Forged in Failure: First Attempt Forging a Knife from a Railroad Spike

how can I lose my hammer it's giant and golden I built this thing quite a while ago and then I didn't use it it's about time to use it I got some railroad spikes I got a whole bunch of them for free from a friend of mine I'm just gonna try to forge some stuff some knife looking objects using my setup I got tongs given to me by Tim at big Doug Forge go check him out he has a video where you made these made 2 pair of tongs for me I have my hammer on which is some of the safety equipment I made this out of aluminum bronze again untested don't know if aluminum bronze is gonna work but we're gonna find out today other health and safety stuff my railroad track and they'll give it to me by a viewer and it's not really attached you might be saying hey it's not really attached well let me ask you this do you want me to wait til all of my equipment is in perfect shape before I Forge something or do you want me to start hitting metal mmm that's what I thought here's the burner and given to me by Roy at christ-centered ironworks and while I fire this up see if you can figure out why this is all gonna be in voiceover now I'll turn it down one benefit of this burner it's very very loud it's always super loud but I can tune the air/fuel ratio which is pretty nice I can do knit to be to be pretty balanced even at very very low fuel pressure so it gets really hot but it doesn't use as much fuel as my foundry burner does and behold the first blows of the hammer look at that the blows of a little girl swinging a hammer that is too heavy for him I get it I get wise to it later and started hitting it a bit harder but not for a while it takes embarrassingly long for me to start doing that what I'm trying to do is is narrow the blade because these are kind of square in cross-section so I figure if I hit it from either side to thin it out of those it'll squeeze kind of you know how a knife blade looks in relation to the handle I don't have to explain it it's pretty clear though I don't know what I'm doing this is the very very first thing I've tried forging I guess other than that one hook admittedly I haven't done as much research as I should have my hope is this will serve as a good starting point and we'll be able to compare later on to see how improvements do or do not happen so if you've been watching a lot of forging videos and they all look beautiful and you try it and it looks but ugly well this one's gonna look but ugly so prepare for a morale boost it's it's okay we're we are in this together I've seen people do this this thingy to try and make a distinction between the handle and the blade so at the back of the blade is kind of level with the handle but the blade part of the blade is there's like a step to keep the handle and the sharp bits separate that's in people do it where it's like half on half off the anvil and as you can see that the thing is probably not as hot as it should be and I'm more or less just hitting the wrong the different spots every time it looks really bad playing back i've also switched from tongs to vise grips because i really don't know how those tongs work but i'll figure it out there we go much hotter I'm trying a different tactic to try to straighten the blade but also use the hammer to form that line it would probably work if I could hit the same spot every time not a different one I assume hammer skills come with practice and I'm generally too caffeinated to be steady or repetitive in my motion so this will be challenging I like this shot this is really cool and thanks look like I'm foraging at night I accept all of the lights are on full blast it's just so bright in the forge that the camera that the auto light whatever setting it correct so that the stuff in the middle is normal and the rest just turns to blackness it's pretty crazy makes for a really cool shot though if you can kind of see the knife heating up over time if we speed up if this time I was dinner so I shut off the gas and I can't but I left the camera going you can kind of see it cooling off but the the center doesn't change color though the room appears to brighten it's like magic I tell you camera magic ok back at it after dinner full stomach and hammering away I'm trying to make a taper sort of for the blade this this kind of worked I assume again you have to hit harder I am hitting a lot harder you can see but I'm kind of all over the place I'm also noticing that when I hit on one side it kind of makes the the whole thing crooked and then I hit the other side that makes it crooked the other way so I'm trying trying anyway to get it even like left and right so if you sight down it it looks straight before I could get that where I wanted it and get the edge kind of kind of thinned out where I wanted it I heard the change and the forage firmer and that change was me running out of gas unfortunately I had to stop then but I think I learned enough do like to make some conclusions anyway looking forward tada the not so finished knife after I ran out of gas this this burner uses very little gas so a surprise but the tank is was mostly empty when I started and you can kind of see you know it's sort of knife shaped and it's got a got a taper to it and I tried to make the taper kind of centered and I was trying to kind of get this edge thinned out I'm way far away and if you notice like here the transition between Oh gasps transition between the handle and blade part man that's chunky so this I mean you see this is clearly a hideous hideous knife but it's well it's not a knife it's a mangled railroad spike but this is my first attempt first attempt ever I mean it didn't burst into flames so I guess that's a success it's pretty ugly though so I guess there's only one thing to do break out the grinder I suspect grinder in all of the nasty away is is cheating and you know I'm okay with that so I decided to grind away I this isn't so much forging a knife as it is excavating a knife out of an ugly block of steel using a grinder and it takes a lot of grinding to make it make a knife out of something this gnarly the things I learned things I learned try this experiment first thing hit it harder and get it hotter get it hot headed hard people say that it turns out they say that for a reason like it's their right a hammer the aluminum bronze hammer did not shatter I didn't get a picture but there is there is some damage on the tip I when I was trying to thin the blade I sort of missed and slammed the sharp cut edge of the railroad track that left a little mark oh I might show you later next this burner uses so much less gas than my foundry burner it's like I just cracked the regulator open a little and then tune the air/fuel ratio and that's it you know it doesn't heat up as big of an area quite so hot but I don't need a big area quite so hot so it's great next thing I learned secure the anvil also I didn't I didn't show you in this video you'll see in the next one I don't have a horn on my anvil because my anvil is an unmodified railroad track and I I might need to do some shaping of this to add some of that and to secure it a little better also I need to raise it up I was kind of crouching dt2 hit and that's bad you want economics as much as possible so I'm gonna do some more research and practice and eventually I'll revisit making a railroad spike into a knife and I'll be able to show you progress so that that'll be fun right right if you have any other suggestions for cool things afford on a railroad track spikes I got like a dozen of them also I'm gonna need some other stuff to forge too and I got a lot of hooks on the her but you know any other suggestions would be would be fun let me know let me hear them in the comments down below and if you seen anything I'm doing blatantly wrong well obviously but tell me specifically what you saw in the comments below you know give me give me some tips tada much better much less gnarly looking it actually looks like a knife now and you can't see all the screw-ups and I know it roughly fits in my hand and my hands not gonna slide up and cut me I didn't I didn't really sharpen it it's just angle grinder in it putting tapers and and stuff like that but there now you can't come here and say new your knife is so bad I can make a better one huh kanya huh huh actually if you could come here give me some pointers that would be really really helpful but hey I make no I make no claims about being good at this kind of stuff so yeah you want good go watch someone else but don't go watch Roy at christ-centered ironworks who sent me that burner because he will not make you a knife no matter how much you badger him about it his other stuffs pretty cool though [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Paul's Garage

Views: 4,830

Rating: 4.9843135 out of 5

Keywords: blacksmithing, forging, knife making, forging a knife, railroad spike, knives, Paul's Garage

Id: p-Qw2Kt1Eog

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018