I Failed My Master Bladesmith Test...

howdy and welcome back to the workshop in today's episode I'm going to tell you the story of going to Blade show what happened afterwards and why this dagger got me an immediate failure for testing for master smith now as you can imagine the buildup of working for several months to get this set done and then getting the immediate failure is bit of a bummer not very easy mentally which is why it's very fortunate that today's sponsor is better help I think that it's incredibly important to be able to talk about these things uh you know for me this is something that I've focused on that I've had my mind on for for years now it's a goal that I've been you know kind of pushing towards to not only have not given myself enough time that's a bad feeling then then also have the you know the mental suffering of failing at something that's not not fun I had you know kind of made my peace with it before I went in thinking that you know I probably wasn't going to pass but no matter how you look at it that's just not fun whether it's you know applying to a university and not getting and getting turned down for a job that you wanted uh losing at a competition whether it's in sports or something like that it's just never Pleasant uh and being able to talk with especially a qualified professional is incredibly helpful in a situation like that now better help makes it incredibly easy to connect with a qualified therapist that can help you whether that's by phone or messaging or a video chat however you want to do it they make it incredibly easy to kind of shop around and find someone that works for you uh for me someone that understands my Christian worldview is is Paramount it wouldn't make any sense for me to talk with someone who doesn't understand the foundation of the way that I live my life and if you don't connect with someone it's very simple to find someone else so let our sponsor betterhelp connect you with a therapist who can support you all from the comfort of your own home you can go to betterhelp.com willll stelter for a special discount off of your first month thank you betterhelp with that uh let's keep on talking about the story I left on Tuesday June 4th with my friend Salem St Salem is my blad spinning Mentor he drove over here from Washington and then together we actually drove to Atlanta which is quite a ways now I got four of my five pieces done before I left to go to Atlanta now the one that I didn't finish was the important one the dagger uh that is the piece that they scrutinize most closely it is the one that has the most uh kind of specs that you need to follow and that they have kind of the closest guidelines that they're looking at everything else is kind of little bit more subjective but the dagger needs to be right so naturally I left it for last and hadn't finished it by the time we left while Salem drove I was working on the handle for my dagger mostly working on the sculpting of the uh flutes or as we'll find out later maybe not flutes it took us roughly 40 hours to get there we had a quick visit with Kevin Willie our buddy over in Sheridan Wyoming he had just finished restoring a 500b bodry which was very cool and then from that we kind of just like stopped for meals drove straight through we both got about 5 hours of sleep maybe 6 hours each along the way and uh and we made it all the way through we got into Atlanta at about 4:30 a.m. uh got about three three and a half hours of sleep woke up and then I went to my buddy Lucas O'Hara's shop Lucas lives pretty close to where the venue is Lucas is amazing he's Grizzly forge on Instagram he's one of my all-time favorite people and then I worked from like 10:00 a.m. all the way through until 6:00 a.m. the next morning judging started at 7:00 a.m. I had my garden pommel sanded etched and cold blued to Blacken them up I had my dagger handle finished to 2,000 grit buffed and my 14 Kat Gold Twisted wire tucked in there now the whole working on it during that night was just a nightmare biggest issue that I had was getting my gold inlay done now I had twisted my wires before I left I had two equal lengths of right hand and leftand twist the wire comes in a big coil and in order to get it perfect you really kind of have to count your twists or at least have a really good way to like measure it and line them up to make sure that they look good and I had them really really close a couple of twists out maybe over over about an 18in length each and 14 karat gold is something that I haven't worked with before I've worked with 24 karat gold back when I used to work for Alex steel and 24 karat gold is actually really easy to work with uh it's really really soft but it doesn't tarnish at all uh kneeling it is as simple as just running a torch down it it turns red and then it's like dead soft again this 14 karat gold would almost hold its own weight over like that much length after twisting it the it had work hardened as it twisted uh and so it was not bending super easy and so I decided to try and anal it soften it uh that's what an kneeling means for those of you who are stupid I'm just kidding that's the metal working term for softening uh and what I didn't know turns out I'm the stupid one is that 14 karat gold uh oxidizes when you anal it um and so there I was at like 400 a.m. I had been working for over 20 hours at this point and I've got some oxidized gold wire that needs to be shiny in a dagger handle to be presented to a panel of judges in 3 hours uh Google was unhelpful they were like oh just use this professional pickling solution that we're trying to sell you which I actually have this is this would have worked great unfortunately it was about 2,000 Mi away I in my Delirious Haze I was like oh maybe I can buff it and so I took it over to my buffing machine which is a loose cotton wheel with some uh abrasive in it and decided to buff it and that did not go very well uh in fact it tangled up my wire uh and I was left with only a couple little sections in in my leftand Twisted wire that would be long enough to be able to inlay in in the handle which just made me feel great I was so excited for the additional challenge but I figured out some of the gray scotchbrite material that I brought with me would work out well for it it got kind of into the cracks and crevices and got it really looking you know nice and clean oh also it didn't it didn't inal it was still fully hard uh which was very unpleasant actually I had my grooves kind of cut uh I drilled my holes and started to kind of tug it through super gluing my ends in as I went uh and I got all of my gold in thought it looked great and I went to tighten my palm on and that's when I figured out that a couple of the gold wires were sitting up a little bit too proud probably 15 maybe 20 thousand of an inch and I was like okay I was like that'll be all right the pommel will kind of crunch it down and it'll look just awesome it'll look like that wire is just like supernaturally tucked underneath the pommel what happened instead because 14 karat gold is springy and a lot tougher than 24 karat gold is that instead it made the wire sit loose in the handle because as the pommel was coming down it pushed on the wire and it made it loose and it meant that the pommel couldn't fully sit down and so this fit up that I had done that took a very long time to get this weird v-shaped fit done was now gappy I kind of tweaked it played around with it did the best that I could I was able to kind of tweak the ends of the wire to tighten them up and then not crank the pommel down all the way so it was kind of sitting on there where it was tight it wouldn't move at all but it wasn't like really like wrenched down um and that's kind of where I left it and so at 6:00 a.m. this was the product that I was left with judging was supposed to start at 7:00 a.m. applicants are were supposed to be there at 7:00 a.m. and I was at this point pretty well confident that I wasn't going to pass mainly because of the gold wire issue the wires sitting a little bit loose in there because of the pommel uh pushing down on it uh wires being able to move uh the wire in the center um the the ones that had gotten mangled in the buffer you know they're not straight they're kind of wobbly I mean they line up well the kind of fundamentals of the dagger are really good and I love how it looks I love the flow that it has I love the proportions I love the color scheme I really really love this dagger but that wire was I thought going to be uh kind of enough to give me the boot but I was like you know what I did all these knives um I love the buoy that I did I loved both the chef's knives that I did and I absolutely love the little hunter that I did and so I was like maybe maybe the gold not being perfect uh will be a secondary issue and that'll be something they're like all right like that sucks but the rest of the knives are good and so it'll be a pass and I was like I'm already here I put all this work in might as well test right so um comes about 6:15 6:20 a.m. it's a 25 minute drive from Lucas's shop to the cob Galleria which is where the testing and blade show happens and uh Salem and I kind of get ready you know have have a couple more Red Bulls drink some more water hop in the truck and and head to the Galleria we get there at about 650 6:55 maybe Salem goes to park the truck cuz I thought I needed to be there at 7:00 uh so Salem went to park the truck uh I walk up with my box full of knives and you know it looks awful and disorganized and all that um and I walk into the testing room and I see my friend Zay dvorac I was like hey zaye how's it going he's like oh how you doing will and I was like a man I just finished up this dagger and I go to like look through my box of knives and guess what wasn't in my box of knives this shiny little unit right here and so I called Salem in a panic I was like Salem oh my goodness is the dagger in the back of the truck somewhere and he's like let me look around and he like you he stays on the phone and he's like nope it's definitely not here and so I called Lucas who who whose shop we were working at and Lucas hadn't spent the night at his house because his AC unit had gone out uh that evening and so he went and spent the night at a at a friend's house nearby and I was like I left my dger at your shop would it be closer for me to drive there and get it and come back or are you closer than like 25 minutes away from the from the gallery he's like I'm like 15 minutes away we'll save 10 minutes if I go get it and I like you're amazing and so Lucas hops in his truck goes and certainly obeys all traffic laws in a timely manner retrieves the dagger and then uh from his shop and then makes it to the cob Galleria with 5 minutes to spare it turns out that that 7:00 Mark is when we were supposed to get there and the actual knives needed to be on the table at 8:00 uh and Lucas got there at 7:55 what I didn't know is that I had woken him up with my phone call and all he had done was grabbed his car keys and hopped in his truck in his boxers and then sped and got the dagger and came and delivered it to me my my parents came to Blade show uh they've been hearing me talk about blade show for years and they really wanted to come they've met a bunch of knife makers and so they were at blade show this year as well and my dad went down and grabbed the dagger and brought it up to me in the testing room with like I said 5 minutes to spare and so I now oil everything put everything down all right walk outside wait wait wait wait wait get called in uh and uh as I speak to the judges they say you didn't get your stamp I was like okay well I kind of expected that I was kind of kind of at peace with it I was like but at least I'll get you know like good critique and you know understand what happened and they were like you didn't flute your dagger handle and so uh that was a little bit of a shock to me because I had had based off of the the straight flutes uh off of Rodrigo Fredo's dagger um he passed I think about 10 years ago now maybe maybe a little bit longer um and he had done straight flutes like this on his um and so I was kind of in shock about that but I talked to all the judges they all agreed that this is not what they consider to be fluting um the technical definition of fluting is ridges or grooves I still consider this to be a fluted handle because it has grooves they said that it wasn't uh rounded out enough that there should be kind of a more even radius between it and I I understand that I understand where they're coming from uh but it was frustrating to get an immediate disqualification um they didn't they didn't look at any of the knives um or anything like that uh because that is a didn't meet the requirements of what is supposed to be in the quillin dagger I think if I had added uh Hollows in between them that would have then counted as fluting um and so had I given myself more time I could have shown it to more people and uh and they would have let me know what to do it was it was definitely frustrating to be uh you know immediately qualified on something that there's no uh written definition for within the organization but I do understand you know kind of where they're coming from and I will certainly do better next year you're on this Council but we do not Grant you the rank of Master and so I'm not going to let it get me down um I I believe that I'm capable of producing the quality of work uh to pass the master smith test uh it is a little frustrating to not have gotten really any feedback from the from the judges I am naming this one the the son flute which in some foreign language that's not American means no flutes um or without flutes and I am going to be fixing this handle I'm going to be redoing the gold making it sit tight make sure that the pommel sits tight and this piece is already sold uh it will not be available but it's sold under the uh the understanding that I'm going to redo the the gold on it so after that the judging ended at about 9:00 on Friday morning Friday morning is the opening day of Blade show and blade Show Goes Friday Saturday and then it ends at about 2:00 on Sunday I just kind of went to it went to my table put my knives down got to see a bunch of people over the next couple days that I just absolutely love people that don't get to see very often at all my my table was right next to Mike quinberry this year who's one of my favorite blad Smiths uh he's actually one of one of the judges for for master smith uh and so it was a great time getting to be next to him I got to meet some new international friends all kinds of stuff we had a really truly awesome year of getting to meet people at blade show it was fun to have uh my parents there they were a to watch my table for me as well as Salem uh Salem hadn't been to a blade show before and so it was super cool uh that he got to meet a bunch of people that absolutely love his work and he got to meet I think a couple of people who who he really looks up to like Rodrigo Fredo and Andrew MIRS and they were also they were just a couple tables down in my same row which was which was really neat blade show as always was just an absolute blast a total Whirlwind Alicia Newton the lady that runs it did an amazing job as always uh she's the best that was actually just the start of what turned out to be about a 2 and 1/2 week road trip uh and so after blade show is over on Sunday my friend Jackson Rumble who's an Australian master smith he was the only one to get his Ms stamp last year uh he and I hopped in my truck and we drove up to Johnson City Tri Cities area Tennessee and hung out for a couple of days uh with Jason knight uh Jason and his wife Shelly were kind enough to host us and they just have an amazing community of people there Jason and Shelly and Tristan Knight and Tiger Lily and Liam Hoffman and Kurt Holland and Brandon Franklin uh and one of their friends Dr Dan was there and Stuart Kerr boxer custom razors we spent a couple nights at Brandon and Emily Franklin's place which is real nearby got to go out to dinner with Kurt Holland and his wife Abby and their lovely son Oliver who's like Yay big he's adorable yeah it's just a real treat to get to be around that Community I've been there a good couple times now and it's just super fun it was very restful we got to like catch up on a little bit of sleep Jackson was kind of in the same boat where he was like uh just totally totally burnt out from blade show and from like the 40 hours of travel that it took to get there from Australia and then we headed on up to Wheeling West Virginia took a beautiful drive to the Appalachian Mountains uh up to weing West Virginia which is where Warwood tool is Warwood is an industrial Forge shop that has been running continuously for 170 years it was their 170th anniversary party uh and this place is just so cool they're running big uh board driven drop hammers uh and they Forge axes and uh fire Fighting Tools and uh and Hammers and just all kinds of Cool americanmade Tools uh they do a lot of stuff for the railroad uh which has some really interesting and unique specifications that they need to meet so we spent a couple of days in Wheeling West Virginia it's a very interesting place um there was very clearly a lot of wealth there about 120 years ago and then seems like a lot of that has gone away so there was a lot of just beautiful like Victorian era buildings that very clearly hadn't been taken care of for like a very long time so Warwood is now owned by uh the aers azers I don't actually know how to pronounce their last name but they bought the company and kind of took it over and now they're bringing it into the 20th century which is really neat it's cool to see them kind of honor the tradition of the shop but then try to kind of bring some new means and maybe start doing some direct to Consumer stuff and stuff like that I'm hoping to get to collaborate with them a little bit soon I ended up taking home with me a 25 kwatt induction Forge from coal Ironworks that they brought to demo there uh but I'll do a whole video about that soon and we left there on Sunday the 16th and drove up to kind of the Cleveland area of Ohio first thing we did was going and visit zaye Dvorak my buddy he came out here last year to hang out him and his wife and he has a brand new son as well who's just adorable too I got to see his shop his forging setup super cool to see him and and kind of where he grew up and then from there we kind of drove back to more of the Cleveland akan area uh crashed for the night next morning oh it such a good day uh we got to go see Nick back shop super cool spot Nick does very cool kind of American not Frontier style uh that's kind of a different style kind of more uh more classic American knives you'll just have to look him up on Instagram if you want to see it Nick looks like he just plucked him right out of like 1890 and put him put him down in akan Ohio uh super cool dude and then from there we got to go to what turned out to be one of my favorite stops of the whole trip uh hgr industrial Surplus in uclid Ohio it's like half a million square feet of beautiful giant industrial machines and they're all on fire sale it's absolutely unreasonable it was so so so cool we spent like three and a half hours walking around this place I bought myself a nice Granite surface plate that if you were to buy it in Montana would be like $1,000 and it was like 50 bucks stupid um and they had all kinds of Milling machines and band saws and welders and drill presses and just anything the mind can imagine uh it was very cool we lit out from there and headed on down to uh the Indianapolis area to hang out with the Cole Iron Works guys we crashed at Logan gillan's house that night and the next day we went to Cole Jackson got to see their whole operation I've been there quite a few times so I'm rather familiar but uh I think he was pretty nice stoked to get to see their whole operation they have a very cool uh way that they build their presses and just kind of a cool workflow very very fun for people that like manufacturing and we played around a little bit with the induction forges we did a pound and a half stainless steel melt and it was great getting to see that whole team uh I ended up buying a couple more dyes for my press so I can now punch things got a punch and stripper plate set so keep an eye out for some hammers soon and from Indianapolis we basically High tailed it on home uh so took two days to get home uh two long days Jackson and I both got sick uh I think from Logan so thanks Logan but we got back to Montana and we had a couple days just kind of hang out Tod Jackson had to shoot some guns Alex steel was actually in town for a couple days so we spent a couple so we spent like a whole day with him just kind of hanging out went down through the ball for Marty in the river and then uh I've just been hanging out and recovering since then yeah got some fun stuff coming up in the works I'm going to the Pacific Northwest custom Invitational show in Seaside Oregon uh on July 20th so if you guys are in kind of the Pacific Northwest area you should absolutely come on by it's going to be very neat very neat show it's a tactical knife show so whatever that means uh it'll be it'll be fun I'm going to bring a couple of Chef's knives and hopefully some other fun stuff that I'll do videos about if you guys are coming to the show you'll have an opportunity to buy this lovely Damascus hunting knife this was part of my failed test set because I'm bad at making knives if you want to come handle it in person it'll be there available single and ready to mingle with your dollars and also now that I'm back I had put it off for a couple of months but I'm actually going to be starting a new business something that I think you guys will very much appreciate uh and I'm going to be documenting the whole process of doing that everything goes into it so keep an eye out for that I hope you guys uh get stoked on it so that's about all we got for today uh we're going to have some more making videos coming out soon uh so stay tuned for them Fellers uh thank you so much to better help for sponsor today's episode thank you to our patrons for patronizing us and I'll see you guys on the next next one byebye

Channel: Will Stelter

Views: 117,693

Keywords: bladesmith, bladesmithing, knife making, blacksmith, how to make a knife, american bladesmith society, master bladesmith, journeyman bladesmith, forging, forged in fire, steel, blacksmithing, damascus, knife maker, bowie knife, tools, blade, willstelter, will stelter, knifemaking, making a knife, anvil

Id: tBzFHmTPlfw

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2024