Unveiling My 53k Layered Damascus Steel Sword

I'm making one of the most epic swords of my life and I'm inviting you to be a part of the journey you get one bad weld in this entire giant buet we just ruin the whole thing wa easy easy wa look at that wow look at that pattern it is day eight of working on the Griffin sword and you might see that I'm all dressed up in my heavy car heart coat because today it is snowing out we don't get very much snow here in jery but it poured down snow this morning in fact it's still snowing really hard and we actually need to go out there get the Billet out of the forge cuz I let it cool down slowly overnight need to get it out and rough Grind All That scale off outside in the snow and cold the next forging session when I Forge W these tiles together it'll actually be time to forge out the blad so we're almost done making the Damascus for this sword Cy break let's take a Treck into the great unknown whoa oh man it's white out you put my forging glasses on because of how bright it is out here man jeez it is so bright I'm not used to snow it does not snow very much in Missouri we might get a whole year where we don't get a snow this deep it's probably like four or five inches and yeah sometimes we'll get like two snows like this in a year sometimes it'll be 3 years before we get one this deep so white probably won't catch the yard on fire today probably I need to turn off this hose before I forget I think it was on whoa these shoes are anti-slip but more like for grease not for Harsh weather all right you got to knock the scale off this Billet here we go I'm I'm curious to see what the Sparks will do to the snow over there uh apparently the Sparks oh there's a little bit of gray right there I guess oh Billet warming up let me see if I can launch a snowball at Josh oh I should have gave my choose a Fresh coat of leather sealer before today kept them from getting all wet but I didn't so they're all wet I got the handle cut off the Billet and I also ran it over the 2 x72 a little bit just to flatten it enough to get it on the surface grinder and that's what I'm going to do next I'm going to use my 1958 Benton Harbor Michigan made koville surface grinder this thing is like 2500 lb of goodness we've got an electromagnetic Chuck on here I can pop that Billet on there it's not completely flat but I think it's flat enough see I can just freely move it well watch when I turn this magnet on Boop it's on that is solid on there not coming off I'm going to get this turned on and start surfacing the Billet on both sides I think I'll be surface grinding for 15 to 30 minutes depending on how much material I have to remove and how flat my Billet is now if I have a little bad spot let's say there's some scale shoved in the Billet somewhere I am not going to grind the entire surface down in order to get rid of that what we'll end up doing is getting the majority of the Billet cleaned up and then later after the tiles are cut up if I have one that has an extra deep spot we grind it there but I don't want to lose a lot of material to grind the entire Billet down just for like one bad spot definitely don't want to do that to dress the surface grinding wheel I'm actually using something that probably isn't quite the right tool but I found it works amazingly well I'm using a dressing tool that's actually made for a bench grinder but the reason I keep coming back to this dresser is because it seems to leave the wheel in a serated state if you have any experience with dressing a surface grinder wheel in order to make it cut aggressively using something that's more surface grinder approved instead of this kind of hiil hobo way I'm doing it here I've tried a bunch of different things in the past and nothing's worked nearly as good as this but I'd love to hear if there is something that's more surface grinder approved that will get me the same or better results I finished surface grinding the Billet it took me about 15 or 20 minutes I got most of it cleaned up there's a little bit that we'll have to clean up later on the Belt grinder once these is once these are cut up into tiles we're going to cut it up into 14 tiles to make the sword out of what this is going to do is it's going to reveal the pattern right now this Mosaic bar has this super cool Mosaic pattern that we created but it's just on the end of the bar if you actually etched the sides of the bar and looked at the pattern on the sides and the edges it would just be a bunch of straight lines not very interesting at all compared to how cool the Mosaic is so when we cut this entire build up into these tiles we're going to flip the tiles around in a certain way to make it so that pattern you see on the end of the bar will become the pattern that you see on the sides of the blade it's kind of like a super cool magic trick to really reveal that Mosaic pattern I'm going to have over to the band saw and start cutting this is going to be a whole lot of cutting for for the banda I mean a whole lot we got 14 of these tiles to cut through this bullet's 2 and 1/4 in wide and an inch and8 thick that's a lot of Steel to [Music] cut I'm cutting up all these tiles on a 35° angle played around with quite a few different angles and that's my uh my favorite angle to do the tile welded mosaics [Applause] on I got all 14 of the tiles cut up on the band saw that took a while also as the Billet started to get really short I ca glued it to a 2x4 in order to keep holding it out there further and further next thing I need to do is get rid of this little bur on here and flatten one side of these the side that the saw just cut through that way we can put them on the surface grinder and I'm going to surface grind uh most of them down get them all to about the same thickness I'm not going to make them all perfect I just want them close they should be pretty close already though cuz I was careful to follow my lines on the band saw and I'm going to use this 2x 72 with a 36 grip belt right here and now it is surface grinder time once again I don't know if they all fit in here uh length ways might be too long 14 yeah I don't think they will they don't all fit on there left with two it wasn't until I got these tiles all cut up on the band saw that I had the idea that maybe I should check the exceler sword build and see how many tiles I had for that well I counted them and there was actually 16 tiles for the Excel Seer build and I only have 14 for this I really hope I have enough material for this sword if I run short on material this is going to be a disaster I I have to make sure this blade comes out at least 38 in long and I need plenty of material for the Tang too hopefully two tiles less isn't going to be an issue but I'm starting to get a little bit worried [Music] here I'm done surface grinding the pieces I've got them all down to mostly the same height there's still a few that are a little bit shter but at least we've equaled them out a little bit just removed a tiny bit of material from some of them that were a little bit longer next thing you need to do is take them over to a 120 grit belt and we're going to grind these angled surfaces these angled little surfaces here are going to be what makes together when we take two of these tiles if I can get that off there these angled surfaces are going to forge weld to each other just like this now if I lay the buet out like this this is how it used to be so these angled surfaces that I'm I'm about to grind on and clean up these are what we first surface ground clean there are a couple places where there's some scale or something left because I didn't want to waste more material than I had to and grind the whole Billet down so in those places now will be the time where I get rid of that scale and clean these all up cuz we're going to have these as the mating surfaces and we want them to be perfectly clean as I was grinding this surface clean I noticed if the light hits it just right in the middle I almost feel like I see something it might be some leftover uh weld that I didn't grind out you know a little of that uh the tig Rod or the MIG welder I'm not really sure though it's so fine it's probably not a problem but I thought just to be safe I would do a little Ferro chloride dip real quick and uh hopefully that would reveal any issues so that's 120 grit finish dip it in a little feret chloride hopefully it's not going to be a big deal here's what I was talking about right in the middle of the Billet there's just this little this little part that's just faded a different color ever so slightly I actually do believe that that's a little bit of residual weld right there but if I look at the uh the surface of the Billet this is what we're going to see on the sides of the knife right there is where that weld would be if that really is weld it's so shallow that you can't even see it from looking at it this direction so I don't think I'm going to worry about it at all now if I flipped this over and I saw a big old round spot of weld there then then something would have to be addressed you'd have to like grind this surface down but since I can't see it there I'm not going to worry about it I'm trying to leave a nice 120 grit finish on these tiles where they're going to forge well together so I'm removing the surface grinder finish that's currently on here and some of the tiles have a little bit of scale and stuff on there in a couple places and I'm making sure to get all that down to clean metal too uh uh uh turns out that weld left in the Billet wasn't settling right with me there was some little impurities where the weld met up with the Damascus Billet so I decided to go ahead and grind those out I had to take it back to 50 grit and now the angles might be messed up a little bit and everything I hope that all doesn't lead to compounding problems I think that got left in there because I had a big gap and I was laying TIG Rod over it the reason I had a big gap was because I didn't Square my bar up properly before I forway it that last time so it was just like this compounding problem I did grind the welds out but obviously I didn't grind deep enough with that one and I left it in there so anyway I grounded all that out there's no weld left in there now but I did grind away some of the Damascus pattern with 50 grit in order to get rid of that and I need to bring them back up to 150 grit but it is the of the day and I can go no further on that for [Music] now it's Day N it's Day N I've got all the pieces cleaned up ready to go but before we start putting all these together we need a few more we need some pieces for the Tang I have enough Mosaic here for the blade I hope hope but I need more pieces for the Tang the Tang doesn't need to be the same pretty pattern so I could either use just like some 1080 steel but I don't have any really massive size and I don't really want to forge weld some together so I've decided to actually take this scrap piece of Mosaic from another project who knows how many years ago that's been laying around and we're going to cut this up into a couple of more tiles this piece is almost the same width as the other buet it's slightly skinnier but it's close enough we're going to cut this up into like three more tiles and use this as the sacrificial Tang materal material so we're not using up the good Mosaic uh for the [Applause] Tang I got the three pieces for the Tang prepared I've also laid out the whole Billet here so we can see how big it is cuz I need to cut some sheet metal we're going to put sheet metal on the both sides of the uh Billet so I need two strips about 24 1/2 in long and there's almost no numbers left on my ruler there we probably go one two three maybe 3 in [Music] wide one and now it is time to reveal Sheet Metal's number one mortal enemy the Nibbler the destroyer of sheets of metal [Music] everywhere e you get one bad weld in this entire giant Billet would just ruin the whole thing you know if one of these tiles doesn't want to weld up properly to another one they could all be good if that one is messed up that would be it I want to show you exactly why I cut up this Billet into tiles and that main reason is so we can see the Damascus pattern on the sides of the sword cuz right now the edges of this bar just have straight lines running down them if you etch the Damascus it's all just straight lines but on the end of the bar is a really cool Mosaic Damascus pattern so just to illustrate how we're going to transfer that pattern to the sides of the sword I went ahead and Drew little little explosion pictures on the ends of each one of these tiles and that'll illustrate our pretty Mosaic pattern that we want across the sides of the blade so we're going to take this entire Mosaic Billet and we're going to flip it all over just like this and when we put these tiles together because they're cut on an angle that'll give a weld surface for the two pieces to be able to made up and Forge weld together on that angled surface when we press this down in the hydraulic press since there's a little bit of an angle there the pieces will press onto each other and they'll make that a really strong Forge weld if these pieces weren't cut on an angle we would have a seam that's just straight up and down it would be much more difficult to get that to forge weld together if we take this whole Billet and lay it out you can see how it'll transfer that pattern that's on the end of the bar to now becoming the sides of the blade when we Forge weld this entire buildup like this we'll have that repeating Mosaic pattern pattern all the way down the sides of the sword blade on both sides instead of it just being straight lines got all the tiles ready to go got our sheet metal ready to go I'm going to clamp a couple pieces down to the sheet metal at a time tack weld them in place once I get all the tiles tacked down to the sheet metal I'll weld the other piece on and then seal all the seams up so it'll be able to do nice clean zero atmosphere Forge welding on this I used to use the TIG welder to tack the tiles down to the sheet metal and then seal everything up with the TIG welder but these days I find it much quicker to just go ahead and use the MIG welder to tack the pieces down and then seal it all up and the benefit of the MIG welder is it's going to add a lot of filler material onto the edge of the pieces which will add strength to the entire Billet giving it a little bit more Integrity for when I put it in and out of the forge just to make sure nothing falls apart having all that MIG welder wire on the edge of the Billet isn't going to be a problem because after we get this Billet Forge welded and drawn out a little bit I'll grind all that material away so it doesn't end up in the final Damascus [Music] sword it's time to get a handle on the situation that's as far as I'm going on that Billet today it's ready to go in the Forge and get that thing Forge welded together get it drawn out into an actual sword blade but right now I've got to go voice over part two of the YouTube Griffin video it's day 11 of working on the Griffin sword we didn't video day 10 because I pretty much spent the whole day staring at the sketch staring at metal pieces staring at the sketch and then doing some grinding so what I actually did on day 10 of working on the Griffin sword besides staring staring at metal and sketches were to make these two patterns this pattern right here is a half swword pattern so this represents half of the sword blade and some of the tang and then this one is the full sword blade I need this for when we Forge out the Mosaic pattern to be able to make sure that I Forge the blade long enough make sure that it's got the right taper and everything on it this is going to be so handy when it comes to actually forging out the blade so that's why I wanted to go ahead and stop and make those patterns and didn't video it because it was involving just a lot of me staring at things today it is finally time to get that Mosaic Billet in the Forge get all the tiles Forge welded together into one piece and then start drawing them out into our actual sword blade I hope to get the blade forged out and uh get the taper done on and everything on it and get the blade ready for grinding by the end of the day that's the Hope also I really hope all those tiles Forge well together properly one messed up Forge we on one of those tiles somewhere and the whole blade will be ruined it doesn't matter if all the the other welds come out perfect if one of them doesn't then it's pretty much scrap I think the forge could actually handle heating up this entire buet at once but I don't think I want to do that I don't think there'd be enough time to try to get uh the entire Billet Forge welded together all in one heat so I think I'm going to kind of focus on half of the buet at a time when it comes to getting these Forge welded tiles Forge welded together one of the reasons I like using sheet metal with my tile Mosa billets is because it adds more structure to the Billet especially with a Billet this long for the sword it gives a lot of structural support to the Billet as I'm taking it in and out of the forge having the sheet metal add that structural Integrity isn't really important when the billets cold but when you heat that Billet up and it's really long and there's a lot of weight everything starts to want to Sag and move on you having the sheet metal there is sealing the Billet off and adding that little bit of structure and don't worry about the sheet metal at all this is only 32,000 thick by time I'm done forging this sword out over multiple multiple Heats all that sheet metal is going to end up falling off as scale or at least most of it will and then the rest of it will get surface ground off once I go to clean up the sword later on at this point in the Damascus making process I have to be very careful the Billet is much thinner and longer than it was in previous stages of making the Damascus so that means it could be very easy for me to overheat the steel and actually melt my Billet in half in the Forge I want my Billet to be in the range of 2,200 to maybe 2,300 de F when I'm Forge welding if I go another 1 or 200° over that 2300 then the Billet could melt in half cuz that's right around the melting temperature of the carbon steel I'm using so I got to be very careful not to get it too hot oh yeah we're getting there that actually looks like a lot of metal still when I look at it next to this wow that's tapered a lot yeah tapered too much is it too skinny out here nah yeah I don't know have to Reed reconsider my entire sword design I really don't mind babying this a bunch if it means getting those well it's really [Music] good got these modified sword tongs from last time I was doing a sword yeah those lock into place really nice cuz I made those big old Jaws for him I left that little chunk on there to help me kind of identify the Tang end but the only thing is whether or not I identified it correctly when I was welding all this together or not or if I accidentally messed up back then try to get this whole bar down to about 38 of an inch [Music] there's something very important I want to talk to you about when you're forging out your blades make sure you keep them nice and straight here's a good example of what a very straight blade looks like this one I couldn't be more proud of how straight I've kept this blade since I'm keeping it so straight it'll make uh all the process later easier if you don't keep your blades at least as straight as this one which is perfectly straight by the way then uh you're going to run into serious serious problems you might have to scrap your entire project keep your blades straight hey it's long enough we're done stock removal the rest well the TU St stub on for the Tang except the the good pattern doesn't start to about right here get off my knee oh yeah now we're now we're getting nice and straight you haven't seen nothing about how straight things can be yet I'm really thinking I maybe forged it a little thinner than I needed to because we still have to taper it uh yeah probably me probably meant I could have left it a little thicker then I've waited as long as possible to grind these Mig welds off the edges so I could make multiple passes drawing the Billet out stretching it without having to worry about any of the Little Corners tearing open the Billet can lose too much heat and it can put a lot of stress right on those tile welds and you can get the very very little corner kind of tear open on you or something now I'm not sure the sheet metal is gone enough for us to be able to see the pattern there but I don't want to grind off more than I need to either this wasn't supposed to look good for the camera this is just supposed to look good enough for me to be able to make some marks and make sure that I'm in the right spot I've laid myself out a line right where the Tang material and the sword blade material starts I can see that transition right here I'm going to make myself a little Notch maybe with the angle grinder on the edges just so I'll be able to always identify where that spot is where the blade starts then I'm going to eat some lunch and after that we're going to put this back in the Forge and begin forging in some of the blade taper for lunches 2/3 of the time either my mom or my sister will bless us with some delicious food some of the things we've eaten in the past are beef stew roast beef Moroccan chicken enchilada shepherd's pie soui steak Pizza soup chili tacos meatloaf hamburgers beans and fried bread pizza corn chowder spaghetti lasagna grilled cheese egg rolls barbecued ribs P pork blt's etc etc wow look at that twists in that yeah we're getting there I want it to be I wanted to kind of match the uh taper of the blade but I don't want it to be uh I want to give myself a fair amount of wiggle room I just want it to look like the pattern is stretched out with the uh shape of the blade without overdoing [Music] it you know you have no idea how much skill is going into running that thing without any Stu s or anything in there making a taper without just smashing the thing in half and destroying it if only you knew the power of the dark side if you only knew the power of the dark side I mean I could still technically go more but [Applause] uh yeah I kind of I think I should start uh straightening that out maybe see how that [Music] looks I don't think I'm going to stress over getting it perfectly straight the this way you know this way I don't think I'm going to stress about it as much as I have in the past because when we go to surface grind it the surface grinder is going to put so much weird stress all over the thing it's going to make it warp a bunch anyway wish we had a surface grinder that I could do the whole thing on uh it's it's literally like this up here like that in the middle this way and then back that [Music] way it's so hard to see down it when it's that long okay it's starting to wear on me getting heavier well technically it's getting lighter but it feels like it's getting heavier it's not straight that way anymore just keeps moving just keeps moving this way and moving this way look at the look at that just completely pulled up off that was touching a minute ago look at it look at it move straightening the blade on the metal workbench is not working very well when you first place the blade on the table the tip lifts way up in the air as the Blade's cooling down and then at a certain point the tip starts lowering back down and you can actually see it moving it's moving like a quarter of an inch which is a lot when it comes to getting this blade straight so I think to get this blade straightened I'm going to have to do it the old fashion way and just sit there at the Anvil tap on it a little bit eyeball it and continue from there until I get this thing as straight as [Music] possible I got to kind of get it in like one take though cuz every time I put it in there and heat it back up you pull it out and it's super warped it's not like I can get it close and then heat it up again and then finish it cuz every time you heat it up it comes out all bananana wish there was there's probably a perfect ratio I could heat the whole blade up evenly take it out shake it on its side a little bit flip it over on the other side and shake it on its side and it would like Auto straighten itself that's what I'm saying that's the end of the day I'm exhausted from wielding this thing trying to get it straight I think I've got it pretty straight for now I'm going to see tomorrow when it's cooled down I'll be able to inspect it a lot better and see if it's straight we still need to get the Tang forged out on it uh so even if it is straight I'm going to have to do some fiddling with it but I needed to be able to at least get it pretty close to straight before I went ahead and made it even longer and harder to handle got that entire Mosaic forged out as far as I can tell it feels like it came out really solid today so I'm very happy about that something else that really helped was I had Josh put one of his lights down there and it made it so I could look down the blade a little bit easier cuz before when the blade cooled down a little bit it would just all blend in with a gray concrete but that made it stand out a little bit so I could try to eyeball if it was straight or not yeah we'll find out tomorrow if it's fully straight but I'm pretty happy with what we got done on this thing today it's day 12 working on the Griffin sword and today I'm hoping to finish forging the blade so we got to straighten it Forge the Tang out and also start doing some surface grinding and stuff on it as well today I've inspected this blade it looks nice and straight now that I can hold it and it's not piping hot like it was yesterday I'm going to go ahead and stick this in there Tang first and we're going to start off the day by forging this Tang out going to forge it down till it's about an inch inch and a quarter or so and it's going to get quite a bit longer than this and then once that's done we'll continue straightening the blade make sure it looks all good and then let it cool and my little marks are right there [Music] okay oh that's not cool what's that I don't like that be one of the welds tearing this can be really hard on the welds cuz forging moving the metal a lot and also forging it while it's kind of cooler than normal I actually think I was able to really leave the blade alone even though a little of this got heated up looks like that's pretty much nice and straight already so we are almost there with the Tang I just need to move it over a little bit I'm going to keep fussing with this Tang a little bit next time you see this blade hopefully it'll be completely forged out and nice and straight I'm going to be fiddling with it for a while but it's pretty close now after a little bit more tweaking I finally got the Tang where I wanted it to be and I got the blade nice and straight when we look down it this way it's pretty straight it's not perfect but it's straight enough the next thing I want to do is go ahead and knock this heavy scale off of here with the angle grinder and then I'll probably take it over to the 2 x72 and we'll try to flatten this out a little bit and prepare it for surface grinding it's going to be a lot of work to surface grind this the last two swords I did took me ages to surface grind because the magnet is only 18 in long so we can only work on 18in sections at a time which means we have to overlap multiple sections in order to surface grind this whole blade let's take this outside and knock this scale off you might wonder why I don't just start surface grinding right off the bat why do I even need to use the angle grinder well the reason being the scale on the Billet is really nasty and it has a tendency of clogging up the surface grinder wheel so if I plop this right on the surface grinder the wheel will get clogged up very quickly and I'll have to redress the wheel multiple times but the angle grinder on the other hand has a much more aggressive coarse wheel and it'll knock that scale off without getting so clogged up it can even be an issue with an angle grinder though sometimes those can get clogged up a little bit too and you might need to dress it by hitting it on a stone or something I ground one side of the blade on the 2 x72 just to flatten it a little bit get rid of some of those high spots on there so it'll sit on the surface grinder magnet just that little bit better hopefully I also unscrewed the end cap on here that hole on the surface grinder there is from the previous two swords I did to be able to stick them through there in my mind there was also a hole on this other end but uh I guess I only ever made a hole on one end I don't know if we're going to need a second hole or not this sword is bigger the blade yes is only 1 in longer but the Tang is probably a good 4 five in longer so that's that all adds up but we probably don't need another hole because I can work that end I can work the middle can I work the other end from here let see if I can flip that around need to be able to work that plus overlap it a bit oh yeah I think one hole is enough I really don't need the other hole there this is going to be really tricky I've got to surface grind this thing in multiple little sections because the surface grinder only moves about 19 in and this entire sword is like almost 50 in Long currently all right uh what's one of the thickest areas I think is the tip so I guess we'll start at the tip first and do that yeah that'll be the first ever section of surface grinding on on this sword I'm also going to need to utilize a couple of Weights so I've got some big old pieces of W2 steel here this is some excellent knife steel really good stuff that I got from Don Hansen who's a master bladesmith also lives in Missouri what I'm going to do with this is use it as a weight to hold down the part of the sword that's sticking out if I set this on the sword it'll make that uh it'll give it a little bit of tension and it'll make it Flex downward just a little bit that'll be important for when I'm surface grinding the surface grinder is going to go past the table a little bit and if I don't have something adding a little bit of weight right here it can the heat from the wheel can kind of suck the metal up into it but I've noticed when I did the previous swords that if I have a weight on there it kind of holds that down and keeps the uh surface Grinder from doing really weird things right here where it's over the edge of the table I guess that's it nothing left to say I'm going to turn on the surface grinder and start the long road of surface grinding I'm so blessed to be able to have this massive surface grinder on hand with that being said I hope that if I do too many more swords in the future that I'll be able to get a longer surface grinder setup it's a little bit difficult to grind this blade in little 18in sections considering that the overall blade is nearly 50 in have to do multiple sections going down the blade it's my dream that if I build many more swords that I'll figure out some way to either purchase or make some kind of a surface grinder that will do sword length projects one alternative could be a sword length surface grinder attachment for the 2 x72 if you don't know the 2 x72 grinder actually has surface grinder attachments and I use it occasionally I don't use them a lot because they don't seem as flat as my koville Surface grinder but for something like this where I'm just trying to get the blade mostly flat and parallel on a long sword blade that could be an awesome option to have so I'm going to try to look into that for the future a sword length surface grinder attachment for the 2 x72 grinder could be really handy to have are you tired of wasting valuable time searching for the tools and materials I use I understand introducing the master smith toolkit it's a downloadable PDF that brings together all the links I use in one convenient place imagine having instant access to all the resources I use right at your fingertips the best part is the master smith toolkit is absolutely free that's right sign up today and have instant access to all the tools and materials I use without spinning a dime so click the link in the description and sign up today it's the end of the day and I am done working on the Griffin sword for today I got both sides surface ground to where I'm pretty much to fresh clean metal there's only a couple little places of scale here and there that being said though this blade is still really thick and I need to surface grind more off of it but I think one of the next things I'm gonna want to actually do is go ahead and get this thing normalized which is part of the the Heat Treating cycle to get the grain reset in it I'm very happy with what I got done on this blade today though I did a ton and a ton and a ton of surface grinding doing little sections at a time and this blade is coming together and looking wonderful I'm G to break a light bulb or something around me here kind of heavy still once you once you get it moving it doesn't want to stop woo it's day 13 of working on the Griffin sword and I finally got this thing ground down to a thickness I'm happy with I spent quite a bit of time surface grinding on this and we've got it down to 270,000 of an inch thick I want the final finish sword thickness to be right around 250,000 which is 1/4 of an inch today the task is to get this blade normalized right now the blade is under a tremendous amount of stress from being forged out Forge welded all that layer manipulating we did all the surface grinding I did on it we need to relax the steel and prepare it for hardening and tempering hardening is where this blade will truly gain its soul to normalize this blade we're going to heat it up to 1600° F let it cool and still air heat it up again to 1500° fenhe let it cool in still air and heat it up one more time to, 1400° fhe and then let it cool in still air until it's room temperature and that will basically be like hitting the reset button on the steel it'll get all the grain nice and relaxed prepared for hardening and tempering later if we didn't do this step chances are that the blade would warp a lot more than it otherwise would during hardening uh you could possibly not Harden the blade properly you might end up with really nasty brittle spots to normalize the sword I have my dad who has made a wonderful creation tell us about what this thing is back here that keeps clicking on and off behind us so we got high temperature salts in here back over there against the the the uh tank I've got a p controller is running two propane burners and they're hooked to the propane it shs propane off and on you can hear it running right now our first Target temperature is 1600° and it's going to maintain that temperature uh plus or minus about a degree it's pretty incredible tell us some of the benefits about heat treating and and normalizing with salts dad the heat transfers through salt and sand very well uh the salt we're using here it's 50 52 54 in of salt and our temperature variation is is going to be nomenal and it protects the steel right it protects the steel during the heat the heat treat process and there it doesn't develop any Mill scale so uh you can almost have a semi-finish blade and be able to heat treat without the worry of excessive Mill scale on your on your semi-finished blade this thing's super cool this thing is terrifying too it's got molten lava like salt glass Blass in there and it's absolutely terrifying and I'm scared of it and hopefully it doesn't blow up it is terrifying apparently just condensation on your blade is enough moisture that it could make the salts blow up out of the tank and just molten lava spewing everywhere so dad's got a vent hole for the the propane burners we're going to stick the blade down in there first down in the uh the vent hole and preheat the blade before I put it in the salts we're also going to be using a winch system that Dad hooked up right up above here to lift the tank in and out well we decided to use that for the blade today to lift it and lower it down in there I probably won't be able to use that winch when it comes to actually quenching the blade cuz I'll have to move faster but I think it's going to work really nicely for uh the normal normalization process absolutely okay have to have that on all the way uh line it up with that with just yeah we can it could be off to the side for the heater it can be right there ready [Music] yeah little more okay more it's not touching the bottom yet okay got something with don't get over that that flame that flame wor okay uh yeah oh yeah I got nice and high yeah all right go down easy scar me you look at it uh hold it keep going down I want to look at it I man look at the blade oh oh uh uh give me another inch or two okay there's about that much tank sticking up okay it's in there oh man molten lava terrifying scary stuff in there good time for a coffee break that's going to take a few minutes for it to heat back up cuz the blade sucks some of the thermal uh thermal capacity out of the salt so got to let them heat back up and then soak for a minute or two and then we're going to take the blade out and just let it cool in still air the steel just needs to be heated up through it doesn't need to doesn't need to soak if it's heated all the way through but I would give it a couple minutes just to you know give it give it plenty of time for the bottom to normalize out with the top or whatever I love how dad's like got the the helmet on but not down and no glasses no not even any safety glasses I feel like you almost should be required to have safety glasses just to be in the shop with nothing on uh let it soak a little bit I want to give it you know 5 minutes or something before we pull it out oh I didn't notice the top of that stainless steel glowing all right uh let's take it out dad now here's an idea is that thing dripping cool salts down into the hot salt problem no no it's nominal no nominal you mean like some condensation on the blade blowing up it's negligible it's negligible all right let's take it out uh question I don't think I'm going to really do anything I'm just going to stand here I don't know where is your your pair of safety glasses this is the first time you've looked for safety glasses since being here yeah I can't know where I keep not on your face yeah stuck won't come out push harder who whoa easy easy whoa look at that that is beautiful look at how gorgeously even that color looks look at that molten salt dripping off of it wow oh man you can see the pattern a little bit I'm curious to see how much we'll be able to see the pattern when this is all all done well that was cool um I really like being able to use that winch I'm kind of getting scared of when I have to manually pull it out and quench it by hand there's not a lot of room there between the ceiling and the uh the piece but the winch isn't going to be able to get it in the I think it's going to be too slow to get it in the oil and then start moving it I think you're going to have to do it by hand yeah go easy I got one speed gentle put it on gentle [Music] speed oh it's far enough right there yep Josh somebody at the blade show was telling me that he did this salt Heat Treating outside and even just a bird pooping in the salts the moisture and the liquid in the poop set off the salts and made it like violently erupt out of the thing outside that's why you don't want to you don't want to put your face and you want to keep your hands to a minimum when they're over that tank in case any little tiny bit of moisture gets in there the only danger we have being around it here is if moisture gets in there and it blows up it's not a problem if it blows up but what goes up comes down and I imagine it would hit that ceiling and probably splatter all over that's the uh the danger in in hitting the ceiling if it was just going to go up and hit the ceiling that wouldn't be dangerous also burning the shop down would also be uh bad too what temperature dad 8:15 which is 1500° fhe we're doing Celsius because the controller apparently only goes up to 1100° fhe but it'll go up a lot higher in Celsius for some reason maybe its digits can only go up to 1100 we're probably good to take it out it's been 3 or 5 minutes now huh okay go oh that is beautiful look at that color look at that molten glass stuff running off of it that is so that salt is it looks like it's the thickness of water it doesn't look it doesn't look as thick viscos V viscous as I'd imagined you know like lava or magma seems like it' be dropping off in little chunks of gooey snottie stuff this is dropping off in little drips of something that looks thinner much more closely related to water see the drips coming off of it they they don't look nearly as sticky and gooey like molten lava like I imagined them to look but when you look down in the tank it looks like molten lava or magma is lava in ground and magma above ground or I'm sure sure I'm being really stupid right now at least I know that one is one and the other is the other but I don't know which one which I know there was a different it's called lava in the ground and magma out or no I think it's magma I want to say that it's magma when it's underground and lava above ground you see you can see that stuff getting thicker as it cools down the drips are a lot bigger and they are kind of building up on there like a slag tight that was the 1500° cycle we're going to let that cool by time the salt tank is cooled down another 100° down to 1400 the blade will be ready to go right back in there and we're going to heat it up for the third and final time right now coffee break oops might need to open my visor oh that's good little cold but good go ahead and go back down [Music] I think the salt's lowered it's cooling down yeah I can't see him can you go down further yeah got a lot little more okay right there all right third and final time just got to let that heat up hopefully no birds fly in the shop and drop their blessings upon the salt tank and we'll be good I've had birds fly in here before uh probably at least three or four different times so as funny as a joke as that may sound which isn't that funny it could actually happen okay here we go this is the third and final part of the normalization cycle we're going to bring it out it's been soaking at, 1400° it's nice and dark in here let's see how this looks go Dad oh look at that beautiful color oh that's such a creamy beautiful orange careful can't see the top there dad woo oh that looks so even and beautiful look at that molten lava stuff dripping off the bottom there wow I love that color I'm really curious once that's cool to see how much uh to see how much scale and stuff's on the blade or how clean it is once we rinse it off the Blade's cooled down enough I can go ahead and cut it Loose here got a pair of wire cutters G try to cut this wire off if I can there's one there's two there we go I'm going to cool this blade off and then we're going to clean it up whoa look at that rinse [Music] off I'm going to go do some grinding on this blade to get it cleaned up and then we're going to soak it in some instant coffee mixed with water for a few hours so we can see how the pattern looks on the sword I finished cleaning up the blade I ground on it with a little 120 and 320 I've also got a pot of hot water here that has about 4 oz of NES Cafe bold roast instant coffee we're going to dump it in this tube and all over my foot and get the blade cleaned off and then we're going to leave it in here for a few hours and we should be able to see what the pattern looks like this is going to be the first official pattern reveal on the sword perfect amount going rinse my foot got to be careful not to cut myself the corners of this are actually very sharp just cleaning this off with a little Dawn dish soap I want to make sure I get rid of most of the oils on the blade okay rinse that off and we should be good to go in the coffee okay here we go that's really high I'm going to leave this for a few hours and hopefully we'll be able to see how this Damascus pattern looks all across the blade last time we saw it it was just on one little tile not on all 14 of these Forge welded into this massive Griff Griffin sword the Griffin sword's been in the coffee for a few hours let's take it out here so I don't make a mess in the shop and see how this pattern looks Whoa man that thing's long let me rinse it off a little bit [Music] whoa look at that wow look at that pattern oh it looks so good oh I love the the really thick 15 and 20 things look at that there's little circles all down through the pattern we've got these flowery bits here with all these dark 1080 areas wow that came out incredible it all looks very homogeneous like one long piece of of Damascus it doesn't look like a bunch of small individual tiles oh and look at something else here you can see that the pattern stretches out more and more towards the tip which is what I wanted I wanted it to to look like the blade was forged at least mostly to shape and kind of have that that stretched out look as you got closer to the tip I'm calling it there for the day we got the blade normalized Kevin the salt Heat Treating oven worked beautifully dad did a great job on that every time we pulled this blade out it had gorgeous even colors all the way through the entire blade and we got to see the pattern by leaving it in that coffee for a few hours I am in love with this pattern it looks so cool keep in mind this is just put in coffee with like a rough finish on it when this blade is heat treated and finished and etched and then darkened the pattern is going to be incredible I will see you in the next video May the forge be with you bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Kyle Royer

Views: 305,445

Keywords: knife making, how to make a knife, how to heat treat a knife, how to make a bowie knife, how to make a bowie, knives, kyle royer, kyle royer knives, making a knife, sharp, how to make knives, bladesmith, master smith, blades, damascus, knifemaker, diy knife, anvil, forging, custom, knife, great content, steel, bowie build, bowie knife, 10 inche bowie knife, blade, knifemaking, knife maker

Id: mO49F3pqIr0

Length: 57min 28sec (3448 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024