Whew! Spent the whole day in the forging shop today. Got an update for everyone on the can project....
After the 4-way was welded up, I cut it into managable sized pieces, 1 1/4" and 1 1/2"....ended up with a total of 2 pieces of each size, and placed them in the annealing tub....took nearly two days for them to cool enough to be handled.
After a quick grind with 220, here's what came out....
After face milling off all 4 sides of each piece.......
Now it's time to lay out the accordion cuts.......
The important part to this step is to use a "guide".....you want the "hinges" to be the same thickness as the rest of the billet (the black lines going lengthwise), otherwise you run a real risk of the billet tearing when it's forged open.
After everything was laid out, it was about an hour of sitting on the bansaw, cutting the "triangles" out......
What I didn't get a picture of was rounding off all the corners, and the bottoms of the "V" cuts.
Rather then take a bunch of still photos....I had a friend in the shop today....so here's a video of open the acordion cut, and finishing out the billet for annealing.
[video=youtube_share;306VEXkELCU]http://youtu.be/306VEXkELCU[/video]
Generally at this point, I will forge out the blade(s) I want from the billet, but these are already sold, and will be sent out once they are cleaned up and a light etch applied.
I'll certainly post pics of the finished billets before they leave!