Got the forge fired back up this morning and continued work on my blade.
Shunning all my great tools like drills mills SG height gage dykem and the like is kinda welcomed in a way. While all these things have their uses for knifemaking there is a draw to just going at it freestyle with the hammer and forge to create something without alot of the modern conveniences. I have been accused a time or to of having an Artsy side so I look at this as way to jest let it flow and see where it takes me. NOT something I typically do when making knives, LOL.
Anyhow, I'm gonna start by making a couple hot cuts in the end of my tang. Something like this-
Home made tongs, hammer, anvil, old wood chisel in vise grips, and a piece of mild steel plate to protect the anvil face from the chisel
Made the hot cuts on the anvil then used the vise like this to open up my cuts a bit
Forged the top and bottom over to the side so I could get to the center piece for drawing it out a bit
Drawing it out
Nearly there
I know I know... just where the heck is he going with this... Right ? LOL
Forged some taper into the end of the tang
In the spirit of of the kith I decided to harden my blade using the forge judging temps by eye and magnet. Getting everything set-up. Got a chair so I can comfortably see whats going on in the forge, long handled tongs for weenie roasting, and my bucket of quench oil
Of course I normalized 3 times by eye prior to quenching. I also tuned down the forge towards the end of forging the blade so I was pretty well normalized in the 1600 range before starting my 3 cycles.
Now because I'm forging 1095 here and we just may get something cool happening during the hardening I tweaked my quenching procedure to try and encourage something interesting to happen.
I did two things here to encourage a natural hamon to occur. When bring my blade up to temp I got the thinner edge and forward 1/3 of the blade up to hardening temp while keeping the back 2/3 of the spine down to the choil area below critical temp. At a minimun this should produce a hardening line of some sort from the choil extending forward to the 1/3 2/3 division area. A full quench would have most likely given me something very similar to this.
Instead of doing a full quench though I gave it what might be called a "hovering edge quench" No restrictor plates or anything just freehanding it. The intial quench covered the entire edge from choil to an couple inches back from the tip on the spine. I held it here for a two count then slowly agitated in a hacksaw motion going a little deeper in with each stroke of agitation.
Caution !!!! - This type of quench is a MAJOR fire hazzard !!!
Anytime you have hot steel on the surface of the oil be prepared for FIRE !!!
I'm not advocating or recommending quenching this way but it is what I did :3:
-Josh