Making the Heretic - The Sword of the Year

[Music] and welcome back to that works and we present to you the long-anticipated video of building the heretic [Music] are two beginnings to the idea of making the heretic sword the first one was uh i needed a set of sister swords to complete a triptych idea and the first sword being the inquisitor the heretic seems to be the natural consequence of that specific idea the second impetus was in fact spite yes pure spite they came as a result of my reading your comments now in an early video someone some scoundrel commented and said i've never seen ilya made complex mosaic damascus uh i don't find mosaic to be in the category of complex damascus from an artistic standpoint however i took up the challenge in about a week a week and a half made the entire billet for the heretic sword and set it aside after which a friend and a client contacted me and wanted to buy a sword and i tried to propose to him the idea of the heretic made with meteorite mosaic damascus already had the sword blade fully forged out and so i began designing the work and really thinking about the idea what would a sword name the heretic look like and what it would represent now i have in fact addressed my way of thinking about art and what i do on the full blast podcast and some aspects of this video will be more informative after you have listened to the full blast podcast or if you listen to the full blast podcast after watching this video it will create a more complete picture i'm not here to teach you how to make mosaic damascus but it's necessary to cover some of the basic principles that went into making the blade for the heretic the fundamental principle of mosaic damascus unlike any other kind of pattern welded steel is exposure of the grain and the laminations this way while in standard pattern damascus you're exposing the grain of the layers either this way or this way mosaic damascus is a 90 degree turn along the axis to give the viewer what's going on throughout the entire building and once you get that idea and have several bullets to play with you can assemble a pretty impressive looking piece from a number of billets any way you want so basically what i did i created a center billet out of multiple rods that set up my primary pattern then by stretching it out cutting it cleaning tack welding it and forge welding them again and adding other billets i created a radiating pattern almost like a mandala or a persian rug design that illuminates from the center outwards and that was my main diamond pattern in the sword i also stashed away some of the other parts of this billet to create long rods which had twisted and forged welded together and cut apart to create the spiral pattern that you see around the main diamonds [Music] once all the pieces are cleaned up and fitted together i tack weld them in one big billet i also use couple tricks that ensure a better weld although they were not completely necessary but it's better to be safe for example i attached two pieces of sheet metal on either of the flat sides that kind of prevents scale from forming keeps the oxygen away from the critical points and uh make me feel safer forge welding a long long billet under the power [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] once the blade billet is fully forged welded together and stretched out to the rough dimensions of the final product however is fairly thick it's time to test etching the reason why test etching is happening right now is because i want to ensure that there are no weld flaws or crookedness and wandering in the pattern itself considering that mosaic damascus pattern is very known for being very precise almost mechanical not almost it is so a consistency of pattern is the most important thing about this specific type of pattern welding in order to create a panel which i'm going to engrave deeply before heat treating what i did i added a piece of 1045 which usually has between 0.45 or 0.5 carbon content remember this is going to be the ricasso and edge retention is not critical however the greatest amount of ductility possible during the annealed stage is the most critical for engraving remember engraving is a mechanical processing of your material and therefore creates a certain degree of work hardening which will be hard on the gravers and hard on the product in the end [Music] so [Music] once the blade dimensions are fully figured out and i know what size and where the final piece will be it's time to begin forging the garden pommel for the piece now what i do is i pick out a stock of low carbon damascus which will be easier to heart since the garden pommel do not need to be hard in any manner for this project and i begin forging it out so [Music] once the rough shape of the guard is forged out it's time to punch the slot now it is my personal choice and uh conviction that the smith and maker should put as much of the hand labor into the project rather than machinery so i always choose to hot punch the slot for the tank as well as the shoulder for the ricasso [Music] [Music] so [Music] because this is damascus and because this is supposed to be primarily a showpiece to impress the judges as i'm submitting it for the competition what's important is creating a more illustrious and visually bombastic style so i'm not forging as much of the guard shape as i would otherwise and i will rely on grinding and engraving to expose more of the pattern [Music] now that i have all my steel pieces ready it's time to begin working at least thinking about the silver sleeve that goes over the handle remember i'm working on all artistic parts almost simultaneously rotating from one week to the next week when i'm working on the guard pommel silver or the blade [Music] once the silver is formed into a sheet it's time to cut it into a rectangle and form it into a tube in order to do that i bend it around the stake and solder it along the seam most of the times for projects like these i use sterling silver as my solder rather than the standard solder the reason being is it is my conviction that sterling silver seems to be a much more reliable solder and chases much better along with fine silver rather than a standard soldered spot [Music] [Applause] in order to formalize a sword that is truly the heretic i first have to conceptualize what it means to engage in heresy unlike the modern popular conception of the heretic being some witch in the top of the mountain a heresy is actually a radical reinterpretation of the orthodox view for example martin luther's 95 theses are a heretical act within the orthodoxy of catholicism and we can't say that martin luther was technically from a moral standpoint wrong or a witch on top of the hill now i based my ideas of the works of a later thinker friedrich nietzsche uh nietzsche's heresy was specifically reevaluating the standard orthodoxy of ethics as well as religious aesthetics in a way that is against the culture that we have currently so he reversed all the values that we had and analyzed and conducted an archaeology of morals and that was his heretical act however we cannot say that he is some evil doer somewhere else nietzsche had a very tremendous problem with any anti-semites he hated anti-semites and he advocated for a more rich way of living one can argue that he is probably one of the most christian people who ever lived now bringing back to the heretic uh friedrich nietzsche started out as a classical scholar he knew more about greek mythology than most anyone around him and what i do with the angel side of the heretic i make the angel at the same time prometheus except i'm changing the eagle to a snake prometheus is also the lightbringer the bringer of light the independence to humanity and here we have a recapitulation of the tradition of the accuser or lightbringer in christianity who later on will be called the devil so it is the devil biting himself by bringing independence and seducing human kinds into understanding the differences between right and wrong it is in a sense they roberos the way you can really think about it the devil is defeated by himself the other side of the sword is the stargazer now the position in medieval societies of the stargazer was always very sketchy technically speaking according to church law you're not supposed to engage in uh divination prediction and astrology but every single king and even some popes had an astrologist and a stargazer to advise them on events in fact uh even the scaffoldings for cathedral were based not on which wood is the hardest or most well cured but based on the astrological sign under which the wood was cut so the idea of astrology a low claw class type of white magic was always adjacent to the orthodoxy of the medieval world the stargazer furthermore introduces to us the nietzschean zoroastro or zarathustra who brings from the mountain the good news to the people and is tremendously misunderstood so the stargazer is the linking character between the thus fake zarathustra and the christian orthodoxy as we understand it remember i'm creating a work of modern art that is inspired by the greek as well as christian folklore rather than specifically copying any one of which if i were to copy a specific narrative it would not be completely my work i have to introduce my intellectual labor into the piece rather than merely follow a guideline that i read in a book [Music] a lot of you are familiar with me talking about cultural aspects of japanese pieces and how each piece relates to another one well this is my opportunity to actually introduce a little bit of my knowledge on european sword aesthetics so here we go now if we look at medieval european swords and we look specifically at the set of proportions that they try to aspire for you see a clear line between cathedral architecture and the way the sword design changes it is actually my argument that i'm not fully prepared to elaborate on right here that the sword designs the longer tip or wider tip don't actually come from martial necessity but come from what people who are making swords saw built in their towns as the main cathedral you can actually check out the timelines and they align much better what actually got me thinking about this is the work of peter johnson and the sword proportions that he advocates for and explains in his lectures and i recommend you to watch some of them if you have a chance to his argument is that in the first years of christendom the way the holy roman empire under the church started militarizing itself it needed a standardized set of equipment that way they can send a set of instructions to modern day germany from rome and people would follow it remember we don't have a standard uh set of units of measurements everybody was measuring things differently and we don't even have a standardized amount of hours in the day for example uh in some locations there were only 20 hours in the day rather than the modern 24. so what needed to happen is hiring people who knew how to play with proportions architects and create a method of delivering sword design information and since architects are making cathedrals those ideas already in the head they cannot think outside of them and peter johnson presents a very compelling argument into architectural proportion techniques being employed in designing certain types of swords in fact to the point he i think is fairly successful in distinguishing inadvertently between the swords made for the civilian markets that will not follow those sets of proportions and swords made for the actual armies that was sanctioned by the church he never makes that part of the argument but i think you should [Music] so in following the idea that the sword is a reflection of cathedral architecture intentionally or unintentionally you choose what i do is i structure the entire sword as if it is a cathedral so the sword itself has to fit the interior design of the cathedral perfectly and blend in with all the reliquaries all the candle holders the altar and everything so the sword panels are as if the architectural portals and stained glass that you would see on the inside or the outside of the cathedral the handle is one of the towers of the cathedral and it is structured in that way i use the forms of gothic architecture not only because i've always been fascinated with the presence that gothic architecture has but also because it fits the theme of the sword perfectly and is easily convertible from real estate onto a sword now that the blade is fully engraved and the silver and gold inlaid into it it is time to heat treat it now since i have access to the even heat kiln that is a safer choice for a sword like this although i could have performed the same procedure either in charcoal or in the gas forge but it would have been much more risky and i simply don't want to take that risk very much now the heat treating specs for the main cutting edge steel that i have so i rely on the entire set of steels and combinations to be very similar to adcrv is that a heat treats between 1545 degrees fahrenheit to 1615 degrees fahrenheit considering that i'm laying the sword on the bottom of the kiln means that whatever the kiln shows the sword will be approximately let's say 15 to 20 degrees lower temperature than the atmosphere of the kiln heat travels up not down silver melts at approximately uh 1700 degrees uh fahrenheit give or take 20 degrees that means them should be pretty safe in heat treating the sword at the given specs and if the silver starts melting i messed up the sword anyway so in this case the fine silver that i had inlaid in the piece is a good test for when to pull out the sword and start all over again because this is mosaic damascus there are higher chances of something going wrong as martensite starts forming so i have a set of tools prepared first of all instead of raw wood clamps i line my clamps with cardboard that conforms much better to the already almost fully ground sword shape after the sword cools down beyond 400 degrees in the clamps i already have a prepared oil bath that i immediately plunge the sword into while my kiln drops its temperature to the point where i can complete the rest of the tempering in the kiln watching the time it was critical for me knowing that my mosaic damascus will not have any problems and in order to do that i moved immediately to the temper which is what we call safety temper on a piece [Music] so [Music] so [Music] by now you the viewer have a fair question is this sword practical it is sharp it is from hardened steel and it's balanced so i can go to war with it or rather fight in a duel however that's only single-use kind of practical notion the tradition of ordinate weapons being given to kings popes bishops and lords is very extensive for example a full set of negroli armor would cost approximately three michelangelo statues at the time and a sword like this would probably be used to seal a contract for two kings to go to war against the third one so a sword like this buys me an entire army a practical sword buys me a sword in an extra five minutes on the battlefield after which i'm buried in the dirt so in terms of martial arts practice it is part of a higher martial art of directing armies to kill each other rather than participating down below [Music] [Applause] [Music] the general pommel shape on the sword is actually quite traditional for medieval european swords and it replicates the bishop's hat what better to choose is the top of your cathedral tower than the head of a bishop on a sword called the heretic besides the traditional general shape i introduced some new elements to it for example a slight asymmetry produced by the flame scroll shaped bezel [Music] [Music] in order to make the bezel i take fine silver and use a jeweler saw to cut out the general shape that i have in mind after which i texture the pieces pile them and solder them to create the actual final bezel [Music] [Music] to attach that bezel to the pommel i carve out a channel inside the pommel with a dovetail edge all the way around so as i said in the silver which is soft and chase it in the silver flows into the undercuts and when i change the surface of the steel it closes the piece over the silver the silver protrudes ever so slightly give it an impression as if it's soldered or glued on i generally don't like soldering uh materials like silver copper or gold to steel itself rather preferring a mechanical setting after the bezel is fully attached to the pommel it's time to set in the gem just like in the heretic sword from a couple years ago i choose the amethyst to crown the pommel except in this case instead of a cabochon i choose a faceted almond shape stone however nonetheless i choose to maintain artistic continuity funny thing is the amethyst right now is considered a semi-precious stone and you can find it in almost any souvenir shop but it was not always such in the 19th century the great deposits in brazil of amethyst were discovered and the amethyst stopped being a pressure stone however in the medieval time it was a very highly ranked precious stone with a slight side superstition of it supposedly preventing drunkenness although the anti-drunkenness effect was never intended for the sword however he is this bit of information nonetheless [Music] and after months of work and sleepless nights ladies and gentlemen i present to you the heretic [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so so and here it is now once again you the viewer will ask why no demo on this sword well this is sold to a client in england and the demo cutting fruit cutting pumpkins milk is actually very strenuous for expensive pieces and the reason is i could scratch it i could etch the damascus badly because of the acidity in the fruit and i can't take the risk of some of the stuff being trapped in the guard or somewhere else and the sword arriving to the end user all rusted up however is the most important part of the demo for this sword and that is a personal practical use that no other sword i would have made would have delivered and it's this this sword won the best sword in show in 2021 no amount of matte cutting would have given me the recognition by a jury of my peers as an excellent craftsman thank you for watching this video subscribe to that works and once in a while you will see pieces like this show off on the channel and thanks for watching the making of the heretic if you enjoyed this build as much as i did be sure to give this video a thumbs up be sure to tell us in the comments below what build you'd like to see this team build next and don't forget to subscribe to this channel that works

Channel: That Works

Views: 454,113

Rating: 4.968915 out of 5

Keywords: heretic, ilya alekseyev, bladeshow award, best sword, mosaic damascus, carved sword, engraved sword, blacksmithing, bladesmithing, how to, diy, best of youtube, hand made, that works, sword of the year, mastersmith

Id: J433f6Yrd0g

Length: 32min 0sec (1920 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021