I'm Matt. I'm Kerry. We are the Stagmer brothers of Baltimore Knife and Sword.
We're gonna be building some of your favorite weapons, and some weapons you've never seen before.
This is Man-at-Arms Reforged
You've seen us make some massive weapons some of these things incredibly long
huge heavy objects. We've been getting away from that trying to get things that we can swing easier.
But what we're gonna do this time is we're gonna make the most requested thing this show has ever had: Chaos Eater from Darksiders.
We're gonna be building this entire thing from steel.
Ilya is going to be doing large repoussé panels, huge forgings of the blade,
the handle the entire piece will stand taller than a man, and it would be very difficult, if not impossible for us to lift
So for the blades on this sword we're actually gonna be using railroad track.
We've got the foot the web and the cap of the rail. We're gonna cut the cap off. I'm gonna cut it in half,
that's gonna give Illya two large sections to forge from and then we'll be able to grind and heat treat them before we assemble everything.
You often see us use a plasma torch one of the primary advantages of this type of cutting is that it'll strike an arc
giving us instant heat. If we were to do this kind of the old-school way using a gas torch
we'd have to preheat the metal
bringing up the high temperature and blow oxygen across it to cut it. In this case
we're able to just pull a trigger it strikes an arc
uses the high pressure from the air to blow the plasma through and blow all the material out of your way
and cut the piece very quickly.
The way I'm going to make Chaos eater is going to be very similar to the Optimus Prime sword we built several months ago.
That means I'll have two blades one and two
connected together to a central tang and the blades are going to be attached to the tang and the overlays will be covering the empty
space between the two. To make the blades I have two pieces of train-track like this.
So I'm going to heat up the train-track,
forge them out onto the blade on the 2V power hammer.
The most difficult part of this build will be the melting skulls panels. Those will be made out of 14 gauge mild steel
using a relatively innovative version of chasing and repoussé-ing.
One of the things that has to happen before Illya can forge these blades,
he's got to take the material and create a normal or regular shape.
With an irregular shape like he has he has to be careful as he drives the material down on itself
that he doesn't create any overlaps which can cause problems in the forging later.
So for the Chaoseater it really would be nice to just plasma cut a lot of these parts out and make them done,
but we're not gonna
go that route at all.
There's only one piece that we're actually gonna use the plasma for and that's the handle portion.
We're gonna do an oval for the bottom of it, and then we're gonna do a large oval that we dish
onto that flat piece weld all the way around giving us a solid form that we can really weld all these little diagonal pieces onto.
We'll create some of the detail in here with just a TIG welder. You can see I went ahead and drew one oval.
I have to do now just make another one
leave the central circle the same,
scale the outer oval up
using the center of the circle as my base point for scaling so that when we do the dishing everything matches.
So that's it guys that's basically all I have to draw, but while we're here. I might as well show you guys
how we laid out the entire length of the piece. So we're gonna make the overall length from tip to tip 72 inches.
That's six feet. I went ahead and let Ilya know the general thickness from point to tip is about
7.5 inches so when he's doing his forging he has something to work from and
then we're gonna go ahead and base everything off of that weld this central panel that he's gonna repoussé and chase.
It's a lot of work guys.
After many heats of drawing out the rail track to his desired length, Illya can now start on actually forming the blade.
As he mentioned before he has to do two of these. He's gonna start by just pinching out material that will become the edge
moving all the way along the blade keeping the basic profile that will then crisp up later using a plasma and grinders.
I'm going to be doing all the beveling on the power hammer itself because given the thickness of the blade it's going to be
much, too burdensome to do it completely by hand.
Now using a very heavy hammer
Ilya moves to the anvil to set up the bends that will establish where the points will be on the blade.
Once I have a significant progress on the blades. It's time to start working on the overlay panels.
I'm choosing
14-gauge mild steel. The reason for that being the overlays will not be responsible for any of the structural integrity of the sword.
The mild seal is fairly easy to move hot
it's easy to move cold the first thing you have to do is gain some height which later on
will be pushed down to gain the form. I start out by first marking my areas.
There's going to be a big skull here. There's a smaller
skull with a prominent jaw
right here. There's some skull going on here, and here's the jaw flaw type structure.
I'm going to utilize the technique called raising.
I'm going to heat up sections of it and start gaining height using this stake over here and
my armoring hammer.
When a person raises a piece of sheet metal, they hammer the sides and not the center,
slowly shrinking the material around the stake and
consequently raising the untouched portion up.
All right, as you can see here
I have one of the blades for the Chaos eater sword, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the torch,
cut off a lot of this excess material, so we can get right to the grinders after this.
Ilya is gonna continue to form this panel using hammer and chisel.
He's also going to be using a torch to spot heat areas. The areas where the torch hits the material will move very easily
with cool areas around the outside will act as a resist and allow him to get deep forms.
There is so much grinding for this sword everybody in the shop will be tag-teaming throughout the next few days.
Now that he's completed the form doing chasing and repoussé, he's going to go back through and planish the surfaces and create new textures.
This is going to even out the entire piece and
visually make it complete.
Ilya is gonna go through and flute the top of the skull to match the original design.
After Bill did the rough profiling on the blade, I've moved on to grinding the flat in the edge. Now I have about
two hours in on the first side. I've ground a deep hollow all the way down the center
following the profile of the blade.
I then established a really steep bevel in the edge because after I looked at our reference photo
I noticed that it wasn't just a hollow ground edge from the back all the way to the front,
it does have that steep bevel, so now let's go ahead and move on to side, two.
Working from a large piece of stock, Ilya is now going to make the center section that's going to support the entire blade.
He'll take the excess material from the tang since it's large enough, cut it off and create the pommel.
While creating the pommel, we'll also go to the cone anvil. This is something
we haven't used on the show yet, but it allows us to go through and true the inside radiuses on large forgings.
This has been such a massive build guys, that even after the camera stopped rolling Ilya
and I basically pulled an all-nighter just to get this thing assembled, so I did my best to get some GoPro footage of the assembly.
Whoo. What a task.
To make sure that our main panel section doesn't warp while we put it together
we have to make sure we tack it in different places spreading out the heat evenly, so we don't have any spots that pop loose.
Once we get it tacked in place, we can move outside, use a very large torch to heat up sections,
bend it where we need to go and then we can finish out our weld.
With our repoussé plates now welded on and the blending is started
Ilya is now gonna move on to start fitting the guard and some of the other pieces.
Everything now assembled this piece is much too heavy to lift and go to our sanders
so I'm just gonna use a hand grinder and remove some of the bulk of the weld, go back in and blend everything smooth.
And this is Chaos eater, you're welcome.
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