Forging A Simpler Axe: Forged Welded Bit

pretty cool huh my uncle gave me his anvil save for a crack in the face there which i had to chase out a little bit it's pretty much pristine but wait you might ask how is he moving the camera like this well simple counterweighted parallelogram thingy attached to a big old crane looking arm about 100 pounds of counterweight all mounted on a big old bearing bolted to the rafters it needs a little tweaking but that's not what we're here for making another axe so an inch and a half from the back that sounds plausible into the fire i've shown a lot of nice zoomed in footage punching the eye so now i'm going to zoom out a little bit and try and give you some context we've got our water bucket we've got the charcoal dust in a little bucket here got a punch we got a blacksmith and a press let's go catch the punch right there that's a very important move and then gently just gently make sure we're getting it centered right on that center punch mark tap it in there again just just gently looks good quench put on a little bit more of that powder and let's go for it i love seeing that little pop of dust as it pops free so on one pass i'd say that's already about a third of the way through it's a little bit off center to one side i'm gonna try to correct that on this next pass but if it doesn't it's easy to correct after the hole is punched there's a really good video on correcting hammer eyes and such i'll link it in the description you should definitely check it out i cut out a little bit here but actually not much [Music] just see if i can just knock that out nice got my drift we're gonna get it in there since i'm still using a round punch uh before i go to the press i like to get it started here to make sure it stays aligned properly i'll use a slap punch eventually i just need to practice with it some more so i can make videos where it doesn't just get stuck all the time a new version designed to give more support on the bottom this one of course is designed for this guy this nice new bottom tooling i have has interchangeable tops for different drifts and punches and things should support a better one putting the drift through now i'm fiddling with it a little bit here because it didn't quite go straight and i don't want to push it through hard before it's aligned properly it's a good start keeping it nice and hot that goes it's also worth noting that i'm starting with a piece of material that's almost square in cross-section and i think for an axe i really want something a bit thinner and a bit taller and that would make a lot of these operations you're going to see me do much faster but once it's thinner you probably don't want to be using a round punch you probably want to be using a slot punch so yeah squeeze it down the part that got bulged out just by putting the uh the hole through and then i'm gonna pinch down the rest of the material and start spreading it out to get it out of the way so i can continue working the steel on either side of the eye [Music] [Music] now you can see here the drift is all the way through almost already but i have a lot more work to do so i end up having to go up to drift size and i think it makes sense to not push the drift through nearly as fast as i did in this video bump the camera sorry about the wobble do let me know in the comments if that's too much i am going to be adjusting this thing to be a little bit more sturdy if you can manage to switch between your different dies it's very useful there i was able to put the drift in switch to the other dies and then pop it right back out again now i tried this with the last axe but the shape was already way too out of whack to work look at this you do the adjustments sooner in the process and just straighten it up like that well not straighten it up uh bias it downwards so the top is flat and the bottom is curved doing so can mess up the eye a little bit so here i'm just tweaking making sure that the drift goes through nice and straight clean up the cheeks draw them out a bit more on the press and then i'm going to switch over to the anvil because really the press doesn't work nearly as well on thin stuff as it does thick stuff cools too quickly hand hammering on the anvil the rounding hammer especially as quick if not quicker it's a heck a lot more fun as you forge it out like that you only want to forge on the wide side of the drift it tends to push the drift out of it so you have to tap it back in that's uh that's pretty good so let's look at this high carbon steel bit that's a 1084 bit and i need to make a slot to put it in and then fit it to the slot to do that i'm just going to use my angle grinder because hot chiseling it is much more time consuming and honestly i think it's a lot harder to keep it straight and then i'm going to draw those out a little bit so that they're tapered this will help the forge well since i'm planning on leaving a bunch of the 1084 sticking out you don't want the large thick square end sort of shearing into the 1084 when you do the weld so you taper the ends now i'm trying to follow along with a process that i saw in a mark aspiring video and i'm you know i've read about it in other places but i will link that video as well because it's an excellent excellent tutorial hey there we go i have never had much luck chiseling apart two pieces of steel which even pushed together you got to get it down to a lower temperature than you think because it's too high it just wants to cut a new groove which you don't want anywho all opened up cleaned out with a grinder let's get this bit prepared i'm just going to grind a slight arc into it and then taper it as well so that it fits nicely into that little y shape i'll go in like that now rather than weld it i'm gonna cut some little spiky bits onto this with a chisel and then keep this up red and squish it around those spikes to lock this in place for the forge building at least that's the theory yes spiky bits they spike there goes the hammer here comes borax both sides time to forge weld [Music] so [Music] sorry slight time warp uh it was very late when i finished the forge welding and i jumped right into grinding because i wanted to see how i did so this is right about where the forge welding line should be it looks pretty good on this side this side did not weld it was a new technique i've never tried before nope i think i've identified probably where the issue happened now as i said there was a lot of scale all the way through well the part that didn't weld which means it probably scaled up almost right away while i was setting up to do the weld when i was getting the bit lodged in there [Music] to fix it it could be as simple as just grind this more regular so that i can cut another piece of 1084 and another slice of this material the forklift tine whatever it is and build up a little sandwich and try to forge well it again and so i did and after all the grinding and taking it all back down again that came out okay so i just got to clean that all up i mean it's kind of a wibbly mess in there with all the grinding and welding and grinding and welding but that's okay we get it worked out cleaned up do a bit more work on the eye and it's time to grind it now i'm going to show a little bit more this time so i've got this cool camera boom makes it a bit easier to get in there uh walking around the tripod before was really a huge issue this is the good side got that nice line there this is the patch side and you can just see there's a patch there and up here it runs to the edge now take off more from this side and then knock it over so after grinding off a bit more here i do end up heating it up again and then straightening it over a little bit to make sure the high carbon steel is a bit more centered but we're just going to skip on past that profiling bringing it down to size and weight i wasn't feeling too confident about the profile of the axe until after this step and i really liked what i came up with several hours later and then after taking it all the way up through the grits i mean to like i don't know 220. we're gonna jump into normalizing just like usual i'm gonna do three normalization cycles now this axe is for my friend ian and you might find him at the renaissance festival in a kilt and doing a scottish accent so hi buddy i felt this was appropriate [Music] i um i intended to put the touch marks in before hardening i just forgot i'm gonna do a quick water clench of the back of the axe here the steel that i'm using there is perfectly happy with water quenches it does not get super hard but it's perfectly fine for a hammering face that looks pretty good check it and then clean it again give it a quick temper [Music] and that should be the last you see of this until it is a finished shed so now let's make a handle grab a piece of hickory here yeah we can get what i need out of that then we just pop that right over to my table saw and chopped saw yeah yeah i'm still i'm so close to getting the shop like properly cleaned up and reorganized and when it's done done i'm gonna do a quick shop tour either as part of a video or as a standalone thing [Applause] this is about the time you remember oh i was gonna buy a bandsaw for cutting handles out yeah [Applause] now using that as a guide line this up on top because of the shape of it you can't get very exact here [Applause] somewhere in that ballpark [Applause] let the voice over me do the explaining we're under cutting here so that i can chisel out from the top you got to be really careful not to cut too far just sighting down from the top and guessing just leave an extra i don't know eighth quarter whatever you feel comfortable and be mindful of the way the wood grain is gonna wanna make the chips split out it's really nice and straight you have to worry about it too much it's slightly angled here as you can see now i don't remember actually exactly why i decided to do this with a chisel other than maybe it'd be easier to show i guess it would definitely been faster on the grinder of course you can overshoot on the grinder really easily anyway once you get it on there you pound it on and you can see that mark in the wood you just start carving away the pieces that are marked by the metal till eventually it fits on nice and it's on to the next step rough shape marked out here this is the part where i should have a bandsaw ah this actually works pretty well i would really love a you know chest mounted point of view angle so you can really see it but this isn't too bad the other thing is i moved the grinder off of that big hollow cabinet and it's quieter now which makes speeding up the sound and such way more bearable the next project is making my new grinder because this one is very worse for the wear and does all sorts of funky things like throw belts at me which is no good handle pretty basic it's pretty nice wedge [Music] we're getting anything right [Music] another axe i'm going to put a coat of linseed oil on this sharpen it up and the finish and i'm i'm quite pleased with that touch marks went in pretty well as well yeah now i gotta finish cleaning up this mess oh gosh make a new grinder and probably live stream some stuff i don't know catch you next time

Channel: Bennett The Smith

Views: 18,347

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Id: zLh_cwYBZV4

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020