All right, Connor, we've got a couple little problems here.
Big one for me is this bird's beak on the back end.
It's shaped down so much, it's metal metal sticking out.
There's no wood on the sides of it,
and it's ripping into my pinkie.
But the big thing is the chipping.
I mean, this is 4 inches of area that's chipped out.
But it stayed straight, it didn't bend,
and it didn't snap.
Good job.
Thank you, sir.
How you feeling, Brian?
I'm feeling great.
Cool.
Ready to do this?
Absolutely.
Antler is a very hard material, and
after seeing Connor's blade chip like that, I'm quite nervous.
[chopping]
All right, Brian.
Obviously we've got chipping and wrinkled edges here.
Yep.
So there is a heat treat issue.
OK?
OK.
But it stayed true, and it didn't break.
So good job.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
Curtis, you ready?
Go ahead.
Don't act so excited.
Go ahead.
Antler is a very, very hard material.
It may chip the edge, it may completely destroy it.
Here we go.
[chopping]
Jay stops, and there's definitely something wrong.
Four more.
[chopping]
All right, Curtis, the first thing I want to say
is you made a beautiful handle.
There was just enough in here to fill the palm and index.
I knew where that edge was every swing,
so fantastic job on that.
Thank you.
But we definitely had an issue in round one
with the heat treating.
And I mean, you could tell that you've
got your forge scale here, which hides stress fracture there.
So the blade is very brittle.
This breaks my heart when stuff like this happens.
Yeah.
Well, Curtis, it seems a flaw from the first round
has thwarted your efforts here in this competition.
We can no longer test your blade due to a catastrophic blade
failure, and for that reason, I have to ask
you to please leave the forge.
Very, very disappointed that I couldn't move on,
but I'm very proud of the fact that I was able to complete
my blade in five hours.
I really challenged myself here.
The ball bearing, it was made of 52100 steel.
I've never used that before, so it's really tough.
But I really didn't expect it to break.
I'll go see Mark.