Making a Twist Damascus Viking Seax

oh my [Music] God hey guys Jesse here today I'm going to be building something a little bit different from my last two videos I'm gonna be building a viking sacks with an experimental twist Damascus the reason I call it experimental is because I'm going to be putting a gradient into my starting Billet that's 18. that's 13. my drink keeps teleporting either it has magical powers or I have ADHD ignoring the fact that I might have ADHD the first step that I take is the same as last two times I clean all the surfaces with a worn 80 grit belt and then I start stacking my bullet together I decided to change the layout a little bit for my cardboard drawing I changed that one layer in between each of the different layers of 1084 into two layers hopefully that makes the pattern a little bit more bold I don't know if you could tell or not but my voice is very different from my past few videos and that's because I got a new microphone let me know in the comments if you think it's better and extra points if you can guess which mic it is as for the Billet that I just tagged together I decided to do something a little bit different from the past two times usually I don't really care if the edges are overhanging like if the 1084 is slightly wider than the 15 and 20. so I took it over to the grinder and I ground it pretty much flat I don't know if this is gonna make the final product any better I I like to think that it will because it did take a lot more time than just going straight to the forge once the Billet is all wedded together and the forge is on I do my routine dip into some parks 50. a lot of people mentioned in my past two videos comment sections that I could use kerosene or w40 but the reason I use Parks 50 is because it's more readily available and I think it does a better job one of the things that I don't usually show is what I do when I'm waiting for the Billet to heat up today was btd6 press one the past few weeks there's been a massive Heat Wave moving through Arizona it's been over 110 degrees every single day for around the past two weeks and I think the day that I was Forge welding this it was around 115 to 117. combine that with the forge that's running at around 2 400 degrees it was essentially working in hell one of the aspects about forged welding that isn't talked about too much but is still super important is just leaving the Billet to sit in the Forge at Forge welding temperature this promotes cross-boundary grain growth and makes sure the Billet is actually glued together it's actually possible to weld some materials without a press at all and just having them sit at Forge running temperature but it requires a bunch of tools that I don't have oh wow I plan for this Billet moving forward is to draw it out into a one inch by one inch bar cut it into two pieces and twist them in opposing directions I have to be super careful about my Forge welds here because any inclusion or cold shut will amplify itself a thousand times when I go to Twisted [Music] of course all right it's gonna be long one of the things that I really have to get to work on is building a jig to help transfer the heat from the forage away from the ceiling as you can see here average temperatures of around 180 to 190 degrees and that can't be good for drywall foreign oh my God if you're super perceptive or just a human micrometer you might realize that the Billet right now isn't an inch by an inch it's around one and a half inches by one and a half inches I don't really know why I decided to cut in half now but I would have to cut off the garbage ends regardless and I would have to have two pieces so might as well kill two birds of one stone as I was waiting for those two billets to heat up I decided to test the rebound on my old anvil as you can see it's obviously pretty good those of you who have made twist Damascus in the past or have seen people make twister masks in the past are wondering why I'm leaving these bars so big the reason I'm leaving them at an inch by an inch is because my plan after I twist them is to stack them up by only two I'm not doing a really high layer Turkish twist so I need to make sure These Bars have enough girth beforehand please [Music] once I get both billets forged down to that inch by inch I take them back to the press and I break the corners this is super important because if I didn't those sharp Corners would end up becoming cold shuts it's less of an octagon and a square with it's more square with broken Corners because that's really what I need [Music] oops oh it's probably Apparent from all my Grunts and groans but twisting These Bars was super super difficult I was sweating from head to toe and I had to exert a bunch of core strength in an axis that I'm not used to exerting it in you've definitely seen it in the past but I wear a Garmin watch and while I was twisting these billets my heart rate went up to 140 beats per minute and sometimes even 150. I'm a fairly young guy with actually pretty good cardio so the fact that my heart rate went that high is kind of amazing um that was terrible I need one more for these two billets I wanted a fairly High twist density I didn't want to go too high though because if I did I would risk shearing the bullets right off and if that happened I would have to forge another Billet and retwist it and if I did that I might just die once I was satisfied with how much twist I put into both Village I took them back to the press and I forged them back into squares I was actually surprised at how much of the width I saved in the billets after twisting those two blocks that you see in the Press are not an inch they're 0.9 but I expected it to be around like 0.8 and the fact that I could keep them at 0.9 is really really nice I forgot who it was but somebody commented on one of my videos that even though it's 120 degrees I still don't sweat but you can see here I in fact do sweat after both billets are cooled down I take them both to the bandsaw and I cut off all of the parts that aren't twisted right so we know which way is up which which no no which way is left we know which was right once I somehow find out which orientation I'm going to weld them together I take them to the round wheel and I grind off all of the oxides on one of the sides the reason that I'm using the round contact wheel rather than the regular flat platen at the beginning is because the contact wheel focuses all of its abrasive power into a very small area of contact thereby making the process a little bit faster once most of the oxides are removed I take it over to the flat platen on my other grinder to grind away enough material just so that I see clean material across the entire face I haven't made enough twister masks to standardize where I weld the billets together so I decided to just do what I do on my usual billets and weld the sides and a little bit in the center all right my plan to forge weld these two billets together is actually do it by hand and whenever I Forge weld by hand I like to use flux foreign oh my I don't know if that Air Canister was close to exploding or not but I didn't really want to find out here I am setting the forge welds with my hand Hammer as you can see I'm not using a lot of force but I am hitting very fast after I get the original Forge Weld set I let it sit in the Forge for a little bit and then I take it back to the press and I start drawing it out as I'm drawing it out I make sure to brush off the scale as often as I can and check those Forge welds I really really want to catch any delamination early and fix it the drawing out of this Billet actually took a lot longer than you would think I didn't want to put a lot of strain on the forge welds so every single heat I took it slow I probably only took it down a sixteenth of an inch every single time I didn't show it on camera here but once I drew it out to around a foot and a half I took it over to the bandsaw cut off the new garbage ends and I put it back in the Forge as I was waiting for the bullet to heat up again I kind of just let my brain run wild the first thing that I did on the Press was draw out my Tang the reason that I did this first was because I actually didn't have the correct size tongs to hold the bar by forging out the Tang I can have them fit in my two inch wide blade tongs the thing about the Viking sacks is that its blade shape is very very similar to the modern Bowie keep in mind I said similar the sax has a much lower blade and it has much less aggressive curves when you see the finished knife I want the first thought to come to your mind to be oh wow that's a sax I don't want it to be like oh that's just the weirdly shaped Bowie I love tongs forging the tip on this Billet could actually be done a little bit later than I did here I only did it early because it was less tall and I don't really like forging tips on wider stock twist Damascus is fairly unique in that the pattern changes the more you grind through the Billet because of that I wanted to leave the Billet as thick as possible and actually not Forge in too many of the bevels I still force them a little bit but I did it much less so than if I was doing another pattern I can make this 16 inch blade with like 13 and a half inches of material that breeze like I usually do I cut off a little bit of material because my Billet is too big this blade was actually commissioned that I took last summer and the commissioner requested a 15 to 20 inch blade I decided to make the blade on the lower end of that spectrum because a 20 inch long sax is really hard to have aesthetic proportions with its handle and the sax is definitely not a two-handed blade I decided to forge Tang at a fairly high temperature I think this was actually over forage wedding temperature I just wanted the least possibility of tearing that four twelve apart my process for getting this blade forged out was a little bit scuff I usually bevel my blades a little bit as I try to get that final length but the sacks has such a flat blade that whenever I beveled it it wanted to curve up so I had to keep going back and forth between hammering the bevels straightening it out hammering the spine Etc honestly that's getting pretty close at least 15 inch blade five inch Tang let me get this Tang perfect and then we move on to something else that hammer that you've been seeing me use a lot is a four pound dog head from Ilia I hear a lot of Smiths say that they'd like to use the lighter hammers like the two and a half pound dog heads I've never been one to like using a light Hammer I feel like no matter how fast I swing it it just won't do as much work as a heavier one and over the years I've built up muscular resilience so that I can keep swinging them for a very long period of time I don't do foreign now that the blades mostly Forge the shape it's time to get it ready for normalizing and heat treat I'm doing what I usually do and I give it a very light profiling pass on the grinder I used to do all my normalizations with my propane Forge because I only recently got this Paragon Heat Treating oven I have to say it is much easier pressing a few buttons than it is using a magnet and testing the entire blade for temperature and even then it's just an eyeball I only show one of the normalizing Cycles here but I did three of them and they were at 1650 1500 and 1350 degrees Fahrenheit I'm actually brain dead after the third and final normalizing cycle I take the blade back to the grinder and I begin hogging off a lot of material I hold back a little bit because I want to quench this blade a little bit fatter than I do other blades I really don't want that Central Forge weld line to blow apart in the quench the temperature that I'm quenching this blade at is 1505 degrees the data sheets for 1084 say around 1475 but it takes time for me to take the blade from the Kiln and put it in the oil and so I want that extra buffer of heat foreign [Music] after I take the blade out of the oil I file test it and make sure that I get that nice high pitch sound it probably helps that I left the blade fairly thick and I did some really accurate normalizing Cycles but at this point the blade was very straight after blowing off all the Steam and getting those theatrical shots I threw the blade right into another oven the other oven isn't as accurate as the Paragon killed so I put it in there at 350 degrees so even if it overshoots it'll still be under my final temper and temperature after two two hour long Cycles in the Paragon killed at 425 degrees it's time to waste a couple hours of my life and get this thing Final Ground before I started making this blade I did some research on what the Viking Sax's geometry was supposed to be like there's a lot of saxes out there that are flat ground there's a lot of sexes that have that very apparent Central bevel and then they have like a gouge grounded to the spine I decided to just do a simple flat grind and do something special to the spine later and this is because mine is made of Damascus and a central bevel is going to make that Damascus look slightly weird here you see me straightening the blade with my three prong jig and a torch apparently it wasn't straight coming out of the Quench and I just Gaslight myself into thinking it was straight perfect one of the things that stuck with me all these years is Alex Steele saying that time is money and you should know when to throw out your old abrasives now if you know me personally you'll know that I'm not too stingy of a person I'm actually quite the opposite but when it comes to grinding belts I'm the stingiest person there is I will keep belts for as long as I can I actually have a shelf in the garage that has around 200 Old belts that I just can't bring myself to throw away [Music] I mentioned earlier that I was going to do something special to the spine here I'm giving it a very very slight Ridge just like those that you see on Katana and wakizakis I have to be super careful about making the angles as obtuse as possible because if I don't it'll just start looking like another Bowie knife I was thinking about maybe setting my table at an angle or making a jig to help me grind this but I always freehand everything and I feel like I'd be cheating on myself if I were to make a jig oh all right I need to fall apart rest assured the running water that you hear is just me filling the bucket with more water now that the Blade's mostly Final Ground it's time to get that plunge line dialed in like I mentioned in my cookie video I don't have a waterfall pattern and I don't really like how flashy that round radius looks so I put on a file guide and I use the 80 rip belt and I make my Sharp 90 degree plunge line the reason that I'm using an 80 grit belt and not a 36 grit belt is because the belts themselves have a radius and the 80 grit belt is the lowest grit one that I have that has the least radius only at a third arm actually I don't need to file at all I can just use the grinder very carefully by very carefully I mean very very carefully the belt can run off the side of the platen and if it does run off I will grind through the center of my blade now that the plunge line is as good as I can get it on the grinder it's time to slap on some higher grip belts and bring the entire blade to a 400 grit machine finish a 220 grit belt that is dull has no purpose anymore the belt I used to give the blade is final finish is an A45 trisect belt that is the equivalent of a 400 grit aluminum oxide belt we're at 57 26. that means uh we're halfway to a million subscribe 1.75 if I want this to be an inch I'll do 375 on either side yes this is material I have to grind off and yes I could have forged it thinner but that requires foresight sometimes I wonder what machine in my shop can remove material the fastest I have two grinders I have an angle grinder with a bunch of different discs I can use I have a hacksaw I have my own fingers I don't know which is the best okay if any of my knife making Tendencies are going to become my downfall it's gonna be the fact that I don't like sketching my pieces beforehand something like that I could do something like this the materials that I'm choosing for my handle are silicon bronze African Blackwood and stainless steel all right we're done according to my research the sax has always been a one-handed weapon and one of the Tendencies for one-handed weapons is to have a handle that's too long if the handle is too long it can slip in and out of your hand and you can lose control of the weapon so what I'm doing here is cutting the block down to an adequate length at this point the thickness of my Tang is around 0.3 inches flat and so I go to my drill press I slap on a quarter inch drill bit and I start drilling my holes [Music] as I'm drilling these holes all I can think of is all the filing that I have to do later to get this fit up to the tank [Music] this is why I need a mill here I am using one of the tricks that I learned from black dragon forge apparently a file guide can be used for a lot of things and this is one of them is there is there like an auto file someone should make a like a massage gun with the file oh wait I can actually do that okay I have to have it on one power even though all the stupid ideas that I come up with have a 95 chance of just not working at all I still like to keep doing them well they make my work fun wait that's really good honestly this might work use a mini Mark but that can be ground off so the handle block needs to go from 0.96 0.625 all right the only bad thing that's happened to me because of knife making is it's accentuated my nerd neck hopefully that'll improve we can do these holes separated by approximately 0.3 I think that's right one of the things that tends to happen when I'm drilling wood is that the drill bit gets clogged so I always have a wire brush on standby to help me clean it up even though my handleblock isn't too long my drill bit is still too short to go all the way through so I have to drill another hole from the other side and hope that they're aligned yeah hi when drilling these holes super close to each other the drill bit has a tendency to try and wander into the already drill hole one of the things that I've realized that helps it not wander is to do tiny pecs once all the holes are drilled all the way through the handle block I use some sideways pressure to connect all three of the holes drill bits weren't designed to be used this way so if you do this make sure to wear safety glasses because the drill bit can explode once the trench has been dug all the way through the Block it's time to do some final shaping with some files and some homemade handle brooches with the power of editing this doesn't look like it took that long but trust me it took me like six hours generally when I go to burn in my tangs the slot is already 99 curved however this time was a little bit different okay I might need more carving home stretch of the handle block fit up when carving the handle block I also have to make sure the front and the back are perfectly Square to the guard and the pommel I think we're good the guard on handleblock oh yeah so after doing some research it's not a good idea to weld stainless steel to carbon steel which is what I was going to do so I'm gonna disregard that piece and use a chunk of mild steel if it was hard for you to read my mind there the plan for the pommel is that I'm gonna slip it on with a little bit of epoxy and then after a day I'm actually going to weld the Tang to the pomple this will make it so that it will never come off and I can get a flush finish on the pommel why is this easier to file than like than bronze once I got the slot in the pommel all filed down I decided to just round the end of the Tang sort of like the process in which you would make a threaded Tang but also slightly different guard fits perfectly handle block fits perfectly and pobble fits perfectly once I have all three handle pieces all fitting perfectly and extremely blocky I take them over to the grinder and I begin rough profiling the shapes I'm going for a mostly ovular shape on all three pieces but I'm gonna do something a little bit special on the guard this process right here brings me back to when I was making the pugio daggers for Fortune fire that dagger had one of the requirements being I had the inset discs into the handle and to make those discs I cut myself a bunch of brass Square pieces and I just ground up the corners once I had the guard and the pommel mostly profiled I actually take the block to the grinder and I have to grind it straight again even though I tried super hard to get that tank slot to be exactly parallel to the sides of the block I couldn't make that happen so I used the sides of the pommel in the guard to make sure that block was Square as you can see here and as you can hear here my dust collection system is running that's because uh I accidentally used it for metal and the Sparks burned through the tube and so now I have to find myself better pipes or just revamp the entire system okay oh my gosh that went entirely according to plan having that table with all those knobs is like having a Ferrari but only using it to drive around your neighborhood I never use that table for really complicated angles and so I've only adjusted it the entire time I've had it like twice anyways here I am rounding the edges of the pommel contrary to popular belief a Pomo with Sharp 90 degree edges is not that comfortable all right getting this started he's gonna why are you moving my plan for this guard is to do a little bit extra firework on it I've actually never done file work like this on any piece I've ever done but I've seen people like will stelter do it on their chef knives so I thought why not try it on a guard for the first time after I'm done filing that Groove in the guard I take everything inside and I begin hand sanding the blade you're probably wondering if you watched my first two videos how come I'm handing the blades so late this time that's because this is another one of those times where I can do things out of order and it won't affect the final product now I love using files as my handstanding sticks and because a file is rectangular I can use the big flat sides for hand sanding most of the blade but if I want to clean up transition areas I can use the sides and it's much faster that way I figured it'd probably be fun to have a recurring thing whenever I hand sand to talk about what videos I watch when I handstand when I was hand sanding the sax I was watching dude perfect and pretty much only dude perfect I made sure to watch every single one of their bucket list videos and honestly the cinematography in those is so awesome that I watched one of them twice that hurt my process for hand sanding the sax was the same as the other two 150 to 400 to 600 to 1500 and here's 600. add a 600 grit finish when I'm hand sanding I like to do these things where I kind of experiment with the fractals that the soapy water creates as you can see they can look super super cool and I'm wondering if I can get these patterns into a hormone somehow once the blade is fully hand sanded it's time to etch my Maker's Mark I actually thought that the blackened Maker's Mark that I did last time looks really cool I don't know why I didn't do it earlier maybe it's because I didn't buy any of the Perma blue but this time I'm doing the same etching process and I'm also permabluing it again foreign the etching machine that you just saw me use is called the personalizer Plus when I finally got my Maker's Mark sent to me by IMG I wanted to get the best of the best in terms of the etching machine and after a bunch of research the personalizer plus was the best one that I found the process by which I'm going to etch this blade is going to be two dips in the ferric chloride that are one minute and 30 seconds each and in between those two cycles I'm gonna be using some 2500 grit sandpaper to sand off all the oxides setting off the oxides is actually fairly important because it's the thing that helps drive up the contrast of the two differing metals [Music] after I'm done sanding off the oxides with the 2500 grit sandpaper it's time to get the blade ready for coffee etch the coffee etch is much simpler than it sounds I just mix up some missing coffee and I throw the blade in and I basically can forget about it and nothing bad will happen foreign two hours later yeah I'm not even gonna try to hide it this thing looks insane that coffee etch did wonders to this blade but yeah now that the blade is finished it's time to finalize the handle pieces and the first step that I'm doing for that is I'm hammering a little pattern into the top of the Guard I think it'll give the guard a little bit more of a rustic look and seeing as the Viking sacks is a really really old weapon I thought it would fit it quite well and then after that I darken the entire thing and then I sand the flats just to give it a little bit more contrast once the guard is finalized it's time to give the pommel a really nice machined satin finish once the pommel is looking nice and after I totally didn't drop it in the bucket three or four times I used some sandpaper and I get that wooden handle block entirely polished if you polish African Blackwood up really nicely it'll start looking like black glass it actually looks almost like obsidian to give it that super dark glowy look I hand polish it to 2500 grit and then I used two different polishing compounds now that everything is ready it's time for that fateful moment the glue up I test fit the Pieces Just One Last Time to make sure that I didn't miss anything maybe there's a gap I didn't see and with that harsh lighting it's really easy to identify after I mix the epoxy with the popsicle stick for around five minutes I make sure to clean everything and then I coat every surface that will be glued with epoxy this will make it so there's not a chance of getting any air bubbles if I were to make a blade similar to this in the future I would probably do a takedown Construction one of the things that I always do but don't necessarily show on camera is me cleaning off the excess epoxy with acetone on a handle like this with such a high gloss polish handle block if I didn't clean off all of the excess epoxy it would be extremely apparent after I give the epoxy 24 hours to cure I flip it over and I weld on the pommel to the tank it's extremely important that I cool it as fast as possible when I'm done welding because epoxy does get weaker when it's hot this is the last step of the process and here is the finished blade I love how much contrast I got between the 1084 and the 15 and 20. I also love how star-like that Bottom bar looks this looks like the kind of weapon that you'd see in a video game like maybe Mario or something also if you look closely I got a little bit of Auto hormone on this blade it kind of looks like a trap soul and I'm all here for it after all those b-roll shots are taken I sharpen the blade with a 400 grit trizact belt and then I take it inside to a buffalo hide strap loaded with green buffing compound this sharpening process isn't as elaborate as some other people's but the edge actually gets quite sharp it's sharp enough to do any tests that I throw at it the only thing is it looks unprofessional but looking unprofessional and being unprofessional are two very different things thank you foreign

Channel: Jesse Hu

Views: 1,137,181

Keywords: blacksmith, jesse hu, jesse hu forged in fire, jhublades, Viking sword, Viking seax, forging a sword, forging a knife, making damascus, damascus viking sword, damascus viking seax, bladesmithing, forged in fire, how to forge a sword, how to forge a knife, damascus, twist damascus, artisan build, damascus sword, knife, knife making, forging, blacksmithing, knives, sword

Id: -hzOmhGh_vY

Length: 36min 49sec (2209 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023