We went to Joe Mc Glynn's house. His equipment was interesting,especially the fire itself, which was basically a homemade metal frame, of angle iron, about 1 foot cube lined in fire brick. Real easy to make and the whole thing did'nt take up much room. It also struck me as being a fairly safe apparatus. It was using propane from a bottle and a venturii effect to draw the air into the mixture. All the parts for the plumbing and venturii were bought in a hardware store. Thats how simple it was.
Joe found the design for it out on the net somewhere.
There were 5 of us there, originally there were only going to be 4 but I was looking after the 14 year old son of a friend, Jonathon so I brought him with me. I was delighted when Joe suggested that the young fellah should make a blade too.
We all started out with a piece of 01 which was 4 inches long and 5/8 in diametre. The steel was put into the fire and once it was up to temp, bright orange in color, we each took it in turn to start pounding. The steel was put back into the fire once it lost color but it was pretty obvious anyway when to put it back in, cause it stopped moving under the hammer.
First we forged from round to square in crossection, and while doing so we also forged a taper into each end. One taper was longer than the other. Then we squashed the square flat until it looked like flat barstock. By now the short taper and the middle section of the bar was looking like a knife blade and the long taper looked a bit like a sticktang. Then we forged the bevels into it.
The other tools were a pair of tongs. One with the end shaped to grip round or square stock and the other shaped to grip flat stock. We used three different hammer sizes and an anvil. That was about it! Brutally simple tool kit.
Forging really is a "brute force and ignorance" kind of thing.(in other words it is best approached with a degree of enthusiasm) Joe took about 7 heats to finish his. Steve Harvey finished second with about 12 heats, I used about 15 heats and the boy finished at around 20. Steve Morse came in late and finished late but I'd say he used about 12 heats.
The bigger fellows seemed to have an advantage over me and the young fellow. More body mass is an advantage. Joe made the point that you could save a lot of the wear and tear on the wrist and elbow by using the shoulder to heave the hammer. Also if you can catch the bounce of the hammer as it comes back up from the anvil you can get an extra lift that way.
By the time we were done all five pieces of steel were a different shape. To me the whole thing was surprisingly simple. Did'nt think it would be so visceral. Talk about roots. The best thing about it was that it was a whole lot of fun.
All that remained was to bring it to a final heat and bury it in bone dry vermiculite to allow it to cool slowly and relieve any stresses.
Once it was ground out it was all ready for heatreating.
