Forging a wrought iron camp axe

hi folks john here with a great forge welcome back david's first time here welcome so what's going on today i'm down here in the workshop getting moving on a new project as you remember from the last video the little anvil we made for a march's quarterly patreon giveaway didn't come out so great so uh i i asked what are some other things some of you guys would like to have seen made and one of the suggestions i got was a hatchet and another one was make something you want to make so i'm going to make a hatchet that i've been wanting to make for a while uh it's gonna be pretty similar to the last wrap diax i made out of the railroad tie plate and all that mess but what i got here to make the body is some inch and a half round wrought iron this was sent to me by a subscriber i wish i could remember who it was off the top of my head quite a while ago so if you're whoever sent me this thanks finally getting to put it to use so we'll heat this guy up throw it up under the press press it down into a bar stock to get the material we need and uh we'll go from there i've also made myself a new hatchet drift a while ago what i did was i forged it out and as i was grinding and shaping it out and everything i used this old axe head you know kind of as like a line to follow or anything like that i'll probably end up making another one because this handle is a good bit shorter than i like but it'll do for now all right we got that guy processed down that was only about six inches of inch and a half round and we got a half inch by inch and a half by about 15 inches of bar stock out of it so you know kind of surprising how much is actually there we'll let that guy cool and we'll take what we need from it and keep moving so here's the dimensions i'm working off of i learned all this watching john switzer at blackbear ford i'll leave a link to that video in the description but basically i've marked the center line on both sides on the side it's going to become the pole we've got marks 5 8 on each side of our center so an inch and a quarter total on the other side we got them inch and three quarters from the center line uh so three and a half inches total i'm gonna go ahead and score these with a grinding disc so that whenever i go to the anvil to do the set downs it'll be a little bit easier to feel but that's what's happening now so i actually forgot to record the first tee and basically all we did we came to that mark the groove we put it on the outside worked it a little bit made a set down came to the inside did the same thing using the mirror edge and you can see kind of what we got going that material right there in the middle is going to become the cheeks of the x so i'm just going to keep working between those two grooves until it gets thin down to where i want it [Music] so [Music] do all right we got our set downs done got the material for the pole isolated and the cheeks thinned out last time i made one of these what i did next was i actually forged out each side pretty close to finish shape this time i think i'm going to do it a little bit different i'm going to clean these up and tack weld in the piece of steel that i want to use for the bit and i think doing all the forge welding while it's consolidated like that will give me just a little more freedom with how to make the blade i don't have too too much of a plan but i just kind of want to try it that way it's a lot of fun though i really enjoy making these this is a great exercise in fundamentals of forging all right we got our bit steel attack welded in using 1075 for the bit uh like i said last time i made an x like this i didn't use this method so i'm not sure if it's going to be easier or harder anything like that i'm not too worried about those the tack welds fouling up the edge by the time it's done because once this thing is forged out profiled with everything we're going to lose to scale and grinding that uh that mild steel meg wire should be long gone but let's get this guy on the forge throw some flux on it bend it around weld it up and make an axe so i had to play it with it a tiny bit but it's bent around everything's lining up pretty well i got it fluxed we'll bring this guy up to welding heat first things first we need to start our weld back near the eye and work our way forward uh and then get this guy forged out second weld same deal all right so what i did there was just take a good hot heater to the press and try to kind of reduce the stuck down a little bit to be a little more manageable to forge out by hand before it was so thick and kind of hard to work with but it feels solid it's behaving more or less as one piece of material so like i said i don't have too much of a plan for the shape of the x i'm just going to kind of take it to the anvil and uh let it tell me what it wants to [Music] be all righty after messing with this thing for a while i've got a free form that i think i'm pretty happy with i can come in sculpt that out step that out make it look kind of cool but uh last step is to go ahead and get the eye drifted [Music] [Music] [Music] alrighty so here's what we got after a little bit of light grinding i went ahead and took it up to 120 grit so hopefully i don't need to grind through my touch mark when i polish it out and everything it's getting centered the eye is pretty straight looks like the shoulders did shift a little bit so we need to go in there with a round file and fix that as well as on the bottom of the eye whatever that madness going on right there is need to fix that so that's really all we got to do and then we'll heat treat this baby let's give it a quick test edge in case it doesn't make it through the quench i'd still like to see what it looks like and this guy is just narrow enough to fit in my acid tube awesome son of a okay so that obviously wasn't supposed to happen let me think for a second on how i'm gonna get that thing out of there so luckily i had a good clean plastic bucket on hand i was able to just pour that whole pvc tube in there so we got this guy out it's got a little bit of etching going on you can see our core is nice and centered it's actually not exposed anywhere on the cutting edge yet and it's a good thing we did the test hedge because otherwise if i heat treated this and then took a file to it i'd have thought the heat treated intake or something like that but now i know we just haven't exposed the core yet but once it's sharpened it should fix itself but let's get all this reconstructed and give this guy a proper edge because that was only like two minutes so here's what we got after a little bit deep urban edge the core is nice and centered like i said it's actually not exposed on the cutting edge yet but it is nice and centered so once it's sharpened we should have good steel on the edge but uh looks really nice so let's hope this guy makes it through the heat treat [Music] so what i'm doing now after the quench is called draw tempering i only quenched off about the front half of the axe and i'm just letting the residual heat still on the body just slowly creep forward into the edge looking for a nice dark straw or so should give us a good edge so here we are to the quench it's looking pretty good i didn't feel any cracks if you remember when we did our test hatch our wrought iron goes pretty much all the way up to the edge and our core isn't quite exposed yet so i don't actually know how hard this thing is and if it needs another temper cycle so i'm gonna go ahead and just cut a stout edge onto it so i can take the rockwell files to it and see what we're working with so after roughing in the cutting edge and getting the high carbon steel core exposed we got our 60 fall right here we're just going to check and see if this thing needs another temper cycle the 60 is biting a tiny tiny bit the 55 is actually skating really really well so i put this thing somewhere in the high 50s like 56 58 something like that which is uh you know pretty good for what we're going for so i'm gonna go ahead and stop here get this baby polished out etched sharpened and make the handle well i'll probably actually wait to sharpen until after i make the handle but you get the idea let's get our degreased just so you know this is wd-40 brand degreaser it's not just wd-40 they make other stuff you know all right got her back in the acid i just made a more acute bend in the wire this time and it's holding fine i know a question i'm probably going to get is why didn't use a magnet to fish it out it's because i don't have a magnet narrow enough to fit in here so i promise there's a method to the madness so this is just a few minutes into the first etching cycle i just wanted to go ahead and show you our high carbon steel is exposed along the entire cutting edge once it's sharpened you're not going to really be able to tell so there you go so this here is after two 15 minute etching cycles total of 30 minutes in the acid looks pretty cool i think so i've got this guy uh took some windex and neutralized the acid sprayed her down with some wd-40 we'll go ahead and get the handle made and then we'll get it sharpened and fitted up to make the handle i got a nice straight grain piece of ash i've gone ahead and drawn out kind of a pre-form of what i wanted just kind of eyeballed it so we'll take this guy to the grinder got a good sharp 36 grit and we'll get it roughed out [Music] scraping your handle with a good sharp knife will help take a lot of the high spots from the sander out and save you a little bit of time hand sanding that'll do it really see what i mean this is just after going over it really quick just scraping with the grain of the wood the knife does leave little chatter marks you have to sand out but it does save a lot of time then if you would rather just gone directly from the grinder to sandpaper so you know just a cool little trick to know so next thing i was gonna do was gonna go ahead and sharpen this and everything but right now it just looks so pretty with the wrought iron and the black of the 1075 and the edge you know it's already pretty sharp it's not razor sharp but it is perfectly serviceable so i think i'm going to leave it like this this is for a patreon giveaway so if the winner if you want it you know if you want the edge polished out and everything let me know and i'll do it but as it's right now i think i'm gonna leave it right there so let's go ahead and get this baby hung up i forgot to press record hanging the axe head but basically all you do is you hold it upside down you hit the bottom with a dead blow hammer and it kind of vibrates the wood into the eye as you can see that little land jet right there is kind of biting in so we'll take a razor knife and trim all that off and uh should be looking pretty good rather than cut a slot in the handle from our wedge what i like to do is just take my knife and just get a little bit of a split going a little bit of wood glue on my wedge just drive that baby in real nice then to really put the wedge in i like to rest it on the anvil and strike from the bottom that'll do it really [Applause] so i decided to char the handle kind of like i do with my hammers just because i thought it would look cool with uh you know the actual wrought iron and all so now it's in the linseed oil bath we'll give it about an hour flip it over soak the bottom half about an hour you know that should really soak in there and preserve the wood real good so here she is all done really happy with the way it came out the uh the wrought iron is really really pretty there's a lot going on with the grain 1075 core is nice and centered head fit up isn't dead dead perfect there's a little bit of space right there on the bottom there's none though so what that means is basically just as i was shaping out the handle i kind of misjudged the taper of the material as i was going down but it is perfectly solid i didn't do any chopping with it because i don't want to mar up the uh the surface finish but the handle's ash 18 inches long looks really cool i think feels really good in the hand heads about a pound and a half so it's on the light side be good uh be good for like a lightweight camper pack something so like i said earlier this axe was made for march's quarterly patreon giveaway originally it was going to be that little anvil we made a couple of weeks ago but it decided it was going to crack during the heat treating but it all worked out for the best i asked what you guys wanted to see someone said hatchet someone said make something you want to make and recently someone asked if i had any more projects with wrought iron coming up so i took all that and this is what i came up with came out really cool you know i am a little sad to see it go but let's go and pick us a winner if you've been around the channel for a while you know how it is i do my giveaways this is just the simplest so i got all the patrons putting on this here wheelingnames.com got the little wheel click tap to spin one of these days rich miller i don't know if you can see or not so rich miller you're our winner if you want the axe she's yours just shoot me an email my email will be in the description box below as well as my facebook and instagram which you all should be following by the way but just get in touch with me on any of those avenues of social media and we'll get this guy shipped out to you if you're overseas or anywhere outside the u.s you probably will have to pay some kind of customs fee to receive this thing i don't know how much that'll be or anything like that but just be advised if you're overseas you probably will have to pay a customs fee but there's that but that's all i got for you if you like what you saw like share subscribe all that you as always more cool stuff coming really happy with the way this project came out like i said i'm sad to see it go you know maybe one day if i'm lucky i'll actually be rich enough to afford my own work but uh especially after the failure of our mini anvil project having this all come together so nicely just really really puts me in a good mood so there's that mr rich miller get in touch with me we'll get this guy sent out to you but like i said that's all i got for you i know y'all take care you

Channel: Old Hickory Forge

Views: 5,870

Rating: 4.9939938 out of 5

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Id: Rc_duUhvnE4

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021