The Samurai Challenge! Forging a 1000 layer Damascus steel KATANA

hey folks John here all take re Forge welcome back if it's your first time here welcome so what's going today I'm out here in the workshop and we're getting moving on the samurai challenge so there have been a few of these YouTube buildoff challenges you know we've done a booy knife challenge a fantasy challenge a chopper challenge it's a great honor to be invited to compete and I'm super excited about the project and the theme with this project is Samurai so uh that basically any Samurai Weaponry is fair game you know you could do a dagger a sword a pole arm or anything like that so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be making a katana I mean Kotana I don't actually know how to pronounce it you know one of you one of you weebs correct me in the comments first things first if you're looking for a traditional Katana build this ain't it I'm not going to be using tah Haan traditional Japanese Bloom steel because I don't have the time I don't have the skill uh we're just going to be sticking with what we know and making the sword out of Damascus because that's going to produce a functional and beautiful blade and I am going to kind of poke fun throughout the video and mispronounce things because there is no sword that is more romanticized in Western pop culture than the katana there is a very large and vocal cohort of people who will look you dead in the eye with a straight face and tell you that a katana is some kind of magic super sword that can chop through a tank but anyway let's get started I'm actually filming this after the fact because I forgot to put it in the first time but huge huge thanks to all the challenge sponsors and here is a Peak at the Finish sword if you want to see how I made it stick around as always first step with the Mascus we've gone ahead and cleaned up all our steel we have our 1084 and our 15 N20 that's what makes the pattern in Damascus steel is it's actually made of two different kinds of Steels and what I want to do for the pattern is something called ladder Damascus I just think that's going to look really good with kind of the long flowing curve of the blade to show you what I'm talking about you know here's a knife that I made some time ago using the same technique that one's about 200 layers and from my understanding the higher you go with the layer count the kind of more activity there's going to be in the blade so this one we're going to be aiming for a little over a th layers we're starting with 32 so we're going to forge weld that together draw it out cut it in half restack it and do that five times and that should get us where we need to go but the first thing we got to do is go ahead and weld all this stuff together and weld on our work pck so we can hold it with a pair of tongs nothing to it [Music] really so we got our villet tacked together with the welder before we bring it up to a nice white hot Forge welding heat we're just going to get it a little warm and then sprinkle on our flux we're just using borax here and what this does is kind of melts onto the surface of the steel it keeps oxygen out so our steel stays nice and clean for the forge weld once this is done we'll get it back in the F break things up and bring it up to a nice white hot Forge while the heat begin to go all righty B's nice and hot give it a good squish [Music] second weld here we go just trying to kind of consolidate my material [Music] now all right we got our Billet forged out so now it's time to go ahead and cut it in half and restack it to double the layer count first thing we got to do is grind one side flat so we got clean Welding Services and this is a great opportunity to take this new Surface grinder attachment I got for my 2 x72 for a spin housemade industrial the same folks who designed this grinder kit you know came out with this tool it's a pretty high-speed bit of kit it's got a magnetic Chuck and it slides back and forth so it's going to be a lot faster and take all the guess work out of making things flat so once our welding surfaces are nice and clean we've basically just done the same thing as before we've tacked the buet back together got our work Peg welded on we'll Forge weld This Together that'll give us 64 layers and we'll do that four more times and that'll get us a little over a th I'm going to kind of glance over this because it doesn't really get interesting until we actually go to make the ladder pattern while that build's cooling off in between Forge welds uh I'm going to go ahead and start working on the new sword quench tank I told myself before I made another sword I'd build an actual sword quenching tank you know I've been using that uh that tank ammo tube and it works but there's a slow leak uh you know they're actually not solid on the bottom whenever you get them and you have to kind of Jerry rig it and um over the past few years mine's just developed a slow leak and it's time to make a better one so before we go any further with the sword quench tank project I've gone ahead and poured it full of water to see how much quench all I'm going to need to buy and also to check if the welds are watertight which as you can see they are not so we're going to have to do a little bit of remedial action to that and uh we'll keep moving on account of my welds not being watertight I've brought it to somebody who actually knows what they're doing uh my good buddy Andrew of wnc metal works I'll link his Instagram down below if you want to give him a follow uh he's just getting started going into business for himself doing welding fabrication all kinds of cool stuff and uh he's a much better welder than me and he can actually do this so we're going to let him do his thing all right so all the forge welding took a couple of days but here we got a Billet that is approximately 1 th000 layers of pattern welded steel we got about 34 in of length it's an inch and 38 wide and about 3/8 of an inch thick and the next step is to go ahead and press in the pattern to make the ladder Damascus and to actually make the pattern we're going to be using our garard forging tool ladder Damascus dies I'll drop a link to his Instagram down below you know he's a buddy of mine excellent machinist he made these for me basically the idea with lad Damascus is you either press grooves into your Billet and then grind it flat or you grind grooves in and then Forge it flat either way the goal is essentially to bring all the wavy layers to the surface and create that ripple effect in the steel that we're looking for and if we over Forge the Billet here it's basically ruined so what I've done is taken a couple of pieces a quarter inch square to uses kiss blocks to keep from pressing this thing too thin and uh let's get moving so we got all our ridges pressed in once this bar is ground flat that's what's going to cut through all the layers and create the lad effect in the steel we're looking for hopefully with good sharp belts this won't take too long but it probably [Music] will so that actually didn't take too terribly long using good sharp belts if you're wondering why I didn't just use the surface grinder attachment I was using to face off the billets in between Forge welding it's just because it's not long enough it's only got a travel of about 18 in and this is just way too big so the next thing we're going to do I was hoping to have enough to just goes straight stock removal from here because any forging we do is going to distort the pattern but it's not quite long enough I want to try to pull a little bit more length out of it so we're going to go back to the power hammer kind of bring the width in we might have to actually Forge in the distal tape or the blade too to get the length we're looking for we also got the sword Forge pulled out so it'll be easy to get a good long consistent heat and uh let's get moving after moving the steel around a little bit we got just over 40 in of material to work with which uh that's good we can pretty much go straight stock removal from here so I'm going to let this cool and lay out my lines for what's going to be the tang and what's going to be the blade and then we'll go from there uh fun fact Katana I mean k Katona these things they were made specifically for each Warrior who used them and everything so the blade length was kind of based on how tall you were uh I'm 6'2 so between a 30 and a 32 in Blade uh would have been historically what they would have made for me if I was one of them uh so we've got about 30 in I think maybe 31 and then about 10 or so to make the Tang uh then once we've got the rough profile ground in we'll do What's called the sorai I mean s sword Sony Sor I don't know somebody tell me how it's pronounced in the uh comments but basically what that is is the curvature of the sword and this is kind of a matter of personal preference from the exhaustive 5 minutes of Googling I've done to figure out what it was so I want just kind of a gentle flowing curve so we're just going to kind of eyeball it another fun fact historically the curve of the sword happens during the hardening process when they put the clay on the back of the blade to differentially harden it that part cools U much much slower and it kind of pulls the thinner steel of the edge back but since this is Damascus and we're not doing that we're going to forge in the curve before the quench another to it really so I clean cleaned up one end of our Billet and just did a quick test edch to kind of give you a sneak peek at the pattern Pretty stinking cool once this is uh taken up the grits and Polished out it's going to be really really nice so I bought this book uh the art of the Japanese sword to kind of try to help me get my bearings before I got started on this project and there's some pretty good info in here you know about blade shapes and geometry and all that so I kind of have just been looking at it to kind of get some inspiration I think I like this shape the best so that's kind of something like I'm going for so I got my laid on on my Billet and we're going to go to the grinder and just kind of rough in the shape of the sword so profile of the sword is established next thing to do is go ahead and Forge in the Sor the curvature of the sword and like I said I'm just going to kind of eyeball this I don't have too much of a plan I'm just going to kind of curve it until I feel like it looks right and from there we're going to normalize the sword three times and go straight into our quench I've already got my quench tank posted up you know doing all the grinding after heat treat is going to kind of suck and take a long time but the thinner we make those edges the more likely we are to have warps or cracking or what have you during the hardening process so this is going to maximize our chances of success I've only got one of these billets and I'll have time to make another one so uh wish me look I'm pretty happy with the curvature of the sword so now just try to go through and make sure everything's straight before we do our normalizing and get it quench another the do it really next step is to go ahead and normalize the plate a few times before we quench it to do that we need a consistent even heat over the whole plate of about, 1500° or so and to get that I'm using a technique called painting the heat where I'm basically just passing the sword in and out of the forge nice and slow this is how you heat treat a blade that's longer than your Forge but uh once I get a heat I'm happy with I'll sit it in the vice uh facing up to cool off and let it cool in still air on its own you don't want to lay it flat on your Anvil or the floor or anything like that because if one side cools faster than the other you know it could end up warping on you during the Quench and you just want to avoid that if you can another two it really all right here we go boys wish me luck so that was a pretty ugly quench I really should have been holding the blade from the side and I did mean to do that but uh you know quenching a sword no matter how many times you do it it's always nerve-wracking and uh once I started going for the oil there was no turning back so it it just is what it is but let's pull it out of there and see how we did looks like we made it through the quench boys the sword is nice and straight as well you know that's the main reason I left it so thick before Heat Treating was I didn't want to deal with any warping or cracking or anything like that right now the blade is very brittle if I took it and smacked it on the Anvil it would break so the next thing we got to do is temper it basically what tempering does is it kind of relieves the stresses that quenching puts into the steel makes it a little bit softer a little bit tougher normally with small knives or whatever you'll just toss it in the oven at like 400 or 450 for however long depending on the intended use of the blade and how hard or soft you want the steel for the sword you know I can't fit this thing in my kitchen oven so we're going to be doing a hot oil bath so I've got my quench tank set up on a little turkey fry right here and we're going to put a thermo couple in there we're going to heat the oil up to about 400 450 or so and hold it there for about an hour hour and a half and that should give us a good strong blade it goes without saying obviously heating up a reservoir full of flammable liquid with an open flame in a Shop full of explosive gases is pretty dangerous but I mean just don't kick the thing over and you'll be okay and I got a fire extinguisher over here in case anything does go wrong and I'm going to stay here and babysit it the whole time so I'm pretty sure it'll be fine all right so once we got the oil up to Temp we started a timer for an hour and a half so the sword's good and tempered at this point one thing I do want to touch on you see how high the oil in the tank is um the oil expands quite a bit when it's heated and that's something you need to take into account if you're going to do something like this like building a sword quench tank and doing hot oil baths because when I got started there was over a foot of head space here and now there's just a few inches and if that boils over and catches fire you're going to be having a really really bad time so uh but anyway uh tomorrow morning we'll pull that guy out of there and we'll get to work grinding on it now you see how much lower the fluid level is now that the oil is cooled off so that's something you need to take into account if you're going to build one of these now that the sword's been through the Heat Treating process it's been harded and tempered we're ready to start grinding this is where we'll start establishing the blade geometry and it'll actually start to look like a sword instead of just a sword shaped bar of Steel because we heat treated this thing really thick we've got quite a ways to go luckily I just got a resupply of 36 grip belts in so that should make relatively quick work of it but we're still going to be in front of the grinder for quite a while we'll be starting doing the back bevel or spine of the sword which is called the mune or the M or something like that and the geometry that I want to go for is something like this one here on the far left I like this one the best so we'll get started on [Music] that we got the mun roughed in it's time to start worrying about the geometry of the blade what we got here are two different bevels which are called the shinogi and the G and the uh the medial Ridge that runs in between the two is called the Shino guy Joe or something like that uh so basically we have to keep that line even all the way up and down the curved surface of the blade you know it's an interesting geometry there's no Flats anywhere like you would see on some other swords and knives and things like that basically you've got your back bevel your medial bevel and your front bevel so it's going to be challenging keeping everything straight and in line and even as we go but uh we'll see what happens [Music] so here we are for the 2x 72 after just a few solid hours of work which is honestly way less than I thought it was going to take but with good sharp belts and the two horsepower sander made relatively quick work of it we didn't find any inclusions in the steel there's no cracks that happened during heat treating that I can see a quick sidebar whenever I got the chance to visit the met in New York City if you've never been it's totally worth checking out but they had a pretty extensive collection of Japanese historical swords and knives and things and a lot of them had you know visible inclusions in the surface and some of them even had like messed up holes drilled in the tang and things like that so U even the fabled master Japanese swordsmiths of old made mistakes you know we're all human and so so on all that being said I'm really really happy with the way this thing is coming along considering that I just ground this by hand and by eye I didn't use any jigs I didn't lay out any lines I just kind of went forward and let my hands tell me what to do you know all the lines are very crisp very straight the shinogi is almost perfectly even all the way up and down there's a few little ripples here and there but we're well within what hand sending is going to fix at this point um it's lightening up really good it's feeling good it's a teeny tiny bit front heavy but uh from what I understand Katana work kind is supposed to be like that they don't have anywhere near as much of a distal taper as you see on European swords it's more or less the same thickness all the way up and down and uh you know for its intended purpose you know the cutting ability of a katana is kind of the star of the show when it comes to the sword so like if you were a samurai who was cutting down peasants because they looked at you wrong or if you were a Japanese soldier at Nan King in 1938 cutting down Chinese civilians because they looked at you wrong don't worry about it though the Japanese government's going to deny it even happened and uh you'll never get in any trouble or anything like that but if you were one of those guys you know having that little forward heavy slicing capability would come in pretty handy so um swords coming along great I can't resist let's do a test etch and take a peek at the P so this is just after a quick one minute dip in the acid you know it's going to pop much much better once it's hand sanded and Polished out and all these little marks like that are going to be hand sanded out but already that is looking pretty stinking cool you know the camera really doesn't do it justice and you can really kind see the way the layers play with the light you know almost creates the illusion of movement that is a beautiful piece of Steel boys the first fitting we got to make for the sword is the hotac I mean habac this thing anyway it's um a collar that kind of acts as the rasso on a Japanese sword so we have to make a piece out of copper and uh basically fit it to the Tang of the sword and then solder in another little piece of copper so it kind of brings it all together I've never soldered anything before in my life so hopefully this all works out first thing we got to anneal the piece of copper we want to use to make the Habachi uh copper is kind of the opposite of Steel you know whenever you heat it up and quench it rather than Harden it actually softens and that's what we're trying to accomplish here and now it should be real easy to work by hand so I've made two little marks that roughly match the thickness of the sword so that's going to end up being the back of the Habachi and these bits on either side are going to be kind of forged out into loes so they're thinner than the back and it'll all be bent around and then soldered together you get the [Music] [Applause] idea so you see what we got going uh we have the lugs forged down to approximately half the thickness of the parent bar next thing is to drive this down with a punch and uh start forming this thing around and then forming it to the Tang of the sword another two really all right so my first tobaki went in the trash uh we learned a lot about how to not solder so this year's take two I'm not going to sit here and film every attempt because I don't know how long this is going to take luckily we got plenty of copper so if we got to remake this thing a thousand times we can do it but uh let's keep moving and we'll come back when it's done so that really sucked uh I've been chasing my tail with this thing for 2 days now this is the sixth habaki I've made and it's the first one that's actually you know kind of held together the soldering job looks pretty awful but it's in one piece and at that point I'm just going to have to take that and run with it because I got to keep moving on the sword I don't have time to keep chasing my tail if I finish the build then I have time to Circle back and make a new one I will cuz something that's kind of cool about the uh the katana it's not held together with any glue or anything like that U it's it's just held together with a pin so you can take the sword apart pretty easily and replace pieces so if I have time to make a new Habachi I will but this one's functional and that's just U you know a win we're just going to have to take and run with I'm not even going to show me struggling with making this thing because it made me look like a straight up if you want to know how to make a Habachi watch literally any other one of the channels who are participating in this Challenge and chances are they're going to be better at it than I am but anyway let's keep moving now that we got a functional habac on the sword next thing we got to start worrying about is this piece right right here I don't think it actually has a name I think it's just called the circle uh and on either side of the circle there is uh little spacers that are called seos so we're just going to make those out of some thin sheet metal right quick and then we'll start going after this thing all right so the spacers are done all we did to finish them was we uh ran them through the forge you know got them hot and then dumped them in some boiled linseed oil to get a nice soft black so now it's time to get to work on the subba the the guard you know the circle shaped deal so what I've done I've cut out a square of this pretty masculine piece of quarter inch plate found the center drilled a few holes and we're just going to file out the slot for the tank like we've been doing you know another two really the subba of the katana is often decorated sometimes very elaborately and I would like to at least do some basic file work to the edges we'll see how much time I have when I'm done we're going to circle back to this after we get all the structural parts of the sword done and you know I have a little more time to play with so the next thing we're going to go ahead and do is start making the handle I got some popler I've already traced out the line of the tang and we're just going to go through and cut that out until it fits onto the sword U I'm not much of a woodworker the only chisels I have are these crappy you know Hazard front chisels that I haven't used in some years so we'll sharpen them up and see what we can do so we got the slots for the tank carved out uh the sword fits in there real real nice so the next step is to go ahead and glue the two halves of the handle together used way too much glue and made a huge mess but I mean if that's the worst thing that goes wrong with the rest of this project I'd say we did pretty good boys so it's the next day the two halves of our handle block are glued up real nice uh there's a little bit of slop to it so the next thing we're going to do is a little knife maker trick called bedding the Tang so basically we're just going to mix up some epoxy and then pour it into our Tang slot and then we'll take the Tang of the sword as well as the bottom of the uh the bolster or what have you and basically anything we don't want to stick we're going to give a nice generous coating of Vaseline and what'll happen is the epoxy will dry and essentially create a negative of the Tang on the inside so it's going to fit nice and solid there will be no wiggle no slop and the handle will go on and off the same way each time um you know it's it's a trick that blad Smiths use for making hidden Tang knives so it's a neat little thing to know all right boys we had a bit of a time last night uh apparently I didn't do a very good job betting the Tang whenever I put the Vaseline on I must not have covered it completely cuz the Tang actually stuck in there pretty badly and I had to beat it with a hammer to get it off and I ruined the sepa and broke the Habachi and had to make new ones but it's on there it's fitting nice and tight it's a little bit out of Center but we got plenty of material there to work with so it's not a big deal let's make a [Music] handle so we got the wooden core the handle shaped out it's looking good it's feeling good you know the sword indexes really really well so the next step is to go ahead and get some Stingray leather on this guy this here is our stingray skin I've had it soaking in warm water overnight so it's nice and pliable we'll cut out the piece we need wrap it around the handle tie it on there with some rubber bands and then let it dry so it forms to the handle I've never actually wrapped a sword handle before so you know wish me luck once the ray skin is dry we'll go through and cut off the excess I gave myself a lot of extra material because I'm not sure exactly how much this is going to shrink as it dries out but once it's dry it'll hold that shape so we'll go through trim off the excess make sure the seam is going to be on this side because that's going to be completely covered by the EO wrap like I said I've never wrapped a sword handle before so I'm sure the seam isn't going to come out perfect and that'll kind of hide any imperfections but uh I'm going to leave this till tomorrow and let's get to work hand sand in the blade obviously this is going to take a while uh we're starting off with ad0 grit to remove any imperfections from grinding the triac belts do a pretty good job of getting all the Deep gouges out though so we don't have a whole whole lot of work to do here but we'll start with 80 grid and then we'll get it up to 600 you know another to it really all right so the stingray skin is glued onto the wooden core of the hand all that's drying inside we've gone ahead and finish sanded the blade it sanded up to 800 G on both sides we've gone ahead and Polished out the Habachi so uh let's see if we can make a Scabbard for this thing all right so we got the channel for the sword carved out of the uh the wooden thing that holds the sword I got it Glu up got a whole slew of clamps on in the Vise the sword fits in there Pretty stinking good actually the seal up here around the Habachi is nice and tight you know not a whole lot of play in it at all so hopefully once that's dry we can um we can shape it out into something that looks nice and feels nice now making this I was quickly reminded why I became a blacksmith and still have a wood worker you know my chisel work on the inside of this looks pretty stinking terrible and there were more than a few spots where I probably gouged a little too deep so hopefully we can shape this thing out without grinding through it and having to start [Music] over after getting the sa finished sand it to where I like it I went ahead and made the kirata I believe it's called Uh I forgot to finish sand it before I glued it on so we'll just have to do that later it's not that big a deal I just used the same popler that the scabbard's made out of but while that's drying we're going to get to work on the subba I've been racking my brain trying to decide how it was I wanted to decorate the uh Circle guard thing uh and what I've come up with rather than do it all out of one piece and carve out a bunch of slots and spend forever Drilling and filing we're going to fabricate this thing so I made this little jig out of a piece of scrap pipe I had laying around we're going to bend some quarter in round around that we're going to remove all the material except for this little bit that fits onto the Tang of the so sword and then we'll make a bunch of these little curved Spokes and weld all that together and I think that's going to look really really cool you see what we got going um we got the inner piece we got the outer ring made and we're starting to make these little spokes I tried a few different ways to kind of curve them and make them look you know a little more dramatic but there's just not enough space there for any amount of curve to really really be super visible so we're just going to make straight Spokes and try to get as many in there as we can another to it really this thing may look like straight Hammer dog crap right now but uh you know once we show it some love flatten it out grind off all the welds needle file out all the crap between the spokes and then blacken it in the Forge I think it's going to look right snazzy so here's the subba you know all done it's far from perfect but uh if you gave me the choice between drinking my entire slack tub and filing out another one of these I'm going to drink the select tub so it's just going to have to be okay let's keep moving and of course you know it's pretty out of Center uh it doesn't got to be perfect but it's got to be better than that uh so unfortunately we are going to have to start over on that piece I'm going to circle back to that once all the rest of the sword is done just so I can you know really give it my full attention what happened I think uh the center punch Mark I started when I found the center of the Billet I used to make the subba I used that I kind of matched that up with the apex of the blade not taking into account that one bevel is much longer than the other and that's what's LED it to be like this so that's a real rookie mistake on my part and something I should have thought about but anyway uh like I said we'll Circle back to that let's keep moving before we Circle back to making a new subba I want to go ahead and completely finish the rest of the sword handle so that that once that's done the sword's ready to put together uh the next things we need to make are the fuchi and the kashida I'm running out of ideas for how to creatively mispronounce things so we're just going to ditch that going forward you know it was fun while it lasted but uh the top piece the fui is essentially a collar that goes around the top of the handle blad is going to go through here so we've gone ahead and formed up a collar out of sheet metal tacked on another piece we'll grind this out till they match and then we got to drill and file it out so the blade sits through here the process on the bottom and is pretty similar and I'm not sure if I'm going to do it different yet cuz I think a little bit of doming might look cool on it but um let's just go for it and see what happens boys we got the fui done I went with the same uh sort of black oxide finish I've been doing on the other steel fittings now we got to make the kashida you can kind of see you know how the sword's going to come together now so slowly but sure all right boys yesterday was kind of a fail as far as shop time goes you know we found out we're going to need to remake the subba we spent half the day finishing my plan for doing the Kida out of two pieces is just not going to work uh we're going to need to make a special top and bottom die set to pull that out of one piece and I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to do that so while I gather my thoughts I'm going to keep moving on the SAA the last piece we need to make for it is the collar that goes up here it's called the koi Gucci I believe basically it's a collar that's kind of recessed onto the s that matches you know the hole in on the front and everything it's made out of a tougher material usually like horn or copper and its function is to help keep the sa together as well as protect the hand of the uh the wielder on a draw cut I don't have any horn and I don't want to deal with making it out of copper so we're going to be using my Carta you know should do the job I got my lines marked out I figured I'd take this Jeweler saw that I bought for this project but I haven't used yet for a spin so I just drilled a starter hole threaded the blade through and now we're just going to go through and Pierce it out looks like it's actually working pretty good you know I thought this would be really slow going but of my carda is not super difficult to cut so it's making pretty quick work of it good thing I bought like 200 of these blades because they break really really easily turns out using that Jeweler saw actually really sucks so I drilled a bunch of holes and then went at it with my hidden Tang handle brooch and then we'll just file that out nice and clean after a couple hours of filing we got the koi Gucci done to attach it to the SAA I just flatten both surfaces and then roughed them up and super glued it on there which isn't the traditional way to do it but it's plenty strong and it'll work for what we need it for so the next thing is to go ahead and trim it down until it matches the shape of the SAA finish sand everything make it all nice and smooth and then we'll start painting and lacquering [Applause] it so now it's time to go ahead and make the tooling that we need to make the uh cida so what I got here I've dug through my scrap pile and I found this I think it's a piece of forklift T we're going to make the bottom suage out of that and we need to make two top Sages is one that we're going to use to make the bottom suage itself that's going to be slightly larger than the finished Dimensions because we have to account for the 16 gauge sheet metal that's going to go between the Finish die and the bottom die and then we'll make the bottom die out of whatever's left of this and hopefully it works the idea is though once it's all said and done we should have an impression here and we should be able to lay our sheet metal here and drive that top Di and make the whole thing out of one piece so let's see what happens base piece chucked up in the Press we got the big drip and we're just going to get that baby [Music] started a little bit of charcoal powder keep from get stuck now do it really our bottom sued is a little bit out of Center but you know it'll be okay so now the idea I think is we should be able to take this top Dy that's roughly the same dimensions as our handle put a piece of sheet metal right here and press it into that to make the piece we need so let's heat up some steel and see if it [Music] works after quite a bit of trial and error with this thing mostly error I kept having the problem of it shearing through the piece whenever I got close to the bottom so I brought it over here to the Anvil and started doing it by hand and that seemed to work a lot better it does seem like our suage isn't quite deep enough for me to pull this whole thing out of one piece I could make a new one or I could take what I got and run with it and I think that's what I'm going to do because what we can do is we can cut that off and then make a collar like we did with the fuchi and uh you know it's still not exactly what we wanted but it's a lot better than what we had now we're going to take it and go boys all right so after Chasing our tail on the khaa for two days you know here is what we got you know far from perfect uh but it's serviceable it'll do the job and I can't afford to keep chasing my tail on this one piece of the sword when there's still so much that has to happen so let's get it on the handle now that that horrific ordeal of Terror is over next pieces we need to make are the minuki and what these are are little decorative ornaments that go on either side of the handle and are also supposed to help you index grip and I think just some simple copper leaves are going to look really nice chunk of copper will Forge this out to a nice thin bar then we'll use a texture tool under the Press here's what I came up with for the minuki uh I just textured that whole bar basically and then cut out the pieces I need Dom them out on a spoon sede and then buffed them up I was worried they might seem kind of basic because minuki can often be very very elaborate but I think they came out really really stinking nice so let's keep moving the final step uh before we can do the EO wrap is to drill and file out a slide in the ca so that when we're done wrapping we can tie off the end of the cord a couple things before we get moving on the EO wrap uh first and foremost I'm not going to be using any HEI gami which the little paper spacers that you see people put between the ray skin and the EO cord just because I've been practicing with this all day and my hands are killing me and it's uh it just makes it a little bit too unwieldy for me to put together at my current skill level and you know some people say it's necessary some people say it's not necessary and at this point you know this Project's been fighting me every step of the way and I'm kind of just ready to see it done which brings me to my next Point uh I'm going to be using super glue to help keep everything tighten together as I go which I know is cheating so you master swordsmiths let me have it in the comments so I'm just slowly working my way down the handle trying to keep everything tight and lined up as I go if you actually want to learn how to wrap a katana handle this is not the video for you because I have no stinking idea what I'm doing but like I said I'm just trying to keep everything pulled tight and lined up and at the um you know Apex of each row I'm just putting a little beat of super glue it's got a 10c set time so I'm going to sit here and hold it you know till it is solid and then I'll turn it over and keep moving so um we just made our way past the first minuki and you know we'll just keep going all right fellas we got the EO wrapped done for the knot on the bottom that secures it I was having a hard time following all the diagrams I found online so I just kind of winged it and put it together in a way that I knew it wasn't going to come apart cut off the excess and then hit it with some more superglue so it's on there good U also couldn't resist doing a mockup assembly of the sword uh last big hurdle we got to cross over is remaking this subba and my plan for remaking the subba a few people have mentioned that you could peen copper into this and then refile out the slot on apparently that's not too uncommon on antique Japanese swords but the more and more I look at this the less and less happy I am with it and I feel like I could do better so we're just going to start with a piece that's a little bit more oversized we'll drill and file out the slot and then measure from where the sword actually sits to get it good and centered all right so we got the new subba fitted on and shaped up and everything that's a million times better than it was I'm so glad I redid this but uh anyway let's decorate this sucker basically my plan for going after the new subba is I drilled 1/ Quin holes around the perimeter I drilled 8 in holes right close to the hole for the Tang where there'll be covered up by the sepa and I'm going through with my Dremel with a cutof wheel and removing the excess and uh I don't know why I didn't think of this because this is way easier and it's going to look a million times better you know I don't use my dremels very often I kind of forget I have them but uh they're pretty great for tasks like this so this was a stupid idea this is the way to go so after Drilling and cutting and filing the subba and getting it all done and everything um I've just ran it through the forge a few times and then hit it with some beeswax to Blacken it I'm really glad I remade this piece this looks a million times better so you know lesson learned but let's keep moving I went ahead and put my touch mark on the Tang uh from what I understand traditionally Japanese swords are signed on the Tang uh kind of hard because there's no flat spot anywhere you know I had a difficult time getting that stamp but now comes the good part uh we got the blade cleaned degased let's get it in the acid and check out the pattern the camera really doesn't do it justice you know I tried to find some good indirect sunlight um you know out here outside but it's really really amazing how the uh the pattern catches the light and kind of creates the illusion of movement that's a real thing of beauty boys um you know this is the most rewarding part of pattern welding is my opinion is uh you know the Acid Bath really bringing the steel to light life last step before the sword is fully functional is to drill through the handle and tang and install the Maki pin that's actually going to hold the whole thing together so I'm just starting with a small drill bit and I'm going to go really slow let the bit do the work Don't Force It and to make our Mugi pin we got a piece of a chopstick another to it really all right we got our Mugi pin in it sits a little bit more proud than I would have liked it to I was hoping it would be closer to flush but it's beneath the level of the EO wrap it's out of the way of your hand and at this point getting it out would be a huge pain so I'm going to call that good so what I got here is what's called a tatami mat these are what martial artists use to test their swords on I've had it soaking uh in water for about a day and a half now it's pretty crazy how much these things actually harden up you know when you get them they feel like a bundle of dry straw but once they're uh soaked they feel almost like a tree branch but supposedly this is supposed to mimic the consistency of a human arm or leg and it's something that I've read and been told that you absolutely have to have training to be able to cut one with a sword or you're just not going to be able to and uh I have zero training but I do have a sword and 15 beers in my stomach so let's see what happens all right no what I'm doing oh bab cool let's try an underhand cut wow man dude that is awesome all right let's TRW one-handed sweet yeah here she is all done my first ever Katana I had a really great time with this project I learned a lot tried a lot of new things made a lot of mistakes but I feel like it really broaden my horizons as a maker and you know even though I did kind of clown on internet anime weeb called throughout some of the video uh making this sword has given me such a new appreciation for the skill and Artistry that actually goes into making these swords and you know even though someone like Ilia from that works would probably look at this and tell me it's a piece of crap uh especially for my first one I'm really really proud of this thing and I already can't wait to make another one so this baby right here is my entry for the samurai challenge big thanks to Dennis tyell for organizing and spearheading the challenge it's always a great honor to be invited there will be links down below to uh all the participating channels and there's some dude's doing some pretty cool stuff for this so be sure to check out the videos there will also be a link to a Google doc where you can vote for your favorite one but anyway thanks for watching like share subscribe All That Jazz I hope you enjoyed the video uh if you want to stay up to date with the day-to-day going on here at the shop Instagram is the best place that's where I'm the most active and as always we're sponsored by lazy K knife Supply so there's some discount codes in the description if you're looking to get your hands on some topshelf handle material but that ain't quite all I got for you so don't go just yet if you've ever wondered about the meaning behind my touch Mark you know the Roman numeral 3 with the jnn on either side my full name is John Howard Norwood III My Father John Howard Norwood the second who a lot of you have met at blade show and hung out with in past years uh well this past July after fighting a long battle with some really aggressive cancer he passed away so what I want to do with this sword is a charity build in his honor and I want to donate all the proceeds to the American Cancer Society and his name so same rules as every other charity build I've done slots are 10 bucks buy as many as you want you buy two your name goes on the list twice this and that and the other um and the winner will be drawn at random on November 30th 2023 that would have been his 68th birthday uh I'd really like to say more but I don't want to lose my composure and if I sit here and start going off about what a great guy he was and everything I'll just I'll just be here talking all day and ain't none of us got time for that so if you want to win the sword for 10 bucks and uh you know help raise money for a good cause this is a chance to do it that's all I got for you and y'all take care

Channel: Old Hickory Forge

Views: 272,880

Keywords:

Id: 4lnYNspWO1g

Length: 43min 33sec (2613 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 14 2023