gundy wrote:What was the process tracker? Can you walk us through it?
Matey the most important things I'd have to say about it all are it is REALLY easy and DON'T overcomplicate it. Hahahahhaaa...
I'm going to make another one tomorrow and I will take some photos of the forging process. It's great fun.
Building the forge needs the tyre rim and the brake drum. Thats it. I filled the drum with heat beads and lit it up... I added some redgum bits and that helped get the fire much hotter when the air pipe was jammed in the pile and the little blower turned on... more nice hard charcoal really got the fire hot. The air mat blower has a cigarette lighter plug and I ran it off a cheap 12 volt trickle charger I had in the shed but a car battery would work fine too. That's the forge... hehehehe... like I said don't overcomplicate it.
The forging is getting it hot and banging away and then getting it hot again where you need it and banging some more. lol... that's what I did and it worked well and was lots of fun.
I did the blade first and then got the handle hot, hammered a cut up each face with a cold chisel to get a nice sharp V shape to the twists and whipped it into a vice and twisted it with a large shifting spanner... took three heats to get it twisted the way I liked. Now I know what I'm doing I think I could forge that in half an hour or so.
Then I finished the blade the way I wanted it with a rat tail file and a straight fairly coarse file and some various grades of wet and dry. Tomorrow I'll try and be careful and get a good polish with no filemarks at all.. lol. Today I was in a bit of a hurry. Anyway then you put it back in the forge and heat the whole thing up until a magnet won't stick to it anymore and then quench it into a tin of cheap motor oil. I dipped it in sharp side first to try and get the blade as hard as I could with the back and handle a bit softer... after it cools down slowly in the oil you put it in the oven for an hour or so for a baking to just 'take the edge off' the brittleness <this could be wrong I'm no smith> and then you can clean it up and polish it and sharpen it.
Oh.. after it was forged but still really hot you spray it with WD-40 every minute or so and you get a nice baked on black finish too.
That's all I know... hehehehe.... like I said I'll take some more pics tomorrow when I try and make a better, fancier one.
Mick.
"One has been a bad spectator of life if one has not also seen the hand that in a considerate fashion - kills." Nietzsche.
