Well folks, back again with a little more progress on this. Didn't know so many people were tuning in until the program stopped for a bit. Everyone must have been silently watching, glued to the screens, until the comercial break started and didn't end, lol. The billets been sitting in this condition for the past few weeks, but between massive amounts of work that has kept me away from the shop and lack of a decision on what to do with this billet, haven't done anything else to it.
As Bruce mentioned, I'm in College, though almost finished. I effectively have 1 day and 1 more semester to go on a degree in Mechanical Engineering. It keeps me a "weekend" only bladesmith, and sometimes not even that. With this semester comming to an end, all the work in all the classes has been piling up. The past two weeks has had a few all nighters and many more close to it to finish off papers, projects, presentations, reports, and even a few tests. Way more than what should be crammed into a couple weeks, to say the least. So if it pains you folks to have to wait on a thread, think of what it does to me, or rather what
something is doing to me to prevent me from being in the shop :3:
Anyway, unfortunately when I went and did the final tiling out procedure I got side tracked by a couple folks that stopped by my shop to pick up an order and forgot to take pictures of the tiling procedure. I worked up a little sketch in paint that should hopefully give a decent picture of what was done.
Basically, I took the square bar with the pattern on the end and cut it into 4 thick pieces (the number depends on how long of a billet you have to work with). The pieces need to be thick for the welding procedure, otherwise the stack will buckle and cause all kinds of problems. 3/4" to 1" is probably the thinnest you'd want to go. These pieces are then ground clean and stacked on top of one another and tack welded together. I grind all the mating surfaces completely flat so that there is very little gap. I also grind all of the seams so that they all meet flush, with no offsets/divets/etc. These are a pain to try to forge out, and create stress risers that make your welds more suceptable to failure when drawing out. I then weld all the tiled pieces together vertically in the press (direction indicated by the bold arrows). Once welded, the billet is flipped so that the patterned face faces up/down and the billet is slowley drawn out. by leaving the extra thickness in the billet originally, you increase the reduction of the billet and that helps solidify the welds, since this method of welding can be tricky and can produce some weak spots if welds aren't 100% solid.
And here's the billet after being tiled out:
The next step is to try to figure out what in the world to forge it into. Most of the time I don't "plan" out my blades from start to finish, I just kind of work them as they go and let things sort of fall into place and let the steel do what it wishes. So I haven't came up with a plan for this quite yet. I haven't done a dagger in a good long time, so I've thought about that, or it could go in a single edge direction as well. I think tomorrow I might go out and do the rough forging on it and see what it turns into.