HOW TO FORGE A BEARDED AXE

so hello everyone and welcome to my workshop today we're going to take a deep dive into forging a rap I axe and my process and my thought process on how I do that so what you need to start out with can vary a little bit depending on what you have at hand what I would like to go with something like this it's about 1.5 centimeters thick and about 15 or so centimeters long and I have I don't know if you can see that but I have some markings on it where I will punch some holes and not punch out where I will punch my Center mark to show where I need to do set doubts but you can also forge an axe out of a little bit thicker material like this something like this would probably work fine as well or out or something like this this is wrought iron a stack of wrought iron which I will Forge well down to a solid bar and that's how I made the scattergram axe so this is going to be another project that's coming along longer in the future but this is basically just a piece of mild steel and this as well and this as well so mild steel is a fine material if to use as the body of the axe and we will get to the spring steel and the high carbon steel later in the video when we get to either forging the beard or the other shape of the axe for example an l-shaped axe so let me show you how let me show you in drawing how it's made so this is basically what we're going to start with we're going to start with a square bar that looks kind of like this and we're going to do a set down here here here and here and what I mean by set down is that we're going to Forge down here to here and we're going to Forge down here as well what this will create is something that kind of looks like this and it looks kind of bad but but that is what you then fold up to create the eye of the axe and you fold it and then you weld it we're now going to do just this so we're starting off with a piece here and what I want is I want approximately five centimeters here I want approximately three centimeters here for the inner the inner eye I want approximately two centimeters for the hammer part another three centimeters for the other hammer eye part and approximately five centimeters for to weld on so we're gonna start off by marking this out with the center punch I'm gonna do the same thing at the other parts also here and here we now have markings where we need to do the draw the drawing out so what I like to do now is that I like to go to the angle grinder just to cut in a small groove where the hammer part is going to be and I'll show you why okay so now I have the grooves grinded in here and why I did that is that now when I begin forging I'm going to go to the edge of the anvils and flip it around and I'm gonna go for the feel of the groove and find it and there I have it and then I'm gonna hit it here to make the initial forging groove then I'm gonna flip it over and go to the other edge and I align my Center mark with the edge of the anvil and then I hit it here as well which will make the other groove and then I can do this more easily move from this part to this part this part to this part and then eventually flatten out and drawing out the the lugs of the axe and I'm gonna do the same thing on the other side and then I'm going to start forging out the body so let's do it okay so we're gonna take this slow I'm gonna place it and feel for the grooves and there they are and I'm gonna make initial hit here I don't know why I did that sound effect sorry and now I can easily find the groove once again there we go okay now we're gonna turn it around and find it Center mark holes there we have them align them with the edge of the animal and now I'm gonna hit it here and there we go now we have the initial goose I can start forging them down a little bit I try to go about half way through back into the fire we go [Music] okay we're gonna continue drawing down the hammer parts I don't do overly powerful hits now mostly control to get this done properly now the good part is that we can flip it here now and we can start this is what we have right now now we can in a moment start flattening out this section a little bit a little bit more over here and then we can start drawing it out let's do that we're going to continue drawing this out a little bit hit the hammer part this part gets easier and easier the longer you do forge there we go now I am at the beginning where I'm going to start throwing out the lugs but I'm gonna flip it around and do the same on the other side first [Music] [Music] so I'm starting with a smaller hammer and the cross pin section I'm gonna start cutting maybe meet them can't say this way little and middle middle ha can't say that Swedish I'm gonna start throwing out the love get thank you pretty cool so I don't miss it it's just gonna say don't do that all right back into the fire we go I was a little bit cooler when I took it out need patience right so back to it we go start platting it out a little bit we're gonna go with it one more time all right let's continue same process all right approximately there I'm gonna flatten out here there we go awesome now I'll just do the exact same on the other side okay so now we're going to start drawing out the body part of the X maybe much more yeah a little bit more all right let's continue to draw it out a little bit all right I think that looks pretty good yeah now let's just flip it around and do the exact same on the other side okay so here we are now with the first forging done and this is what it looks like I show you here I don't know if you can see it but it basically has all those things that we drew on the on the wall earlier and the next step depending on how we want to do this you could clean off the surface a little bit with a grinder or a file if you want to just a true off the edges where the eyes meet otherwise you could just be careful when forging and person pores and borax in there some people would say that you could you could wrap it and then you could tack weld it to make it stay in place that's also an option if you want to I'm just gonna go I'm just gonna I'm going going to eat now anyway so this is going to cool down while I'm on break and then I'm gonna go over with a rasp real quick just to clean off the scale and then we're going into the Forge and then I'm gonna brush it before before I do the initial initial closing of them and when they're closed there's not much we can do other than heat it up properly and beat-beat it to submission so we're gonna do that next so we're gonna start off by just cleaning off the scale as much as we can so so we're going to begin fold it like so this part can be a little bit tricky I like to go like so and then into the fire again and then we're gonna be used to post wise advice get the neck like so into the fire we go and we're hitting just closest to the eye because we want that hard well the most clean it off back put some borax in back into the fire we go again now we're gonna do this a couple of times until we're sure that it's welded that part of the eye closest to the eye where the where the weld will go is also if it's not welded properly it's something that could crack open when we are fitting it or when we're drifting it later so we really want that well to set properly so we're gonna take time here to do this properly see - let's go basically just tapping it need to be quick they're probably going to repeat this at least four more times and then we're going to get it's more hard-hitting to see if it stays we're gonna flip it on the high side and the punch it there as well to see hit it there as well to see if it holds if the weather holds basically and in the end we're going to put in a drift start forging it and then we will definitely see if it's looks to me like we have a what I can see okay so what we're going to do now is that we're gonna turn it on the side and here down there some more to blend the welds a little bit on top we are going to grind there later when we're doing the profiling work but it's nice to see that it welds disappear a little bit at least and when when we grind down there are going to be some few delaminations unless we do this now that we blend the welds but if we grind past them they are going to disappear if the weld is properly made that is so we're going to try to blend the welds a little bit now so I'm going to take it up to a well in temperature and put it and hit it with the with the cross beam a little bit on top of it the hardest part is closest to the eye I'm gonna do this one more time on the other side there we go can still see it a little bit flat that's not gonna be a problem once we start grinding there so this is where we're at we now have the hole here and everything is welded up as far as I can see and now we're going to start drifting it a little bit I'm just gonna flatten out the body part a little bit and then we're gonna start drifting it okay so this part is going to be easier if you have a suede flop but not everybody has that you just simply put it on the edge of the element here start punching down I basically want to shape the eye a little bit after the drift that we're using there we go I'm gonna do the same on the other side it's a little bit uneven so it's hard to balance it fix that later and weld held up nice now this seems like a very small axe probably but it's gonna get bigger what I would usually do at this moment is that I would go to the put the drift in and go to the power hammer and just draw out the lugs a little bit make them a little bit wider and I would also shape them here before I did the weld on the horn I forgot to do that I don't know why you can see that in some of my other videos that I do that here we can see pretty much blended weld compared you can see here we didn't Forge out here at all so this is not blended we're going to cut this open later anyways and this little lip here that you can see from the unevenness it is fairly common we're gonna trim this off anyway but it's I blended the weld and it took care very nicely I must say so there are no signs of the weld being weak and we also got proof of that by drifting it a little bit which causes tremendous stress here this part wants to pop open when the drift is in so or when we were drifting it so that's good now it's not gonna look like this for much longer what we are going to do is that where we're gonna stop working on this for a moment and start working on the beer part now if we were to do a type L axe we would just cut this open and insert high carbon steel bit and start forging it to shape we're welding that and start forging into shape but this time we are doing a bearded X so the same material which is this old piece of mild steel forge this down a little bit and then we're going to cut in a groove on the length to make it like a hot dog bread you know or taco it's gonna be almost like a taco and we're gonna Forge this piece of ss 2090 spring steel into shape and put inside this fort well that was together and then we are going to forge well this to this to get the beer now we have the piece here we're going to cook this inside here we're just gonna heat this piece up then we're gonna punch this inside it this is going to be cold this is going to be hot this is going to form after this because this is the cold part and then we're gonna start Forge welding it together into one solid piece I also made some teeth on this err not the prettiest but it also helps it weld a little bit easier so yeah okay so here we can see the two pieces that are going to well together this is the body we cut a groove in here that we are going to weld onto here and then we have the beer and we can find finally start shaping the X so it's a kind of a long process until you actually can start shaping it to the way you want to it's gonna look a bit weird at first when we want this on but later when we start forging everything to shape we are going to see how everything is going to turn out now first action is to heat this up and forge this down what that will do is that it will taper this both of these grooves thinner and the thinner material the easier it is to weld we're gonna do that now and then we're gonna shit'll it out and then put it on here alright let's go [Music] okay so I cleaned after I opened up the body of the axe to insert the beard parts I cleaned off the beard part a little bit with my angle grinder just to remove the scale and we're gonna heat up the body right now put it in the vise and punch the beard part in to the body of the axe and then we're gonna flux it and forge well it alright now just going to take my pen and prepare for how to cutting off some excess excess material over here we're probably gonna cut off a little bit down here as well okay so we're going to start cutting off some material I'll take it pretty slow I've never need one more heat here get this off and then after that you're just gonna draw it out a little bit more on the body and then we're basically done with the forging of the axe alright so the next part is basically grinding the profile and that depends on how you would like it so this this is where you really can put in your personal touch and do it however you want I'm gonna cut off a little bit on the beard here I'm also gonna thin it down some over here and then we're going for a normalization cycle of three I'm gonna come back where I'm when I'm done with the grinding the profiling and we'll take it from there all right alright so here we go I rough grinded the profile I see now that I have to do some minor tweaks to it but I can do that before the normalizing process I'm also gonna put in my touch mark on the lugs here which is my place where I put it some people put it on the beard and some people even put it on the hammer part you can put it wherever you want not wise to do it on the blade because you're gonna grind the hair a lot so but this is my take on the type B we're almost completed with the forging process [Music] okay so I don't have a Albany specifically made for heat treating I use my regular oven for heat treating and now it's still a little bit hot from the on the quench and that's how we want it now we're gonna take some aluminium foil I guess it's called still pretty hot so I'm gonna be quick now I heard the tip I don't remember where it said that you shouldn't temper unless it's still hot from the quench so you shouldn't wait until it's cooled down and then I don't know if that's true I tried it and I'd like to resolve $0.07 and why I wrapped it in a lump medium is because otherwise the whole new smells with oil or the oven smells with oil but if I do it like this there's barely no smell of oil so I've put it in the oven and you need to check what tempering your steel needs my shield should not be be going over 200 degrees Celsius after it's been quench so I leave it at 190 for about an hour and then I take it out so what you just saw me do was that I took the axe to the scotch-brite wheel and just to clean it off the profiles I liked it that way and you can do it however you want to if you have a file the finished or no finish at all if you take it straight out and Forge this is like off see you basically that's how I do them I like the the flashiness with the contrast of the rough Forge finished on the main side so basically now the axe is finished it's heat treated it's tempered it's finished off the only thing that's need needing to be done with the axe head is grinding in the last piece of the bevel and for the edge and sharpening it then the axe head is complete so what I'm going to do now is basically do the handle work and the way I do that is that I lay the axe on top of the piece of ash I rough sketch it out and then I take it to the draw knife speak the head to the to the to the handle and then I just shape it from there and the shaping of the handle is very much up to you as well depending on what type of X you are making what you wanted for and so forth [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so we're basically finished the only thing left is driving down the handle and wedging it I just made a quick round here I like to do the final sharpening when the axe is armed you don't have to do that it's just how I do it and there are different ways to drive down the handle to the eye as well you could simply turn it around and hit it from the behind and that will drive the head on to it to the handle I you can have a press to do this as well I used to have one foot it broke but I usually go with this I take my leather glove put it on the post wise open it up a little bit I don't know if you can see it put it here and I hit it with a rubber club from up side from the other end of the handle to drive the axe in place checking to see that it's properly set you want it to be tight all around the bottom part of the eye here you don't want when you look into the eye you don't want to see any gaps what I usually go by let me see if we can see this it might be too small you can see the wood starting to take shape around the shape of the body of the axe and now don't do that too much because I don't do that too much but I want there to be just a little bit of that that means it's really bugging into the wood properly right all that's left now is wedging it I like to do it like this let's see where I put the wet foot I'm gonna shape this wedge piece of Wedgwood to the eye on this side it's tapered but if I wanted to be table on this side as well just a little bit so it can reach all the way down through the eye but also expand on top so that it is also a force holding the axe down to the body thank you so much for watching the video I really hope you enjoyed it so this was my attempt at trying to explain how to forge a rapt eye bearded axe now I wanted the focus to be around the forging process of the wrapped eye and I think that's very clear when you see the video so I hope you could learn something from the video and I hope there's something that you can take with you from this video and if you like the video please like the video be sure to subscribe if you want to see more content like this in the future once again thanks for watching the video and have a great day goodbye

Channel: Nils Ögren

Views: 49,960

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Id: fFBksFKu9T4

Length: 36min 45sec (2205 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020