Forging a KATANA/WAKIZASHI from a rail spring clip: The complete project

hello everyone and welcome back to the forge now in this week's episode we're going to be taking this rail spring clip here and we're going to be making it into a wakazashi now i'm aiming for about a 28 28 and a quarter inch overall length for this wakazashi with around the 22 inch blade about a six and a quarter inch handle that should put it right in the ballpark of what they originally would have been uh this should be a good hardenable steel let's get it found on the forge get straightened out let's get to work so so so so [Applause] so [Applause] so [Music] this [Music] be [Music] [Applause] so tank me um too um man me so [Applause] you uh [Applause] so and [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] ten now me um da [Applause] uh [Applause] [Applause] so all right not too bad for an old rusty railroad clip railroad spring clip pretty happy with the way this turned out so far it's a good stopping point for today next video we'll get this sucker cleaned up profile cleaned up get it heat treated and get to looking into what we're going to do for fittings hello everyone welcome back to the forge now our last video we rough forged our wakazashi out of that rail spring clip so we're going to jump in and get this cleaned up get the profile cleaned up get the bevels roughed in get everything set up for heat treat so we can move on to the fittings all right let's get after it [Music] all right for the most part we're pretty well centered in the middle of this till we get right down here at the tip at the tip we kind of kick over let's see here for the focus i don't know for the focus or not let's get it back in uh we start kicking over right about about two to three inches from the tip here yeah you see where it starts wavering that side still plenty enough to grind to straight but right here we begin to get off so i'm gonna heat this section right here back up and we're going to hammer it over in alignment a little bit more the spines in pretty good shape it's nice and straight but this edge here just kicked over where the bevel is so let's get it tossed in the forge and get that straightened out much better i think that'll work well all right this is where we currently are i have thermal cycle this four times i made sure everything was good and straight i have some furnace cement that's good the 2000 degrees i'm going to go ahead i don't know if this steel will take a hormone or not but we're going to give it a try and see why not i'm going to go ahead and start laying that out on here let it cure up and then we'll be ready to heat treat it so let's get after it all right i got all that furnace cement on there looks like we're all set up and ready for heat treat so let's get it tossed in the forge and let's get this sucker hardened [Music] all right our heat treat went great no cracks or anything that i can see blade got nice and hard so i'm gonna take it out of the grinder we're gonna clean all this up and get ready to move on to working on the hibaki and probably the suba as well all right let's get to work all right i got the blade cleaned up for the most part i went ahead and etched it to see if i had got a hormone after putting all of that refractory or that uh furnace cement on there and there's not much one it goes just like this right here didn't really get any activity down here which is fine uh as you get sometimes the mystery steel so not a big deal there i didn't know the blade got hard that's all that matters get this piece of eighth of an inch copper i'm making the hibaki out of so let's get it tossed in the forge and get it annealed and start bending it around [Music] all right this is where we currently stand with our hibaki i did get it bent and shaped around the wakazashi i still got a lot of cleanup on it we'll make short work of that with the belt sander but i did have a separation right here i soldered this together as you can see clearly there's a separation so i'm going to have to resolder it again not a big deal and then we'll go ahead and get this fixed up and move on to getting the suba done so the reason i didn't show this in depth there's a lot of other makers out there that do this a whole lot better than me and i mean walter sort of is a perfect example there's several others uh instead of showing you my attempt which is the first one that i've ever made uh it's better to go to watch someone that really knows what they're doing on this part like i said i'm happy with this but it's first one ever done so anyway let's get it fixed up and get it fluxed and get the soldering done and then we'll move on to the subaru so all right there we go still got a lot of cleanup work left on it but it fits good there's no crack anymore yeah i think that'll work out all right time to move on to looking at how we're going to do this suba all right i've got us a piece of scrap mild steel here plan on doing a hammer texture on the guard so i think that it will uh it'll do well originally i looked at this thinner eighth of an inch uh it's just going to be too thin once i hammer it hammer the texture in on it and everything it's going to be way too thin this this here i'd work well so i'm going to go ahead and scribe the halfway marks get our holes drilled get it fit up to the tang and then we will drill it out or we'll mill it out and clean it up and get this sucker fit up [Music] [Music] so we're getting there a little bit of foul work and we should have a good fit [Applause] all right now that we've got our guard portion here nice and fit up i went ahead and put the layout fluid on it and i'm going to take some reference marks here so i can get this guard nice and even when i grind it to shape right now i'm thinking i'm going to go with a pretty simple guard just because of the size but we'll see how that works out when i get going so let's get this measured out all right overall we're pretty symmetrical all the way around just a little bit off here and there with our square so we can pretty much just go ahead in here and draw our and make it we can go ahead in here with a template and draw out the shape of our subaru without much trouble so i'm going to go ahead and get one made up and we'll trace it on there and get it ground out all right here's our paper template all i did was just use this to cut a piece of paper then in the same shape square shaped that folded it in half folded that in half that gave me two reference lines like that and i just happened to find a washer laying around that kind of fit the the curve that i wanted to go with and so when i folded it in half i just took this and made it up at the two points and drew the circle the rounded edge there it will work perfectly fine for what i'm wanting to do here with this so let's go ahead and get these lines scrubbed and then we'll grind it out and we should be in good shape and i know this won't be perfect but it'll get me in the ballpark of where i want to be and as i clean these parts up leading into the final assembly i'll be able to to refine the shape that i'm after so let's get this ground to shape all right not too bad we got our hibaki made we got our guard made or our subas it's known pretty pleased with the progress uh we're going to stop there though because i'm still waiting for some of our other materials to come in and with the state of things in the world today they were delayed or they would have already been here and hello everyone and welcome back to the forge now after yesterday's video where we worked on the wakazashi i had a lot of questions about the hibaki because in the in the video i didn't really show exactly how i made it i got to the point of me bending it over hammering on it some and then the next thing you know boom finish toboki now the reason for that is is a lot of the footage was out of focus it was really bad and i didn't think y'all guys would want to see you know several minutes of blurry footage with me pecking and hammering on stuff so today i decided uh after giving it some thought over the course of the night now let's do a little video dedicated to the making of this hibaki how i made the hibaki so so uh i have minimal tools on this i don't have none of the fancy bending jig stuff like that so i'll just show you how i did it there is better ways to do this i'll get that out front right now there are people that do a better job but this worked for me and for you just starting out this may be a good way to approach it without having a whole bunch of fancy equipment so let's get after it all right i'm gonna be using this piece of scrap copper round i think it's like a two inch piece it's not quite an eighth of an inch thick but it'll be plenty thick enough i'm gonna start out with cutting about an inch and a half to one inch feet i want one inch to an inch and a half piece off of this and then we'll slice it and we'll flatten it out and then we'll start forming our hibaki all right now that that's annealed we're going to go ahead and bend it out and get it flattened [Music] all right all right i've taken our piece of copper in there to the surface conditioning belt and i've cleaned it up so now we're ready to start bending it around the back of our wakatashi [Music] now what i do is after it's roughly kind of formed i just kind of use my vise to squeeze it around it just to get a little better fit there on the back where i can okay now i go back with a hammer all right all right this is where we currently are it's way too big which is better to have too much than not enough uh i am going to go in now and get this focus back in and i'm going to come right back here and we're going to cut a notch that is where the shoulder of the wakazawa she will slide down into the habakki i'm just gonna do that with a file i don't have a handsaw available right now with a good blade so i'm just gonna file in that notch and then we'll be ready to start working on cutting it to length and soldering the piece in the front of it here all right that's kind of what we're looking for right there so it slides up over the edge like i said this is looking pretty rough right now we'll clean it up when it's all said and done make it look a lot better and now we'll move on to getting it cut to length getting the piece put in there and soldered in place all right now that we're at this point right here like i said we have our fit upgrade on the back we're going to put this piece into here now we don't want this piece to be all the way up where the edge of the blade is we want it to be right down below where the blade is making a bigger piece here would be smart because that way you have plenty to grind off and everything else you just want to make sure you keep it where it needs to be at i'm going to scratch it's a mark here where i want that to stay at so i can see where it needs to be and like i said it needs to be all the way back up in there to where it rests against the tang right here and what we'll do is we'll flux this real well and then i don't have a hand torch to solder this with so i'm going to do it in front of the forge not really hard to do you just got to watch it what you're doing and stay on top of it all right what we do is i'm kind of here i'm going to pinch this right here with the tongs then just kind of help hold everything in place i got my solder here ready so let's go ahead and get it heated up and get it soldered [Music] all right there it is for the most part we're gonna go to the grinder and clean this up see how it turns out [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] all right there it is for the most part like i said it's still pretty rough a lot of cleanup is going to be required on this one but this one's mainly just to show you the steps that i didn't get to capture in the video the other day uh not too bad if you have the equipment to be able to build a jig if you plan on making a lot of these it's definitely worthwhile it made things a lot easier and i may build one in the future but we'll see what happens hello everyone welcome back to the forge now today we're going to start work on our suba and go ahead and get the rest of our parts of our wakazashi wrapped up so we can get it put together and have it all finished now a lot of you that watch the video about the making of the habakkuk you may have seen that i have a template made up and i'm thinking about going with that design for the suba so i'm going to lay out the four holes here i'm going to drill them with a drill press i may wait on these two side pieces and then mill them out later on just so i can get an idea of of what they'll look like but let's go ahead and get these holes laid out get them drilled and get moving on [Music] all right i just got back from the meal and that's what our guard looks like so far and we'll see how it fits up on the wakazashi anyone move on the next step all right there we are so far pretty happy with it there's still some file work i need to do on this guard like clean up me to radius the edges real well so we're going to move on to some other things now let's get after it all right now that i got the guard roof formed i'm going to move on to the sepa which is a spacer that goes here below the hibaki and another spacer that goes here below the suba before the handle i'm going to be using the same round two inch round piece of copper that i've got that i made the uh the hibaki out of in the other video uh for these spacers so let's go ahead and get a piece cut off get it cut up and get deforming these [Music] all right i did the same process of heating this up in the forge and annealing it it's really soft i'm going to hammer this out flat and then i'll get my scribing pin and lay out how i want my sepa to look shape and size and everything based on the rest of the wakazashi and then we'll get them cut out and get the holes drilled in them and file the shape and what i did on this is the same thing i did with the layout of the suba and everything when i first started out even for the template and the design of the parts i removed i just cut a piece of paper made a small template something i lay on top of the copper scrub around it with my pen be good to go so yeah so let's get that done so now that we've got everything above the guard figured out we're going to start looking at everything below the guard for that the first place i want to start is getting the piece of wood cut out for what will become our handle because at that point i can trim it back when i go to add the spacer up here i can add the other separate with no problem because it needs to match the same size of the handle itself so i'm going to go ahead and cut a piece of black walnut i've got an abundance of it move on to scrubbing it out and getting it getting the groove cut into it so [Music] [Music] so so [Music] all right now that we've got our handle rough shaped i can go ahead and glue the sides together and get it ready for final shaping and then we can move on to the last few components and it won't be long until we're all wrapped up [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so so [Music] hey so wow so so [Music] do so so um [Music] so [Music] [Music] so sure [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mystic Mountain Forge

Views: 622,142

Keywords: samurai sword, katana, sword, forged in fire katana, forged with fire, knife making, cable damascus knife, clip point bowie knife, damascus hunter, hidden tang hunter, san-mai, hamon, how to make a habaki, making a knife from an old wrench, building a coal forge, tutorial, metal work, bladesmithing 101, diy, how to, asmr, anime, swordsmith, how to make katana, katana making, how to make a sword, forging, how to make knife, restoration, how to make a knife, Blacksmithing

Id: Afxm5-vBOe4

Length: 50min 30sec (3030 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020