Chevron or Wheat twist, forge welding twists

it's been a little while since we've looked at twist patterns or other ways that you can twist the Barb besides just taking a square bar and twisting it up in the vise today I thought we would look at what's referred to as a wheat twist or a Chevron twist I think I've heard it referred to both ways so I'm not sure that there's really a difference between the two and to do this this is another Forge welded twist so I'm going to start with some quarter inch round bar that's about six millimeters around these are 14 inches long which looks like it's about 36 centimeters and I'm going to bend them in half and lightly Forge weld the ends together that doesn't have to be real strong let's just help them behave when we twist them the first time in the vise and I'm going to then twist these in opposite directions one bar left one bar right then we'll show you what else we're gonna do to it so we just want to heat in the center and I'm going to do this in the coal Forge because it's pretty nice to do the little short welds we need in the coal Forge but you could do it in the gas Forge as long as you can weld on your gas Forge it will just bend this right in the middle this is a place where torch would be good at you could mark your Center and just get a very precise heat but we can come pretty close eyeballing it and doing it at the anvil and by the time we're done it won't matter if there a hair off this one's about 1/8 of an inch off no big deal and that's all we want to do to that now we want a forge weld this end but first let's Bend the other one and get it to the same point I'll set this one aside while we weld up the first one that's real easy to burn this little bar so keep an eye on it just the teeny tiniest amount of flux is all we should need [Music] [Music] generally generally we are looking for a lemon yellow color in the bar if it's sparking you've gone a little bit too far if it's sparking a lot you're probably ruined it a few sparks are okay especially since this flux I'm using it's an Iron Mountain flux it's got a little bit of iron in it so that will spark before the material birds so you just have to learn to judge these things they keep turning it to make sure it heats evenly I'm just going to weld this very lightly I just want it to hold together I'm not trying to make a permanent weld at this point that's good just a few light blows is all it should take that's a good weld I'll set this aside and weld the other one then we'll do the twists and that's welded well enough so now we need to twist these now for this pattern to look right we need to twist one of these pairs of bars to the right one pair to the left or that's clockwise and counterclockwise or gee and haw or however you need to think of it in your mind to make sure that you end up with mirror images you don't want two identical twists that might look good but that's not what we're after for this project you also want to make sure you twist them the exact same number of turns for the best results so we're just going to do one at a time and we'll start doing the first one clockwise and I'm going to put the weld in the vise so it's well supported less likely to have shears I twist it it just hit the camera I hope you're still in focus here and that's one turn 2 turns 3 full turns let's go to 4 and I've left some end on twisted here that's 4 4 4 full turns clockwise will explain why I've left so much untwisted trying to get it all straightened back out as much as you can that's what we're after see if we make the next bar match it want to walk the same amount in the vise try to put the rich on in the same place and then we're gonna go for full turns counterclockwise that's one - I think that's 3 but let me double check if one more looking awfully tight already and hopefully this results in two opposites it looks pretty darn good let's do a little straightening this one's a little bit better now you're probably already with me on this one we want to forge weld the side by side and I'm just going to Forge weld the ends I don't want to forge weld the twist because we'll really mash it and destroy it if we do that we are going to flatten it before we're done but to start with I just want to get the ends Forge welded to help guarantee that these will stay together the way I want them to I'm going to wrap them with some bailing wire and I'm gonna wrap them kind of back in the middle because I don't want to just burn the bailing wire off while I'm coming up to Forge welding heat and this won't be a perfect tight way to hold these so you still have to be very careful moving them around on the fire getting to the anvil another option would be to put a little tack weld Bend everything into the middle so you can tack weld the ends with a MIG welder or something like that and that would work but if you don't have that you can Forge weld weld them without and use baling wire another thing that can really help is putting a pair of tongs on with a Tong clip so that holds them together while they're in the fire so I'm just going to sneak off camera real quick and bring these two ends together and then just a touch more flux just to make sure that I didn't knock it all off there but it doesn't need a lot of flux these are open enough the flux is going to get in there as you're getting real close [Music] real easy to burn this little stuff up so keep your eye on it [Music] and it's kind of looked down in between the pieces of coke so I can see what's happening it looks pretty good and then weld them together gently it will take another welding heat at this later but I'm going to turn it around and work on the opposite in first you kind of see the pattern developing already and keep an eye on this stuff you might see something happening here that is interesting for some other use so pay attention to it it could be some sort of animal horns or something like that just like I did with the other end I took this to the vise and I brought these together so they you will so they'll weld together more readily [Music] real easy to get this really scrawny and skinny at this point so be careful I'm gonna go ahead and bevel this and scarf it so that I can weld it onto a handle and then it can be a fireplace tool or a forge 2 or something of the sort now let's make it easier to work with it as we finish this I'm going to do the same thing with a piece of 3/8 square bar and upset it a little bit and create your scarf these two pieces then should go together just like that we have looked at this kind of welding before a scarf weld or in this case often called a drop of the tongs weld and I'll link to a video that covers that right up here in the left hand corner so I don't have to completely explain the entire process in this video but in any case it pays to rehearse this kind of a weld before you try to bring it up to heat I know that this piece has to be face-up on the anvil and this piece has to hold it in place while they drop the tongs pick up my hammer and make the weld so there's little coordination involved and the more you practice it without welding the more likely are to get it it's also better to practice it on things that don't matter before you try and do something that's important to you this is also a place where they tend to want to move and skitter at high heat and different fluxes affect that differently borax flux seems slippery and slimy to me so I don't use borax for this I'll use the iron mountain or the EZ weld it seems to be a little stickier and it's less likely that these are going to slide out from under each other so another dry run I bring them together just like that drop the tongs grab the hammer make the weld let's see if it actually works that way or if that happens light rapid blows and then back in the fire [Music] kind of refine the weld and make sure the scarves are stuck down but be careful not to go too thin I want it that end up as a 3/8 square bar to match this bar necessary we can take one more heat I'm not quite as thin as I could be and I think it looks pretty good just to be sure we'll put just a touch more flux on there just a few select places and also be sure that you're hammering with your decorative twist off the anvil otherwise you're going to end up messing that up while you're doing this the next thing I'm going to do is just simply straighten this up no heavy hammering here you just want to get it back in a line then I'm going to finish this up and put a little ring handle on that so you can hang it from a hook or something and we'll do the last little step to our Chevron at a welding heat I'm going to draw this out this might share a part remember there's four little bars in there and is sharing a little bit I'm not gonna work the end anymore right now put some more flux on that ends and see if we can reweld it and that's pretty common when you get trying to draw out four bars into a little tiny point so real light blows turning at 90 degrees each time to try and get all that to go together still being a little ornery I think we got it welded I'm not gonna overwork it at low heat so back to the fire you just make this whatever you want it to be I just want a nice delicate ring on the end that sure depart again that's really common like I say it's it's just one of the problems with trying to draw something that's got that many layers out that then it's one of the problems you run into working wrought-iron let's try it one more time to weld it if it doesn't work we'll end up cutting that part off but it's almost what I want so if I get it to stick at this point we're gonna quit [Music] yeah it looks better and I want to round this up a little bit very gentle on that tip so we don't blow it apart again now I realize that a lot of this stuff has absolutely nothing to do with the Chevron or the weak twist that we're working on but you need to do something with the twist when you're done with it so it really makes sense to go ahead and weld it to a handle if it's going to be a fireplace tool a poker shovel something like that anyways this is the time to do it so this is just a normal progression for me to go ahead and do all that and then finish the decorative element kind of at the end so I don't mess it up while I'm doing the Forge welding but in the meantime go ahead and finish this little curl on the end little backbend this I'll get it hot one more time and we'll put it in this little jig and we'll Bend the ring it looks like that jigs a little bit too big for the ring I'm going to end up with always a little fussing and fiddly looks like that's split again that's kind of what happens when you get in a hurry for the video but you get the idea and that could probably be be welded up with a torch and it would go away or you could cut it off and just make a blunt in ring always disappointing what that happens but it does happen so now what do we do with this well you can leave it just like this if you want to there's nothing wrong with that effect but I like it better if it's flat if it kind of comes together and this is more of a rectangle it's going to very gently Forge it down but I don't want to do this at welding heat because I don't want to weld this or deform it too much it's all going to be very gentle with it so we had a well below a welding heat that's really all this needs to have done to it just take one last moment to straighten it ups and do anything that needs to be done to make it look just right now I would have the option here of straightening the ring out and REE welding it but I'm not sure it would take at this point so I think I'll probably take the torch and weld it and then we'll file it to get rid of any lumps bumps or anything else not my preferred way of doing it but it will certainly work sometimes we all get just a little bit lazy and think we can do just a little bit more work than we should in this case that curl where I kept having problems with the welding probably would have done better if I'd stopped and clean the fire because now that the fire is out I have pulled a really nice big clinker out of the bottom of that fire pot which means I did not have a neutral fire I did not have a clean fire and those things are both vitally important to get good forged welds so the fact that I was trying to just get that last little bit done without doing what I knew I should have done is what bit me on this and now I'm going to have to fix it so let that be a lesson to you anyways we've got a very nice chevron twist the only problem with it is a little bit of a delamination in that ring and that's something I can go back and fix I've seen lots of versions of this I seen I've seen two pairs of bars like we did here I've seen three I've seen four all side by side I've seen four done in a perfect square bar pattern so that there's one on each corner and each pair that you'd ever see or twisted in opposite direction so the opposite corners are the same on either side that's a very interesting effect I kind of like the flat version of it like this I think it makes a comfortable tool handle nice fireplace poker nice fire tool for your coal Forge if you need something in the shop it would probably also make a nice hook back or something like that if instead of a ring here you do something to mount the hook draw this end out into a hook all sorts of possibilities that you can do with a twist like this let your imagination fly and see what you can come up with I know people shy away from doing projects that involve Forge welding but I consider that it is an essential skill of a well-rounded blacksmith and the sooner you learn it the sooner you'll get good at it and the more things you'll be able to do it opens doors for you it's not some arcane mystery that you need 20 or 30 years as a blacksmith to figure out you should learn to Forge weld your first year in blacksmithing and then use it as often as you can so you do get good at it and then you can do all these really cool twists and composites and if you're into knife making that opens to the door for doing some pattern welded steel which you can't do without Forge welding anyways I hope you enjoy doing the twist with me if you did give the video a thumbs up if you haven't done so already I would love it if you hit that subscribe button feel free to watch more of the videos share the videos with your friends or on your social media sites but by all means make time in your day to get out to your shop make something stay safe wear your safety glasses we'll see you for the next one

Channel: Black Bear Forge

Views: 871,336

Rating: 4.9115291 out of 5

Keywords: wheat twist, chevron twist, forged twist, twisted iron bar, blacksmithing twists, ornamental twist, ornamental iron work, ornamental iron, blacksmith, blacksmithing, forged, forge, anvil, forge welding, welding, fire welding, jump weld, drop the tongs weld, black bear forge, hand forged, wrought iron, blacksmith shop, blacksmith forge, blacksmithing for beginners, blacksmith project, blacksmithing projects, blacksmith anvil, blacksmiths anvil, blackbear forge, john switzer

Id: c80mMzDknTI

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Domborg120]

Cool video, Just wondering why the flame was showing above his cuff and sholder. Is it because of the angle of the camera or something?